‘But I would find it appalling when all men were to wear high-heels tomorrow!’
by: Marij Rynja
On the web several extravagant looking young males peacock themselves in the gaze of the fashion world. They shop in the woman’s department and know how to use dress as a personal branding strategy. One of them is Dutchman Sonny Groo, who for his age (23) has come a long way in the fashion world already, mainly due to his looks.
In Morlang, a cafe on one of the Amsterdam canals, I talked to the Dutch online fashion entrepreneur and stylist Sonny Groo. Groo, whose real last name is Grootjans, is still a young man, but already he leads the life which he could only dream of: entering at fashion shows in Milan and Paris, styling fashion reportages for well-known magazines and fashion labels, running a fashion magazine of his own, writing as a freelancer about fashion, being photographed by the Sartorialist and having an army of imitators during the fashion weeks in Paris which has resulted in hundreds of fashion blogs on which he can be seen.
In the still quiet Morlang cafe Sonny Groo sits calmly waiting for me in the good company of his best friend: his Blackberry phone, the connection with his online life. Musingly Groo wobbles his foot up and down, a foot with a giant block heel by Rad Hourani. A boot in black leather with a square blunted tip with a plateau and no less than an eleven-centimeter heel.
Groo has a tall and slender built, short hair, a trimmed beard and semi-dark skin color. He is simultaneously wearing a handbag, ladies sun glasses, a skirt over his pants and a long, broad-shouldered leather coat.
Heels and a beard? What kind of person is hiding behind the giant black Lanvin sunglasses at € 500, his trademark? Transsexualism? Uncertainty? Need for attention? What is the story behind the fashion cover of Sonny Groo?
‘I have always felt the need to stretch the boundaries of how I look. I did not feel an inkling of shame, really’.
Behind the cover of the young Sonny hides a cheerful, enthusiast and passionate individual, who seems to know quite well what he wants and where he wants it. After his high school graduation in Purmerend he moved to Amsterdam. Instead of going to college, he preferred to dive into fashion. Sonny feels that without his eccentric appeal he would have failed to gain access to the competitive world of fashion: ‘How you look says much about who you are. What you do and your skills have to fit the image you radiate. I do not find myself eccentric, but I understand that people look at me that way. But this is who I am. I have always been that way. I do not have the slightest feelings of shame about it. It has been several years now that I wear high-heeled shoes or skirts; I’m used to it.’
He earns his money as an all-round freelancer, but if necessary he also works in a local bakery to fund his passion. Groo: ‘These are very serious to me, fashion and the internet. Sometimes you need to be in debt because you absolutely want to show a great reportage. It is not a matter of doing fun things or having skills; it is simply hard work, requiring stamina. Those who succeed to stay on in this field deserve to be able to make ends meet. After all, they already spent the money in previous years, investing in themselves and taking risks because they really want to be where they are.’
When he was young Groo’s parents divorced and he lived with his mother. As a child he moved several times, from Middelburg, to Vlissingen and back to Purmerend. Groo: ‘As an only child I learned early on to be who you are. My mother stimulated this and said that I should just wear the green Kermit the Frog sweater and pants in combination with a big red Dirk van de Broek bag, simply because I felt I had to do it. That sense of freedom may well be gone the next day, she told me. I have always felt the need to stretch the boundaries of how I look. I did not feel an inkling of shame, really. At one point it doesn’t matter anymore whether you are wearing high heels or a skirt. In my case people got used to it.’
Hardly going out, he leads a reclusive life, but once he logs on to his profile sites and fashion blogs, Sonny comes alive: Facebook, Blogger, Twitter and the monthly online fashion magazine MykroMag, set up by him in 2007 and made with some of his international fashion friends. Like Sonny, the magazine is unconventional and eccentric. He tells me: ‘In 2007 I set up MykroMag to approach fashion from an angle different from the common ones. The people with whom I put it together are not part of an in-crowd, for they come from everywhere, just like our topics. It is not just New York, London or Paris where fashion is generated. I think that we are one of the first fashion magazines that interconnect different professions, nationalities and ages. With this online generation this works out quite easily.’
