Mark Bryan, influencer known for his love of wearing skirts & heels, blames the LGBTQIA+ community for the public perceiving him as gay:
“I’ve tried to separate myself from the ‘LGB’ community […] they’ve made it worse for me, being straight, because now I’m assumed to be gay.”
Most of us believe that clothes have “genders.” Our society got the idea that some things are “fitting” for a man or woman to wear, some are not. However, there are open-minded people in this world who wear whatever they want and express themselves freely, not needing to live up to any type of stereotype. Like this inspiring man. He proves that it’s finally time to get rid of gender stereotypes, especially in clothing.
Mark Bryan is an American, but he currently lives in Germany and is a robotic engineer. He lives his life like every other person, except that he challenges gender stereotypes every day. He almost always wears a skirt and heels while he goes to work, to the town, and even at home. And let’s just say he looks absolutely fabulous while he does.
Mark told Bored Panda: “I dress like this because I can. Just to be different. I have always admired the women that wore tight skirts and heels. Not sexually, but the power they presented. I don’t dress to be sexual, but to dress like any professional woman would. To me, clothes have no gender. I prefer skirts to dresses. Dresses don’t allow me to mix the genders. I prefer a ‘masculine’ look above the waist and a non-gendered look below the waist. It’s all about clothes having no gender.”
“I’ve always had a thing for high-heeled shoes,” he says over Zoom. “It started back when I was in college forty years ago. I had a roommate that was sort of a girlfriend, who was as tall as I was, but she loved to wear four-inch heels, so she was naturally always taller.” Bryan’s then-girlfriend encouraged him to try on her heels and he’s been wearing them on and off ever since. “I wore them with jeans, but I grew up in a fairly small West Texas town, so I wouldn’t walk into a country western bar wearing high heels,” he says. Four years ago, he added skirts to the mix.
Standing six-feet tall without heels, and possessing a lean, athletic physique, Bryan cuts a striking figure in his ensembles. “I call it my hybrid style because it’s kind of half masculine and half feminine, like electrical charge,” he says. “For some reason, I tried dresses and they just didn’t fit—the shoulders, the neckline was never right, and the sleeves were always too short.” The pencil skirt idea came to him watching Meghan Markle’s character Rachel in the American legal drama Suits. “I always liked the way she dressed,” he says. “She wore pencil skirts and white blouses, so that was my inspiration. And I thought, Well, I can do that with a men’s shirt and still maintain some masculinity. I don’t really consider it crossdressing because I think clothes should be more gender neutral: I’m not crossing anything.”
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