Yahoo News Romping around: why all you need to style out this summer is a gender-neutral 'onesie'
Being fashion-forward is risky business.
Slip into a gender-androgynous outfit with your two X chromosomes jangling around and you risk being dragged across social media, as the makers of the RompHim, “your new favourite summer outfit”, will testify.
Or you end up being chased up a tree by a herd of angry cattle. This happened to me.
To backtrack, a romper is an all-in-one shortsuit, a staple of festival Cara Delevingne types, predominantly worn by women.
It lives and breathes during the summer, a silk, denim or fabric butterfly emerging from its wardrobe cocoon (this is where mothballs hatch, after all). There are both high- and low-end iterations: you can wear them at festivals, parties, gigs, even weddings. When ACED Design, a Chicago-based fashion label, launched a Kickstarter to fund a romper range “specifically designed for men”, it thought it had hit the money shot.
ACED was correct to an extent — the first line sold out within days. “Is it a romper specifically designed for men? Sure, but it’s also so much more,” reads the site. “This super-garment is designed to take them all on in style, keeping you cool as the days and nights heat up.” It set off a tweetstorm. “From the comedic roasts to the downright disparaging comments, the romper set off a firestorm of reactions to what a guy should and should not wear/ do, feminising an article of clothing that’s essentially genderless,” wrote Teen Vogue writer Jared Michael Lowe. Madison Kircher, associate editor of New York magazine, simply tweeted “Ban men” beneath a picture of the RompHim.
That was dull of her. This is a brave new world and, as Emmanuel Macron called it back in February, in the current environment if you are shy you are dead. I’d like to tell you that an editor forced me to wear a romper. They didn’t. I am 26, and just desperately don’t want to be dead, so I fired up the website ASOS and put an order in. I was en marche, and ready to romper.
Initial feedback was interesting. As a 6ft 3in gangly, white stick-man, I slithered into my romper as soon as it arrived in the office. It was a scorcher, a dress-down Friday, and what better environment to parade your new romper than an open-plan newsroom?
The material was breathable. I was the definition of chillaxed. The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the office, though, who veered from aggressive indifference to open revulsion. The best response I got was “Loving your summer wardrobe!” (an email) and “nice legs” (to face). The worst: the person who sits next to me moved. We don’t even hot desk.
Seeking to test its upper limits, I took it to Cornwall, where my girlfriend, my best mate and a small dog called Poppy belonging to my girlfriend’s mum went for a walk. Unfortunately, the walk took us through a farmer’s field run by a shady racket of bullocks. The bullocks disliked the dog, and proceeded to stampede in our direction. Being from London, I am streetwise — but take away the streets and I am lost. I ran to get the dog, we scrambled up a fallen tree in the centre of the field, and proceeded to throw small bits of bark at the angry animals.
We Googled what to do when you’re charged by cows to learn that we had failed to take any of the appropriate steps: do not bring small dogs into fields, do keep them on leads, do let the dogs escape if the cows begin to run towards you. I was going to die, in a romper, slowly dissolving in a cow’s oesophagus.
Fortunately, we were rescued by a couple from a nearby house, who heard us shouting, saw the Romper, and told us to calm down, climb down from the tree, and the cows would back off. Then, as soon as they left, we put the dog down and the cows attacked again. Can you run in a romper? Reader, it flies. I am happy to report that we all escaped the cattle untrampled. The romper, remarkably, was unharmed, despite a last-minute scramble over a barbed wire fence. Seriously, it is light and apparently indestructible. Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear rompers.
Back in London, the romper made its way, inevitably, to a festival: Lovebox in Victoria Park.
Here it was free to be who it wanted to be. It bought two cans of Red Stripe and romped around loudly. It didn’t care about the rain. It magnanimously thanked the steady trickle of people who genuinely seemed to think it was a good look. I was like a festival RoboCop, more suit than man. I posted it on Instagram. At football the next day, someone took me aside: “My mates texted me a picture of someone wearing a nutty outfit at Lovebox. I’ve just seen your Instagram. Obviously it was you.”
Still, though, I felt pretty “man”, whatever “man” means. As someone who doesn’t usually stray beyond a white tee and a pair of jeans, this was a personal milestone: new, and a lot of fun. I get what all the fuss is about. But I don’t get the fuss about the fuss. There’s a peculiar kind of toxicity that still hangs around rigid definitions of what anyone should or shouldn’t wear. Sure, it’s not an office suit, not yet (maybe something a little less jazzy), but if — and it’s a big if — Twitter is representative, men just aren’t given the chance to explore their masculinity constructively, which is constricting. Not as constricting as that romper, possibly, which was quite a squeeze.
Maybe that’s where the Romp Him comes in. I could do with going up a size.
