I used to think gender-neutral fashion was just about beige.
Turns out, the visual language of inclusive fashion brands is way more complicated than that—and honestly, it’s kind of fascinating when you start paying attention to what’s actually happening in the design work. These brands aren’t just slapping “for everyone” on their labels and calling it a day. They’re rebuilding entire visual systems from the ground up, questioning everything from color theory to typography to the way bodies are photographed. I’ve spent months looking at how companies like Telfar, Entireworld, and Official Rebrand communicate inclusivity through design alone, and the patterns that emerge tell you something important about how visual language either reinforces or dismantles gender norms. Some of it works brilliantly. Some of it feels like they’re trying too hard, honestly, but at least they’re trying.
Here’s the thing: traditional fashion branding has always been gendered as hell. Walk into any department store and you can tell the men’s section from the women’s section with your eyes closed—the men’s side smells like leather and uses sans-serif fonts, the women’s side gets florals and script typography. Gender-inclusive brands are deliberately breaking these visual codes.
The Color Palettes That Actually Challenge the Pink-Blue Binary System
Wait—maybe the most obvious place to start is color, except it’s not obvious at all once you dig in. Yes, inclusive brands tend to avoid hot pink and navy blue used in traditional gendered ways, but what they’re doing instead varies wildly. Some, like Phluid Project, embrace a full rainbow spectrum that feels almost defiant in its refusal to be categorized. Others, like Entireworld, went for that beige-gray-cream palette I mentioned earlier, which reads as “neutral” but also kind of reads as “boring,” if I’m being honest. The interesting middle ground is brands using unexpected color combinations—burnt orange with sage green, rust with lavender—that don’t have strong gender associations in Western culture. There’s research from the University of Rochester suggesting that color-gender associations are culturally learned, not innate, which means these brands are basically trying to teach us a new visual language. It’s working, sort of. I still see lavender and think “feminine” sometimes, which tells you how deep this stuff goes.
Typography Choices That Refuse to Whisper or Shout in Gendered Ways
The font choices these brands make are doing more heavy lifting than you’d think. Traditional women’s fashion uses delicate serifs or flowing scripts—think Vogue’s iconic typography—while men’s fashion goes bold, geometric, industrial. Gender-inclusive brands overwhelmingly choose geometric sans-serifs that sit somewhere in between: confident but not aggressive, clean but not delicate. Brands like TomboyX and Kirrin Finch both use custom typefaces that feel substantial without being hypermasculine. What’s interesting is how this creates a visual middle ground that doesn’t exist in traditional fashion branding. It’s not feminized masculinity or masculinized femininity—it’s something else entirely. Or at least that’s the goal. Sometimes it just looks like every tech startup’s branding, which is its own problem.
Anyway, there’s also the question of how much text these brands use.
The Photography Styles That Deconstruct How We’re Taught to See Bodies
This is where things get really interesting, and also where I’ve seen brands fail most spectacularly. Gender-inclusive fashion photography has to solve a genuinely hard problem: how do you show clothes on bodies without reinforcing the idea that certain bodies should wear certain clothes? Some brands photograph garments flat, avoiding bodies altogether—functional but kind of cowardly, honestly. Others show diverse bodies but still pose them in traditionally gendered ways, which defeats the purpose. The brands that actually succeed do something more subtle: they photograph bodies in active, candid moments rather than posed editorial shots, they avoid the male gaze and the female gaze simultaneously (which is harder than it sounds), and they often crop faces or shoot from unexpected angles that make you focus on the garment and the person’s comfort rather than their perceived gender. Telfar’s campaign imagery does this really well—there’s an energy and authenticity that feels genuinely inclusive rather than performative. But I’ve also seen brands overcorrect and produce imagery that’s so deliberately “edgy” or “weird” that it becomes its own kind of exclusionary aesthetic. It’s a delicate balance, and most brands are still figuring it out.
The Minimalist Trap and When Less Actually Means More Gatekeeping
Here’s something nobody talks about enough: the rise of minimalist design in gender-inclusive fashion might actually be creating new forms of exclusion. When brands strip away all ornamentation, all pattern, all decorative elements in the name of being “universal,” they’re often just catering to a specific aesthetic that appeals to young, urban, design-conscious consumers. Minimalism isn’t inherently more inclusive than maximalism—it’s just a different set of aesthetic codes, and ones that tend to skew expensive and elitist. I’ve noticed that truly inclusive brands are starting to embrace more visual complexity: patterns, textures, decorative elements that don’t read as gendered but also don’t feel like they’re scared of being interesting. There’s a difference between designing for everyone and designing for no one in particular, and the minimalist trap is when you accidentally do the latter. Some brands recieve criticism for this, and honestly, it’s deserved—inclusivity shouldn’t mean visual boredom.
The challenge, I guess, is that we’re all still learning this new visual language together.
