MEN, IN LIPSTICK AND MASCARA

...AND AN ACCOMPANYING TWO CENTS

Words Rohin Jotal

@br0hin

Rohin is a DJ based in Staines. Often found travelling the world and meeting new cultures, when Rohin finally gets a minute to himself, he'll be engaged in Japanese media or watching Bollywood films with his Grandma. Oh, and he's wickedly good at limbo.

Fashion has always been an outlet for pushing boundaries, and embracing the fluidities of human nature within culture. If we look around the globe, what may be unusual to our localised ideas of fashion, is entirely usual to another locality. And this isn’t even defined by where you are, really. Take London, for example, you’ll meet some people who’ll swear by skinny jeans, compared to others that wouldn’t be seen dead in them. Is this a generational thing? Dictated by the year you were born, or how clued into the latest TikTok trend you are?

I don’t know. The point is that fashion is subjective and, yeah, when you take it out of its normalised context, it may appear a little strange to others, but style has never been about others, not really. It’s about expressing who you are.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Let’s look back, quite a fair bit back to be honest, at the Ancient Egyptians. Now, don’t go turning the page yet, I promise there’s a point to this. In Ancient Egypt, back in 4000 BC, men used to wear make-up. It wasn’t revolutionary, it wasn’t anything all that strange. It was a symbol of power, wealth, and status. And this persisted, would you believe it, even up to the 18th Century in this country too. Male English (as well as other Western European) aristocrats and the landed gentry class used to powder their faces with lead-based makeup, just as the women would, to highlight their place above the rest.

This wasn’t the case everywhere, mind, I wouldn’t conflate such a fact. In Ancient Rome, men were shunned from wearing make-up as it was considered too ‘feminine’, too soft.

If we return to Modern Britain, drifting from the Aristocracy to the Millennia, we can see clearly how things changed. The Ancient Roman consideration of men’s make-up may be more of a familiar stance to what we witnessed growing up. There’s many reasons for this, the creation of the true middle class and less of a pageantry for those of high status; a natural evolution of style and expression; and, most probably, the Victorian illegality of homosexual men that spurred a century of ‘queer fear’ that squandered men from anything feminine.

It’s quite upsetting, really, to think about how far we’ve come (though not perfectly, and not fully) in the advent of LGBT liberation in our country and, yet, there is still resistance to men’s make-up from a huge chunk of the population. Makeup is still conflated with overt femininity, and, because the LGBT identity is still considered to most a strangeness, so too is men wearing make-up. The two do not have to be considered mutually exclusive, in fact, they shouldn’t be. A man who wears make-up may be gay, but he also may not be. It isn’t a statement of his strength, his masculinity, it’s simply an accessory. It becomes a statement then, when Jonathan Ross paints his nails, or Noel Fielding wears eyeliner. A statement of support, a statement of forthcoming change, a statement to embrace the strange and make it un-strange. Make it normal.

Like it used to be.