Men in skirts

Some advice for men in skirts
Michael Brick NYT Wednesday, November 5, 2003
NEW YORK Wandering around Brooklyn in a skirt when you are a dude is a complicated affair, fraught with loaded symbols and multiple entendres, but three simple rules will get you a long way:
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1. Take short strides.
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2. Make no eye contact, except with people who are already yelling at you.
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3. Stay out of the ABC Super Stores branch in the Fulton Mall.
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A security guard at the ABC, John Cheeseboro, may insinuatingly ask what you are wearing under the skirt, but it is the excitable teenage girls who shop there who will almost certainly make a grab for you. “You’re being a child molester,” shouted the bolder of two girls, glossing over the fact that she was the one lifting my skirt and getting a look at some stylish boxer shorts. “I’m 15!”
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Cheeseboro ignored the little voyeurs and focused on maintaining eye contact with me as I took notes on his opinion of the whole “man in a skirt” deal. “I live in New York,” he said. “I’ve seen worse. I’ve seen people naked.” He leaned over and whispered the last bit in conspiratorial tones. An old, stooped woman walked by and asked where in the store she might find pots.
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Little did Cheeseboro and the girls know, but they were test subjects in an experiment designed to take to the streets certain notions of changing mores regarding masculinity and attire being debated across the river in the refined cultural halls of Manhattan.
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On Tuesday, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a display called “Bravehearts: Men in Skirts,” documenting the absence of reciprocity in the borrowing of clothing styles across gender lines. “People are beginning to talk about new forms of masculinity,” said Andrew Bolton, a curator at the museum and the author of a book sharing the name of the exhibition. He cited as evidence the use of kilts in the fashion layouts of lad magazines and the popularity of the term “metrosexual,” which I understand refers to guys who say they are not gay but have manicures anyway. Bolton cautioned that this so-called new masculinity was all just academic theory so far and said, “For the street, it takes a brave man to walk around in a skirt.”
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That is where I came in. I am not particularly brave, but I do have all the other qualifications needed to take the theory for a spin around the block. I am highly suggestible, humble, patient, self-assured and, perhaps most important, desperately broke. So when the call came to my office in Brooklyn, where I work as a reporter for The Times, asking if I would spend a day in a designer skirt intended for men, I named my price.
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A deal was reached, and the neuroses quickly set in. I went through phases not unlike the stages of grieving. For denial, I pretended that the choice had not been mine to make. I called my wife, who helped by laughing uncontrollably. “Would you feel like a total idiot?” she said. I gave no answer, and she deduced across the telephone lines that I was already taking notes for the article. “Stop writing things down.”
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Another pause. Then she offered some real advice: “I think you should drive to work that day.”
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I had already bargained, and denial was doing no good, so when the skirt arrived, I tried procrastination. I took it home, reasoning that I would put it on in the morning for a full day of going about my business and recording reactions. Besides, that way I could plan what to wear with the thing, since my closet is overflowing with choices for matching skirts. Nobody had anything helpful to offer on that score.
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“Well, when Axl Rose wears a skirt, he wears white socks and black combat boots,” said Diane Cardwell, another reporter for The Times in Brooklyn. “Beyond that, I don’t know what to say.”
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The skirt, a wraparound by Jean Paul Gaultier, was dark gray or black or maybe navy blue – I’m not good with colors – and it had a cloth belt. It was cut like a kilt, but the belt held only the waist, so the skirt flapped open in a brisk walk. It seemed rife with snares.
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I stayed out until 1 a.m. Thursday covering a shootout in East New York and was assigned to return to the neighborhood the next morning. I opted for jeans and threw the skirt in the back seat. I was sure I could walk around East New York in the skirt without being beaten up, but no way could I hope to interview witnesses to the shootout and be taken seriously.
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So the skirt had to wait until I returned to the office, in downtown Brooklyn. There, Tara Bahrampour, a reporter for the City section, noticed that I had put the skirt on backward so she retied it, presumably intending to spare me humiliation. She also instructed me to tuck in my white dress shirt. I went back out to brave the world.
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“What’s the celebration?” asked the doorman, John, who was smirking. Out in the street, I found myself trying to hide between telephone booths and cars. As people stared, it occurred to me that when you are a guy in a skirt, pretty much any abuse that anyone heaps on you seems fair. Whether the Met likes it or not, the only guys who wear skirts in the street – other than rock or soccer stars – are seeking attention, and the presumption is that they are selling skirts or are conducting a media stunt.
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I walked up the block, pressing on with this particular media stunt. The need to scribble in my notebook, a defense mechanism that reporters are born with, took on new importance. I was greeted by Courtney Sowell, 18, crying that I was wearing a dress. I decided to interview him to try to make him stop yelling at me, and he decided to pose for a photograph. We each got a little something out of it. I walked on. An old man stared. People behind the windows of a second-floor gymnasium clapped and gave thumbs-up signs. More than one young woman looked me up and down, but none stopped to talk, perhaps noticing my wedding ring.
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People in a diner, a gym and an eyeglass store were polite and discreet, stealing furtive glances at the skirt but paying more attention to the woman following me around taking pictures. Everything probably would have been fine if not for the trip to the ABC store.
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As I stood behind a rack of clothes, half wishing that I had waited just one more day, until Halloween, and hoping the teenage girls did not plan to make off with the skirt, Cheeseboro babbled about New York and freedom of choice and so on. He volunteered, as I furiously took down every word, that he personally would not make a skirt a part of his regular wardrobe.
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But after considering, he allowed, “For fun, I’d probably go for it.”