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'Vogue' Put Gigi in Zayn's Blazer and Now Toxic Gender Norms Are Over

“It’s not about gender,” Hadid says in her August cover story for the magazine. “It’s about, like, shapes.”

Good morning everyone! What a time it is to be alive and on this spinning hot rock we lovingly call Earth. You know? There's just so much to be thankful for, don't you think? We somehow managed to invent the internet, for one thing. And we haven't been hit by any devastating comets for like 35 million years. But perhaps most importantly and most incredibly, Gigi Hadid is wearing a suit jacket from her boyfriend's closet and, with this simple garm that likely seems inconsequential to the untrained eye, she is leading the gender revolution.

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Hey, it's a messy job but somebody's gotta do it, okay? Somebody's got to wear a blazer made for, yes, technically a woman, but it does look quite masculine, and use its steezy androgynous power to shock the rigid generations that came before us into letting us have gender fluidity. Thanks in entirety to Vogue's August cover story, Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik Are Part of a New Generation Embracing Gender Fluidity, we now know who our movement's figureheads are.

I know what you're thinking. I do! Because I thought it too, at first. You're thinking Wow, wild, I really did not expect the leaders of the gender revolution to be a cisgender, heterosexual couple ha ha crazy. I know. I know. It is, to be sure, a small shock. But if you actually read the piece, I think you'll see that it all makes sense.

Like any good article about gender fluidity, this story begins with Virginia Woolf's Orlando: "He becomes they," Vogue's Maya Singer writes in her profile of the couple. "The pronouns shift, but the person remains the same. Woolf's words, written in 1928, could easily be mistaken for a manifesto posted yesterday on Tumblr, the preferred platform for the growing cohort of "fluid" young people who, like Orlando, breezily crisscross the XX/XY divide." Interesting. The last time I went on Tumblr it was all memes and anime characters fucking each other, but that's neither here nor there.

What do Gigi and Zayn have in common with Orlando and the non-binary humans of the world? Ask all of us, in terrifying, loud unison. "The couple snuggle in interchangeable tracksuits" on set for this cover story shoot, obviously! "For these millennials, at least, descriptives like boy or girl rank pretty low on the list of important qualities—and the way they dress reflects that." Which makes sense. Unlike people born before 1990, Gigi's not interested in wearing trackies with "I identify as female" written on the arse. Which is very fucking cool. Very cool. Very now.

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"It's not about gender," Hadid tells Vogue who then not at all unfairly chooses to print it, "It's about, like, shapes." The whole world stops on its very axis. The birds stop singing. The wildebeest stop migrating. Trump wakes up from his sleep in a cold sweat and says "Melania, wake up! Wake up! Gender is fluid! Gender identity is not defined by a person's physicality!"

Just when you think you've learned enough for the day, Gigi's brother Anwar calls out from a nearby tire swing, or picnic table, or as he whizzes around on an antique baroque carnival carousel imported from Paris or something—I'm not entirely sure—and says: "We're chill! People our age, we're just chill!" And, according to the number one fashion magazine in the world for good reason: "This is how you can tell a paradigm shift has taken place: when a way of seeing a thing seems like common sense." Beautifully put, Vogue's Maya Singer. Beeaaaautifully put.

If you still don't know what it all means, which you probably don't, because we haven't talked about it in terms of heterosexual men who recently died yet, this is for you: "Think Prince and David Bowie, both of whom scrambled male and female fashion codes in the name of liberation." Ahhhhh, I see, I see, I see.

In closing, and in the immortal (bit like Orlando) words of Vogue: "If this month's cover stars are anything to go by, the momentum is all in the direction of attitude, not gender, as the all-important marker of a human being."

So there you have it. You asked for equality, you got it. Gigi and Zayn (and, every now and then when he's nearby and has a minute, Anwar Hadid from a fairy floss factory somewhere) will be the heroes we deserve and also the ones we need right now and also the ones we didn't expect. Who knew it was all as simple as stealing an Anna Sui silk shirt from your girlfriend's closet…

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