The online-generation of Sonny Groo, also called generation Einstein or Y, thinks in terms of connectivity, interaction and multidisciplinarity. They do not limit themselves, for the internet has no boundaries. This generation, born after 1985, is used to processing much information and also produce new information themselves. ‘At thirteen I had a homepage already, which was just a profile site. At that time blogging was not what it is today. Things were fairly standard and simple. Each day I updated my profile and added the date. I wrote a piece on what I experienced and added an image that I liked. It was all very basic. And often it would be about fashion.’ To Groo the computer served as an emotional release: ‘As a teenager I spent much time alone. At times I would sit crying behind my computer. But it also felt very much liberating. Online I could really be who I was.’
‘In Asia they really copy our style, especially that of my friend Jean Paul Paula.’
Sonny Groo gained fame through the images of him circulating on the internet. He has become a self-made fashion celebrity. The online fashion scene eagerly takes pictures of both him and Jean Paul Paula, his best friend, during their visits to international fashion weeks. ‘Jean Paul Paula and I are on hundreds of blogs. In Asia it is even worse, compared to here in Europe. Over there they really copy our style, especially that of Jean Paul.’ Even more than Groo, Jean Paul Paula (23) is a first-rate fashion flaneur. This Grace Jones look-alike wears killer-heels, leggings and designer clothes, but is all but a woman with his stubbly beard, masculine body and blockhead hair dress. Jean Paul, too, is stylist, but mainly a fashion-entertainer and self-made celebrity owing to his flamboyant dress style.
Aside from Groo and Paula, other fashion boys present themselves wholeheartedly on the internet through blogs and photographs: BryanBoy (Malaysia), Yu Masui (Japan), Jak&Jil (America) and many others. They know each other and promote each other’s blogs. Raised with internet they fuel their websites daily with new fashion analyses, stories and photos of themselves or other ‘hipsters’ they encounter in or on sites that seem to be hip and happening, from art galleries to promotional parties and fashion events.
Paula and Groo attend as many fashion weeks as possible in order to network, meet young talents and of course – PR-minded – be seen by the international fashion press and professionals. They do so with quite some success. In February 2009 journalist Elisabeth Spiridakis of the The New York Times T-Magazine blogged about them: ‘It’s men dressing mostly like men […] but with accessories from the women’s department. […] It’s not about cross-dressing at all, but about thinking outside of the box of formal menswear.’ This blog-post led to 146 divergent reactions from visitors of the site. A girl writes: ‘I have never seen a man look so good in heels before in my life. This is genius.’ Another one puts this hype into perspective, writing: ‘Much of the buzz is because males are in now publicly wearing apparel designed for females, but without the usual make-up that accompanies this typically transsexual look. But very few of us readers do not ‘wonder why every guy doesn’t do this’, because we know that few men outside of the fashion world would be not taken seriously by either men or women if they dressed this way. Let’s not get too carried away.’
‘I only shop in the women’s department of H&M, for it has a lot of oversized clothing, nice fabrics and more design’
Apart from positive reactions and admiring responses as to these boys’ daring, the negative reactions can be extreme. As one boy writes: ‘Honestly, these guys look pathetic. If they want to women’s dress and use women’s accessories just to look different, my advice to them is, they need serious mental help. There are lots of other ways for a guy to look cool and still maintain his cool. Dressing like a woman is definitely not one of them.’
Cool or odd, transsexual or masculine – apparently it is a sensitive issue when men dress in unmanly ways. Words such as ‘transsexual’, ‘freak’, and even ‘mentally abnormal’ recur in these reactions, while these ‘cyber dandies’ in fact emphasize that they do not want to imitate women or feel feminine at all. I ask Sonny Groo how he feels about these reactions. What do they tell about men’s fashion and about them? ‘I do not find myself androgynous nor am I transsexual – no, not at all even. I feel very manly in these clothes. I am more unisex than feminine. Likewise, Jean Paul is all but feminine, or, for that matter, all but androgynous or transvestite. That is a misconception. He has a beard, real man’s calves, a fully trained male body and this is how he is in all he does: very manly. But Jean Paul challenges fashion issues much more than I do, because it really is his way of release.’
For several years Sonny himself has been wearing high-heeled shoes and a skirt on top of his pants: ‘What matters is that you stretch the boundary and still let it be a male outfit. A black skirt is another story than a flower skirt edged with lace or spike heels. No panties, legging or exposed leg, no. That would be carrying things too far; even I would feel to have reached a limit then. I still want to dress like a man. Did you know that the male skirt at H&M here sold out in no time? Telling, isn’t it?’
