Everyone has a butt. And denim providers are happy that the world is filled with billions of butts. But most denim lines only cater to a certain kind of butt—male or female. This denim line? It will change that gendered norm.

This new line of gender-neutral denim, LA-based Mother, comes fro a partnership with iO Tillett Wright, an artist, photographer, and member of the transgender community. Together, Mother and Wright hope the gender-neutral denim line will “break down barriers of gendered fashion,” Hello Giggles reports.

Wright is revealing the line at the right time. Humans are becoming aware that gender and identity aren’t simple. “A closet is just a box of identities,” Wright says. “A little wooden cabinet of costumes that we pull out every day and say, ‘This is how I’m going to project who I am to the world.'” People should be able to project that gender-neutral identity to the world.

About the partnership

Mother asked Wright to make a few clothing mood boards for “Love Your Other,” the name of the now gender-neutral denim collaboration that’s “intended to draw attention to the concept of othering and discrimination,” Elle reports.

Wright took to the project immediately and responded with a plethora of images for Mother to work with: photos of people wearing overalls, vintage pilot suits, and jackets, describing the pieces in the photos as “things a person who gets shit done would wear.”

Over time, all of those ideas were transformed into two pairs of jeans: one pair that has a skinny fit, and another that has a straight-leg fit. Each of these pants can fit any body type.

In addition to jeans, the line also includes “aviator jackets, flight suits, and T-shirts emblazoned with NOT 100% and the gender-neutral honorific MX,” Elle reports.

“[The line] aims to take the question of man or woman out of getting dressed,” Tillett Wright and Lela Becker and Tim Kaeding, Mother co-founders, add.

More than just a label

While the line’s main goal is to serve individuals who want to keep their closet gender neutral, some of “Love Your Other’s” proceeds will help fund Wright’s portrait series, “Self Evident Truths.”

The series includes the images of 10,000 LGBTQ people. The artist plans to publicly stage the series on July 2, 2018, as a tribute to Sylvia Rivera, a prominent activist at the Stonewall riot in 1969,” according to Hello Giggles.

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Image of Tillet Wright via the artist’s Instagram

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Times they are a changin’. The UK may soon allow people to obtain gender-neutral passports… I know. I can hardly believe it.

This possible new passport is getting support from a wide smattering of people in different political parties across the UK. If the UK does decide to allow a gender-neutral passport (also called Gender X passports), the country would join “Australia, New Zealand, and Nepal as one of the few places with passports for non-gendered citizens,” Dazed Digital reports.

While these passports would be available for anyone who doesn’t claim a gender, Dazed Digital reports that in the UK, they are mainly aimed at British LGBTQ people who don’t want to identify as male or female:

“Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has pledged to consider ‘Gender X’ passports as part of an overall rehaul on trans rights if Labour get into government,” reports Dazed Digital.

Over the past few years, businesses, organizations, and services, such as Google+ and Facebook, have started to provide more gender options for people who don’t claim a gender. So far, 2015 and much of 2014, has been filled with a lot of positive press about gender neutrality. Here are just a few of the notable recent changes we’ve seen:

More establishments, colleges, are creating gender-neutral bathrooms: Gender-neutral bathrooms are a great option for people whose inner gender doesn’t necessarily match their outer gender. The following quote from Sasha Buchert, staff attorney for the Transgender Law Center, in a somewhat recent HuffPost article, explains the importance of these bathrooms: “Trans and gender nonconforming students should be focusing on their education or getting their job done well, and not about which bathroom they can use.”

Parents are giving kids gender-neutral names: Many parents are beginning to recognize that just because their kid is born as a girl, doesn’t mean she will grow up to be a girl.

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Image: Images Money

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Yes it’s true. A customer complained after wanting to purchase ‘Boy Stuff’ for her daughter for Christmas. Welcome to the power of social media in the twenty first century. Marks & Spencer, the mega retailer, totaling $16.3 billion in revenue in 2013, has some mega news, and it all started through Twitter.

After a call out from a customer who wanted to purchase a marble run for her daughter as a Christmas present, she was halted by a marketing label that read ‘Boy Stuff.’ She called out Marks & Spencer via Twitter, and the company quickly responded that they would be canceling gender specific marketing for toys by spring 2014. Toys have a long history of being geared towards a specific gender, but for Marks & Spencer that is all about to change.

The company said in a statement: “’Boy’s Stuff’ will be rebranded to use a simple graphic logo, whilst the ‘Little Miss Arty’ range will become Poppy and Blue – which will use character based branding.”

As the first major UK retailer to be carbon neutral, Marks & Spencer is no stranger to innovative initiatives. During an internal assessment of the company, they found aerodynamics of transportation trucks can account for 50 percent of fuel consumption. The company responded by redesigning their vehicles for lower ‘drag’ and more fuel efficiency. The redesign rather serendipitously increased the truck’s carrying capacity by 16 percent, allowing more merchandise to be shipped by one truck than the previous designs.

In September 2012, Marks & Spencer released the ‘most sustainable suit ever,’ made from reclaimed material and GOTS certified wool. The suit claimed to be the first intricate garment made entirely from sustainable material, and was another large step forward from the company’s innovative initiatives.

Other big projects have included their Shwopping events, a collaboration with London College and Oxfam, which encourages a customer to give one article of clothing for each one purchased.

By now, corporations know, acknowledge, and act on the importance of providing options that keep sustainability at the forefront. And by sustainability I am not simply referring to environmental sustainability but, as important, social sustainability–which can truly be translated to responsibility.

From inside intel I know some of the largest corporations are taking steps towards more responsible practices, and listening to consumers, as is shown through the Marks & Spencer case. But most companies aren’t bringing information on their initiatives out to the public because they are in the midst of deep research around best marketing strategies–probably similar to why Marks & Spencer kept their gender neutral plans under wraps until the Twitter incident.

Whether a large corporation can actually be sustainable is another debate, for another time, but what is important to mention now is their efforts towards a better way of business–a triple bottom line approach, for people, planet and profits–should not be ignored.

What do non-segregated toys have to do with sustainability? A lot. The efforts of Marks & Spencer are exactly what is needed from a billion dollar multi-national corporation to try and sustain themselves in the local maker market of the twenty first century.

See Also:

7 Clues To Tell Your Garment Is Really Sustainable: Eco Fashion Dissected 

Will The Fashion Industry Ever Attain Sustainability?

Fostering a Responsible Fashion Industry: The Sustainable Apparel Coalition

image: geir tonnessen

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