Dive Brief:

• High-fashion brands, including designers and retailers, are increasingly presenting designs and campaigns that cross or ignore gender lines.

• The moves are not so much a repeat of previously popular androgynous styles but more of a crossover that blur and even eliminate the lines between “mens” and “women’s” categories.

• As Quartz points out, the changes are a reflection of global and generational influences: Many cultures recognize more than two genders, and half of millennials believe gender identity is not binary but a spectrum.

Dive Insight:

High-profile celebrities are also helping break down gender definitions and are bringing these notions into the mainstream. Celebrity offspring and Tweeter Jaden Smith, son of actors Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, recently showed up at Coachella wearing a dress, for example. And Bruce Jenner showed off his closet, including dresses, to Diane Sawyer during his ground-breaking interview Friday, while saying he's hanging on to the pronoun "he."

The idea of gender is being softened, at least, and this movement presents both an opportunity and an interesting problem for retailers, which are often slow to respond to consumer and generational shifts like these. Indeed, some retailers still struggle with how to sell clothing on a full spectrum of sizes, much less gender.