Performance artist and designer Aloke Vade Menon urged the fashion industry to degender itself back at Voices 2019.

This year, at our first physical gathering since the start of the pandemic,

Alok spoke with a rising star who has taken gender-fluid fashion into the Main Street.

Since graduating from Central

St. Martin's two years ago, Harris Reid has dressed Iman for the Met Gala, launched collaborations

with Etro and Misoma, and made a powerful London Fashion Week debut at the Serpentine Gallery,

all in line with a vision for a gender-free fashion industry.

On this week's BOF podcast, Harris and Aloke discuss the opportunities in de-gendering fashion

during their discussion at Voices 2021.

So let's just begin with the basics.

How is fashion upholding the binary and why is that a problem?

Oh, such a good question.

I think from my interpretation as a gender fluid fashion designer, I think society relies on what

it thinks that it knows is right and what it thinks that it's going to make money from.

So I think it sticks with the structure that men's clothes needs to look like this, women's

needs to look like this because we can profit from this because we've seen it from the margins

in the past, from the sales in the past.

And it just kind of keeps perpetuating this idea that there's this crazy binary and there's

no kind of risk there because people, I think, are too scared to kind of jump that, even

though when you see people like me and other people, that there's a huge kind of opportunity to make money

and grow a business. Right. They're taking arbitrary objects, colors, sense, textiles, and

giving them genders. It's so funny to me how they accuse us of making everything about gender

...