Butch Attire & Fashion

[Duchess]

[macele]

kd has had several hair styles that i've liked. she's got the butch attire and fashion going on. there's no one like her. unique. original.

[Ascot]

That's another good thing about turning 50. A couple pieces I've had since college are still in great, if slightly shopworn in a charming way shape and are now considered vintage. I find it quite amusing and great fun. The one that most comes to mind is a brownish, full length, herringbone tweed overcoat from Brooks Brothers. Every time I see that narrow, silk, navy blue label with the yellow script my heart melts a little.

[*Anya*]

NY TIMES July 2, 2013

By E. ALEX JUNG

Elaine David and Joy Evans were set to be married in Kauai, Hawaii, in April, but they had a problem: Ms. David didn’t know where she was going to get the vest and pants she wanted. Finding a wedding dress had been easy enough for Ms. Evans, who went to a bridal shop in Sacramento, where she bought a strapless lavender dress. For Ms. David, however, it wasn’t so easy.

“I really didn’t want to wear a dress for the wedding,” said Ms. David, a 33-year-old software engineer from Sunnyvale, Calif., who generally prefers casual clothes like jeans and a T-shirt. “That’s not how I really identify myself so I started looking for clothing choices.” Ms. David doesn’t wear dresses, which means finding formal wear can be a fraught process.

She did what many masculine women do. She turned to the boys’ department. “It’s a compromise, going to the boys’ section,” she said. Ms. David is 5 feet 1 inch tall with broad shoulders from years of practicing Jeet Kune Do. “The boys’ section is not going to be a perfect fit because they don’t accommodate breasts, because, well, they’re not meant to.”

Zee Amador of ZShots

Elaine David and Joy Evans, right, on their wedding day in Kauai, Hawaii. Ms. David wore a Tomboy Tailors suit.

Then Ms. David discovered a number of brands that fit her sartorial needs online. She ended up visiting Tomboy Tailors, a clothier specializing in made-to-measure suits. She chose a lavender blue vest with matching pants and wore them on her wedding day.

Tomboy Tailors is one of several brands that have emerged within the past few years catering specifically to masculine women, transgender men and others who fall outside the conventional clientele for men’s wear.

“I started Tomboy Tailors after years of dealing with ill-fitting suits and poor customer service and I knew that other people must be having that experience,” said Zel Anders, the founder and owner of Tomboy Tailors, whose store opened in February just off Market Street in downtown San Francisco.

“There are, I suspect, hundreds of thousands of women like me who prefer to wear men’s suits,” she said.

Major retailers have begun to take notice of the emerging market: Kenneth Cole is producing some of the men’s shoes in smaller sizes to be sold at Tomboy Tailors in September.

DeAngela Cooks

A look by the Brooklyn-based brand, Marimacho.

Other brands have sprung up online in recent years, including Fourteen, which spawned from a wedding planning company called 14 Stories, and the Brooklyn-based Marimacho, whose most recent collection featured bathing suits based on 1920s men’s swimwear.

Going to the men’s department creates obvious problems around sizing and fit, but rather than reproduce an hourglass silhouette, the goal of these brands is to create a straight line over a female body. “What masculine-identified women don’t want is a suit with darts in it, that’s all very feminine and cut in with that hourglass,” said Shaz Riley, the owner of the Butch Clothing Company, a tailor for masculine women in England. “They want to look like David Beckham looks in his suits.”

Bex Wade

A look by Marimacho. The goal of brands like Marimacho is to create a straight line over a female body.

“For a lot of people that have bigger breasts, it’s difficult to find something that fits your chest, is slender enough for your shoulders and then doesn’t pull too much on our hips,” said Crystal Gonzalez-Alé, the business and life partner of Ivette Gonzalez-Alé, the creative director of Marimacho.

Many of these brands have been a source of empowerment for many masculine women. “It’s about feeling good in your clothes,” said Patricia Baldwin, a lecturer in the English department at San Francisco State University, who recently went into Tomboy Tailors to shop for a suit for her commitment ceremony next month. “If my suit starts at Men’s Wearhouse, it’s not going to be supportive of who I am,” she said.

After the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act and tossed out the Proposition 8 case, effectively allowing gay marriages in California, the political tides have shifted in favor of gay marriage, and with it, more marriage ceremonies and a broader embrace of styles that cross the gender line.

“I think that people wanted this kind of a business for a long time but haven’t been comfortable to do it,” Ms. Anders said. She has been with her partner, Doris Bersing, for a dozen years. They married in 2004.

This time around, she’s planning on wearing something from her store, like a three-piece tuxedo in a black pinpoint fabric.

[Wrang1er]

I am going to a wedding at the end of July. I think I found this thread just in time.