Sonny’s vision is that fashion will increasingly evolve towards unisex, because personality and character should matter more again, rather than what you do and how good you are. Groo: ‘Men will become major competitors for women, something which used to be hardly the case. I only shop in the women’s department of H&M, for it has a lot of oversized clothing, nice fabrics and more design. What I find annoying in men’s wear is its tight and perfect fit: the length of the sleeves and shoulders are exactly right. Instead, I like it when something is slightly too short, too long, too tight or in fact very wide. In men’s wear you cannot buy something too small or too large, for all other details of the design are in line with that size: all is adjusted to that size. In women’s wear the size differences are smaller. Nor do I like the use of fabric in men’s wear. I rather like shine and leather. You do not find that in men’s fashion, but you do again in today’s women’s fashion. So that is where I go shopping. But I would find it appalling when all men were to wear skirts and heels tomorrow, for then it would be six of one and half a dozen of the other all over again. What matters is diversity, being who you are and not do what others do because it will become fashionable. Please no!’
‘It will no longer be about who you are, but about what you do. You have to have the whole package. Whether you are a man or a woman, gay or straight, is irrelevant.’
Sonny has a rosy picture of the future: ‘I am on the right track, doing what I like most. I know for sure that in fifteen years from now I will be high up there somewhere, that I have power in the world of fashion. This is what I want, just like Anna Wintour of Vogue. Why should a man not be able to take her place? Did you realize that not a single international fashion magazine for women has a man as editor-in-chief? And that there are hardly any women who design men’s wear? It is old-fashioned, isn’t it? I do see such development happen in the future. It will all be much more unisex. It will no longer be about who you are, but about what you do. You have to have the whole package, though. Whether you are a man or a woman, gay or straight, is irrelevant.’
Sonny has a rosy picture of the future: ‘I am on the right track, doing what I like most. I know for sure that in fifteen years from now I will be high up there somewhere, that I have power in the world of fashion. This is what I want, just like Anna Wintour of Vogue. Why should a man not be able to take her place? Did you realize that not a single international fashion magazine for women has a man as editor-in-chief? And that there are hardly any women who design men’s wear? It is old-fashioned, isn’t it? I do see such development happen in the future. It will all be much more unisex. It will no longer be about who you are, but about what you do. You have to have the whole package, though. Whether you are a man or a woman, gay or straight, is irrelevant.’
In short, it seems a new kind of dandyism has emerged from behind the fashion of Sonny Groo, Jean Paul Paula and the likes. Sonny and his many fellow ‘cyber dandies’, as I call them, have turned profiling themselves online truly into an art. They are online fashion flaneurs, who do not hit the downtown streets but the avenues of the internet to display themselves to a large audience. The internet serves as their raison d‘être, much like the city performed this same function to the flaneur of the 19th century. Nationality, gender and age do not seem to play a role any longer, but aesthetics all the more so.
They are individuals – freed from social conventions – with liberated minds and fashion ideals. They glamorize themselves on the internet, cultivating the self, like the nineteenth-century dandy, who lives for his audience and is known for his fashion sensibility and self-presentation. Groo: ‘I am very aware of my image and the power of an online community. I attend fashion weeks and I know that I, through the way I dress, will end up again in some newspaper, an online magazine or a blog. I love it. It is perfectly fine to take a picture of me any time! In this sense I am a victim of online power.’
Like the dandies of old, these digital dandies do not seem to bother much how others feel about their fashion. Their individuality and personal fashion expression come first. Perhaps this eccentric group of young men will prove to be the vanguard of a large future change in men’s wear: freedom in choosing clothing and moving away from traditional men’s fashion.
Women wear pants, so why should men not wear skirts?
This article is published in the Yearly Journal of ArtEZ Fashionmasters and is written in order of Rynja's graduation project, The Transgress Journal - #1: transgender in men's fashion www.thetransgressjournal.com (website under construction)
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| Left: Sonny Groo/MykroMag; Center: Sonny & Jean Paul/Paris Fashion Week; Right:one of his extravagant looks found on the web |
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