Because I'm such a special person, a worldly sophisticate, I just spent a week in France. Arriving in Cassis, a beautiful little city outside Marseilles on the Mediterranean coast, I noticed a few things. One was that I was in the middle of an extremely multicultural situation featuring all sorts of people from all sorts of origins, including French tourists and also Germans and Brits, and many people from various regions of North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia. But I also noticed early on that the clothing and hairstyles weren’t as diverse as the homelands.
Many of the younger men featured a style I’ll call "golden age Andrew Tate": a shaved head and a beard. It's hard to imagine a more direct expression of masculinity as the world now understands it. The gendering of a person with a shaved head and a beard might be ambiguous or questionable deep inside, but as far as the outward signs are concerned, the message could not be clearer: Dude, I'm a dude.
The style of the young women was just as uniform, though it's true that many visibly Muslim women still wore head coverings. But I’ve never seen so many sundresses in my life. There were racks of them in the shops and most women were wearing one, often more or less visibly over a bikini. They were favoring luxuriant locks, as well, a kind of modified Kristi Noem: there were few younger women with short hair. Again, one effect is to leave no one in any doubt for a moment about one's gender: to signal it as definitely and quickly as possible.
As if to show that southern France isn’t alone, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce styled themselves more or less in this way for their engagement, the biggest story since World War 2. He had the buzz cut and facial hair, she the sundress of right now. Looking at them in any outfit or no outfit at all, you wouldn’t be in any doubt about Taylor and Travis's genders. Looking at them as restyled for 2025, it's hard to imagine a more gender-differentiated couple.
"Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married," said Taylor on Instagram, and that too is gendered, especially right now, as people assume and assert that a man would only read a novel as a performance to impress women. So the English teacher of now I suppose, is definitely female. And Travis Kelce is some jock. When he gets his gym outfit on, you’ll find that a number of secondary sex characteristics are evident.
The hyper-verbal genius of female experience has hooked up with the inarticulate hunk. But they play their little roles very consciously; they play at gender differentiation; they're on a gender play date. And they definitely make it look fun.
Five years ago, we were in the middle of an extended "trans moment": many people were exploring trans and genderqueer identities, and many styles on the streets here and there reflected that fact. Five years ago, people who one might have supposed to be male were wearing little dresses and high heels around campus. Fashions on the runways and even at the beach reflected this fluidity. People debated and still debate whether the trans moment was a fad or fashion or an affirmation of deep human identities that were previously concealed. I think it was both, but it was definitely a fashion among other things. You can tell, now that everyone’s restyled.
The great contemporary thinker Judith Butler is famous for arguing that "gender is a performance": a matter of the way one dresses and moves in public space. She’s come in for much derision from gender essentialists of the sort who are driving the redifferentiation. The difference between men and women is a biological difference, they say. It's natural, not a performance at all.
But whatever the biological situation, gender is among other things a performance, as we can see vividly in Cassis or on Instagram. Maybe you’re naturally biologically female, for example. Okay! Maybe. But in your daytime sundress and nighttime trad-wife lacy flow, you’re also performing gender. If I'm styling as Andrew Tate, I'm trying to leave you no doubt, even echoing the Tate brothers' misogynist or abusive gender relations. Whatever all these people are doing, they’re performing gender as well.
A problem with the trans moment was the attempt to “naturalize” trans identities, a move which Butler, for one. must regard with some hostility. The account was that people have a gender identity, m or f, deep inside, which may or may not match their bodies. Then the clothing and hair but also the hormones are supposed to reveal or express one's authentic identity.
The way gender gets expressed, however, indicates that this isn’t a plausible account. Through the trans moment, more and more younger people identified as non-binary. I think they were exploring different gender expressions, not merely revealing who they were deep inside.
This is the best thing about gender: you can put it in play. In various ways it's sexy, it's fun, it's interesting. The ways many non-binary identities are expressed is charming and fascinating, and it opened up new possibilities for fun and art and flirtation and fashion. And right now, the Travis/Taylor style of maximum differentiation is fun and flirtatious too: it seems almost innocent, and also easy: like we're returned to a familiar vocabulary.
The problem with the buzzcut/sundress style of trad gender was above all the oppression and objectification of women. The highly-differentiated style was appropriate to patriarchy. And maybe there’s a "re-establish the patriarchy" vibe to the current situation, which coincides with a worldwide rise in right-wing populism. We’re in many ways in a reactionary moment.
And yet I vibe that Kristi Noem isn’t exactly a traditional wife, and Taylor Swift neither. I don't think we'll be able to re-establish the patriarchy.
One thing that Judith Butler is right about: the sundress/bikini vs beard/shaved head thing isn’t biological. You can tell because it just blossomed fully over the summer. Gender’s very volatile, and is liable to look different next year than this year. It's a lot about playing dress-up. Now if it stays primarily on the level of play, this could be just another fun moment in the non-stop transformation of gender. But if it's accompanied by a new transphobia or a serious attempt to restrict the basic rights of women, it’ll be a disaster. Meanwhile, worldly sophisticate that I am, I think it’s okay to play.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell