‘Tomboy’ With a Sensual Twist

Her brand features oversized silhouettes, masculine tailoring, and a streetwear swagger, each piece carrying a subtle defiance. It’s the sex appeal of ease, of a woman who doesn’t need sequins to feel magnetic. “Whatever I do, there’s always some kind of edge,” Ciara says, and that defines the new erotica.

It’s not just her. Zendaya drapes herself in menswear one day and slips into Valentino couture the next without blinking. Billie Eilish built a career on baggy tees and armour-like outerwear, then stunned the world in a corseted gown. Kristen Stewart turns up at Cannes barefoot in Chanel. They all demonstrated that power can be dressed as nonchalance.

Priyanka Chopra once called herself a “total tomboy,” all sneakers and swagger, before discovering that her femininity didn’t require a costume change. Tamannaah Bhatia has spoken of hustling through her early years on her “masculine energy,” then learning to reclaim her femininity.

“We still want to be women, we want to look like women, we want to feel sexy, but we want these silhouettes,” the founders of Wildfang described on their website how the Portland-based label was founded around a tomboy aesthetic. Its creative director, Taralyn Thuot, added, “We want her to feel sexy because she’s being herself, not a representation of what she thinks men want her to be.”

Designer Isabel Marant, long seen as the architect of Parisian ease, explained, “I’m very boyish and I can be very feminine at the same time. I like contrasting things… I like sexiness, but I don’t like the first degree of it - the overly sexy, which, for me, is very vulgar.” Her world has always been about tension — pairing a mini dress with a man’s jacket. “You can have a very sexy tiny dress, but we put it with a man’s jacket,” she said. “The cool-girl attitude is about breaking codes; there’s always something that could be wrong for others that makes the silhouette cool for us.”

Model Freja Beha Erichsen, whose angular frame and no-nonsense energy helped define 2000s androgyny, said, “Being a tomboy worked to my advantage in fashion. I’ve never felt pressure to change myself.”

Fashion critics now call this the “blur” — the erasure of the binaries that once ruled wardrobes. The idea that femininity should sparkle and masculinity should swagger has collapsed under its own weight. The new icons move like shape-shifters: Denim that hugs and sags in the same breath, tailoring that hints and hides, sneakers that feel more powerful than stilettos ever did. Harris Reed said, “Fluidity offers an alternate way of being, crossing and merging masculine and feminine.” He rejects the unisex default and insists that style must reflect form, movement, colour, and self-expression.

Likewise, style blogger Kim of J’adore Couture said, “I’m a definite tomboy, so I always like mixing something masculine and something feminine in a look.”