Editors’ Pick: New York Fashion Week: Men in Skirts

As New York Fashion Week (NYFW), which annually rounds out to more of a fashion month, comes to the close with the end of September, Fashion Reverie reflects on the highlights and most outstanding trends from the season. Among them? Men in skirts.

As it goes with most trends in fashion, we are certainly not witnessing the invention of men in skirts, let alone gender fluidity when it comes to clothing. In fact, we can trace almost every fashion pattern to a spot on the timeline of humanity. It was in ancient civilizations like Mesopotamia that men first wore shendyts (kilts) thousands of years ago.

This season, they’ve taken shape in different forms on the runway. They’re tied from sarongs at Dries Van Noten, gorpcore-inspired at Craig Greens, and worn with a slouched hoodie at Ziggy Chen.

While these menswear skirts emerged nearly at the dawn of man, the late 197The

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See: The Cockettes, the avant-garde multiracial drag ensemble based in San Francisco, which first surfaced in the late 1960s with the late great pop and R&B icon Sylvester as a founding member. The group wearing gender-bending frocks and skirts lent itself to later, more mainstreamed wearing.

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Singer songwriter Boy George brought the trend to a wider audience when he wore skirts and dresses on stage, performing solo and with his pop band, Culture Club.

Image courtesy of Vogue Australia

In 1985, Jean Paul Gaultier debuted a men’s skirt-suit, and it marked a distinct turning point in androgynous fashion.

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Skirts became a marker for the punk and hip-hop eras of the late seventies and eighties, bleeding into the 2000s and today. In 2022, rapper A$AP Rocky stepped out in a knee length leather skirt.

Here are a handful of designers who have brought back the trend in 2025:

Dries van Noten