Analysis: Youth have always used clothing as a means of rebellion so masquerading in a dress can be seen as a generational flex
By Dee Duffy and Katriona Flynn, TU Dublin
It's 2025. A 12-year-old boy comes home from football training, frustrated with his coach, throws himself on his bed, and says, "I’m going to quit sports and become one of those boys who dress like a girl, to piss dad off". Quite the statement; he was angry. For reference, his father is the football coach and, on the cusp of his teens, the boy mustered up the best revenge he could impose on his father.
In a sense, isn’t this what fashion, or rather the 'anti-fashion’ of youth cultures, has always been about? Finding a way to give the two fingers to a system that feels restrictive and outdated to those coming of age. It is what Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) call ‘resistance through rituals’. With the limited power they have, youth deploy clothing as a means of rebellion against systems, whether familial, institutional, political, or otherwise.
From The Barbican, curator Karen Van Godtsenhoven and assistant curator Jon Astbury discuss the subversive role of dirt in fashion
Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion is an exhibition that opened this year at the Barbican in London. It features 50 years of rebellious displays through fashion, highlighting designers from the 1970s onwards who aimed to challenge conventional standards of beauty, widespread images of perfection, and prescribed codes of behaviour. Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's Nostalgia of Mud 1982 Autumn/Winter collection is featured. It was a sartorial challenge to a post-industrial, late-capitalist fashion that had become too uniform, too pristine and too fake.
The phrase 'nostalgia of mud’ was originally coined by French playwright Émile Auger in 1855 and used satirically by American writer Tom Wolfe in his 1970 article Radical Chic for New York magazine. It describes a longing among those in industrialised societies to return to the rural, rustic, or ‘primitive’ world, as industrialists might say.
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This post-punk sensibility is shared by a recent guest of the Desert Island Dress podcast, Gavin Friday, former lead singer of The Virgin Prunes, who launched their album If I Die, I Die in the same year Westwood and McLaren's Nostalgia of Mud collection opened. Friday once describes doing a photo shoot for the 'brown' side of their album (avoiding the conventions of the A-side/B-side format), where the band spent three days in the forests of the Wicklow Mountains, capturing an earthy tribal aesthetic to mirror the music’s tone.
The podcast asks guests to select four personal garments they’d salvage if marooned on an island. Friday chose his homemade, four-yard black and white skirt, worn on the cover of that debut album. He reminisces on a 'rough and hard’ Dublin with all of its scarcity, yet punk rock was accessible by its DIY philosophy – one that working-class Irish had long been acquainted with.
So, with 'three chords and an attitude', as a skirt-wielding, angry young man, the band took to the stage to express ‘anger’ at the world. Meanwhile, newspapers and primetime TV hosts, including Gay Byrne, ridiculed their angst and creative expression.
'Gender bending' or challenging gendered norms through androgynous sartorial choices is frequently attributed to music legends like David Bowie or Mick Jagger, who supposedly wore "women's" clothing as acts of rebellion. In The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n' Roll, music critics Simon Reynolds and Joy Press argue that performers used an androgynous style to defy existing patriarchal and heterosexual norms, all the while extending, or even transcending, the boundaries of what men can be.
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From RTÉ Archives, The Virgin Prunes perform Theme for Thought on The Late Late Show in 1979
If men who wear dresses were the rebels over 50 years ago, how can Irish band Fontaines DC frontman Grian Chatten continue to attract criticism for donning a skirt today? How can we still be challenged by the juxtaposition of a man in a skirt? In a recent interview, Chatten drew on Oscar Wilde’s quote, ‘Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth,’ in discussing, amongst other things, the outrage toward the band’s newer, more playful aesthetic.
And it might be this mask that the Birmingham CCCS scholars alluded to when describing youth style as a ‘magical resolution’ to limiting, restrictive, generational tensions. Bravely masquerading in a dress is each generation’s affront to the elders’ cyclical pattern of flexing their positional power over the younger generations.
Returning to Wilde, as did The Virgin Prunes when incorporating The Ballad of Reading Gaol into their own music, is the lyrical wisdom, ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves …’ Albeit, for their own good.
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Dr Dee Duffy is a Senior Engagement Manager in the Retail, Tourism and Hospitality Sectors at the Enterprise Academy at TU Dublin. Katriona Flynn is a Lecturer in Fashion and Luxury Goods Management at the College of Business at TU Dublin. They are the hosts of Desert Island Dress.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
