This volume presents a choice of probably the most latest knowledge at the relationship between gender and fashion in historical and latest contexts. Through fourteen essays divided into three segments—how dress creates, disrupts, and transcends gender—the essays investigate gender issues through the lens of fashion. Crossing Gender Boundaries first examines how clothing has been, and continues to be, used to create and handle the binary gender division that has come to permeate Western and westernized cultures. Next, it explores how dress can be utilized to contest and subvert binary gender expectations, before a final section that considers the meaning of gender and how dress can transcend it, specializing in unisex and genderless clothing.

The essays believe how fashion can both constrict and free gender expression, explore the ways dress and gender are products of one other, and remove darkness from the construction of gender through social norms. Readers will find that through analysis of the relationship between gender and fashion, they gain a better understanding of the world around them.