Wandering around Brooklyn in a skirt when you are a dude is a complicated affair, fraught with loaded symbols and multiple entendres, but three simple rules will get you a long way:
-- Take short strides.
-- Make no eye contact, except with people who are already yelling at you.
-- No matter what, stay out of the ABC Super Stores branch in the Fulton Mall.
A security guard at the ABC, John Cheeseboro, may insinuatingly ask what you are wearing under the skirt, but it is the excitable teenage girls who shop there who will almost certainly make a grab for you.
"You're being a child molester," shouted the bolder of two such two girls, glossing over the fact that she was the one lifting my skirt and getting a look at some stylish boxer shorts. "I'm 15!"
Cheeseboro ignored the little voyeurs and focused on maintaining eye contact with me as I took notes on his opinion of the whole "man in a skirt" deal. "I live in New York," he said. "I've seen worse. I've seen people naked."
He leaned over and whispered the last bit in conspiratorial tones. An old, stooped woman walked by and asked where in the store she might find pots. The girls gone wild scampered off, presumably to smoke cigarettes and waste time, as teenagers are supposed to do.
Little did Cheeseboro and the girls know, but they were test subjects in a pretty uncomplicated experiment designed to take to the streets certain notions of changing mores regarding masculinity and attire being debated across the river in the refined cultural halls of Manhattan.
On Tuesday, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open a display called "Bravehearts: Men in Skirts," documenting the absence of reciprocity in the borrowing of clothing styles across gender lines. "People are beginning to talk about new forms of masculinity," said Andrew Bolton, a curator at the museum and the author of a book sharing the name of the exhibition. He cited as evidence the use of kilts in the fashion layouts of lad magazines and the popularity of the term metrosexual, which I understand refers to guys who say they are not gay but have manicures anyway. Bolton cautioned that this so-called new masculinity was all just academic theory so far and said, "For the street, it takes a brave man to walk around in a skirt."
That is where I came in. I am not particularly brave, but I do have all the other qualifications needed to take the theory for a spin around the block. I am highly suggestible, humble, patient, self-assured and, perhaps most important, desperately broke. So when the call came to my office in Brooklyn, where I work as a reporter for the Times, asking if I would spend a day in a designer skirt intended for men, I named my price.
A deal was reached, and the neuroses quickly set in. I went through phases not unlike the stages of grieving.
For denial, I pretended that the choice had not been mine to make. I called my wife, who helped by laughing uncontrollably.
"Would you feel like a total idiot?" she said. I gave no answer, and she deduced across the telephone lines that I was already taking notes for the article. "Stop writing things down."
Another pause. Then she offered some real advice: "I think you should drive to work that day."
I had already bargained, and denial was doing no good, so when the skirt arrived on Wednesday afternoon, I tried procrastination. I took it home, reasoning that I would put it on in the morning for a full day of going about my business and recording reactions. Besides, that way I could plan what to wear with the thing, since my closet is overflowing with choices for matching skirts.
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