Sex In Suits

Following on from my post about hats yesterday I did a bit of thinking and realised what the most un-sexy hat is.

It’s the bowler hat.

There was a time when every stock broker and jobber at the London Stock Exchange wore one. It was part of the uniform. In fact if you go back far enough many British managers wore the same hard black headgear that was, pretty much anti-sex.

With one exception that is. A bowler hat on a woman is very, very sexy.

The juxtaposition of the hat, the hat’s associations with the male establishment and a sexy woman both subverts that establishment and highlights her femininity. It’s like men’s shirts on women, seriously sexy.

I don’t think it’s anything to do with cross dressing, though if you’re in to that kind of stuff that’s an added bonus, it’s about contrast. What more of a contrast can you get than a female body in male clothes? Blurring the clothing gender boundaries in everyday life is interesting and is part of developing fashion. At one time the thought that women might wear trousers was scandalous, then through an evolutions of clothing, fashion and driven by necessity trousers became everyday for women.

Global conflicts played a major part in this as women were utilised as part of the workforce to help the war effort and adopted male clothing in factories, on farms and invaded previously male preserves. When women moved out of the typing pool their suits became more like those of their male superiors but retained the femininity. Thank goodness. I’m all for equality in the workplace and elsewhere but without the differences between us we would lose the contrast I mentioned earlier.

Thing is, and call me a hypocrite here, I’m not into men wearing women’s clothes. I can understand transvestites for example feeling the urge to express their female sides by wearing women’s clothing, yet the idea leave me cold. On the other hand I know there are women who find the idea of a man just wearing women’s clothing, or even at its most extreme, sissified, a huge turn-on.

Just foes to prove that the range of sexuality out there is so vast it defies comprehension.