ABSTRACT
Today, fashion speaks to men. This development represents a cultural revolution respect to previous articulations of fashion discourse, that used to focus on women to the exclusion of men. For years, when targeting fashionconscious men, marketers have produced representations of male beauty and appearance shaped by gay aesthetics. The resulting convergence in style between straight and gay men resulted according to some social observers (e.g., Colman, 2005) in the decreased reliability of the ‘gaydar’, the emic term employed in the gay subculture of consumption to refer to the ability to identify sexual orientation from style-related consumption (Kates, 2002).
