You may not have heard, but Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik are a couple. A very attractive, young couple who (probably) like to wear each other’s clothes, as most young couples do. You know, it’s cold and you’re at your boyfriends house so you throw on one of his jumpers and then never give it back because it’s so soft? Gigi probably does that.
Vogue US, however, have decided to call this ‘gender fluidity,’ and print it on their latest issue to sell to the masses. The cover story discusses how Gigi and Zayn are ‘part of a new generation embracing gender fluidity’ and that they have a ‘blasé attitude toward gender codes,’ because they share clothes. I'm soery, have we missed something here? The extract reads as follows.
“I shop in your closet all the time, don’t I?” Hadid, 22, flicks a lock of dyed-green hair out of her boyfriend’s eyes as she poses the question. “Yeah, but same,” replies Malik, 24. “What was that T-shirt I borrowed the other day?” “The Anna Sui?” asks Hadid.
“Yeah,” Malik says. “I like that shirt. And if it’s tight on me, so what? It doesn’t matter if it was made for a girl.” Hadid nods vigorously. “Totally. It’s not about gender. It’s about, like, shapes. And what feels good on you that day. And anyway, it’s fun to experiment. . . .”Anwar, eavesdropping, pipes up. “We’re chill!” he calls out from a picnic table not far away. “People our age, we’re just chill. You can be whoever you want,” he adds, ambling over, “as long as you’re being yourself.”
The issue here isn’t Anwar’s sentiment that being whoever you want is chill, because it is ‘chill.’ Everyone should have the option to wear whatever, whenever they want but just because we’re swapping clothes with our boyfriends, or girlfriends, that does not make us ‘gender fluid.’
The Oxford Dictionary defines Gender-fluid as ‘denoting or relating to a person who does not identify themselves as having a fixed gender.’ As a straight couple who sometimes wear each other’s clothes this doesn’t then give Vogue the right to label them as gender-fluid. Nor does them wearing interchangeable Gucci suits on the magazine’s front cover mean they are the best placed people to discuss a complex modern gender theory that is not defined by a love of wearing your girlfriends Anna Sui.
This problematic cover hasn’t gone unnoticed, with people taking to Twitter to express their concerns.
Vogue have tried to raise a valid point, that we are not restricted to the clothing on offer for our gender, but wouldn’t a non-binary or gender fluid couple on the cover have been better to illustrate this important message? We thank you Vogue, for trying to explain to us what gender-fluidity is, and failing epically.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.