Future chic.

I'm imagining gay fashion three decades from now not as gay-autonomous or gay per se but as sexy fashion in the future's separation between fashion as physical self-expression and fashion conformity. Everyone will have the classic choice of closet or pleasure. I hope most gay people will prefer pleasure.

Thirty years ago I thought gay fashion consisted of my habit of reading Esquire and GQ surreptitiously from back to front, admiring the Parr of Arizona, Ah Men, and Village Squire ads on the final pages; they were minuscule but magnified immensely in my imagination. Lesbian fashion was even more invisible and had to be conjured out of Eve Arden movies, Tallulah Bankhead as a television guest, and Army-Navy stores' styling. Gay and lesbian fashion was deep in the closet. But something happened in the late 1960s and 1970s. Mainstream fashion was tantalized by the sexual revolution, if only incidentally by gay and lesbian identities, in such examples as Yves Saint Laurent's sophisticated cross-dressing pseudolesbian chic of the 1970s and the new presence of designers Pierre Cardin, Saint Laurent, and Don Robbie making their mark in menswear. That mark had more to do with Ah Men than Brooks Brothers.

As I think ahead 30 years into the future, I'm shocked to realize that 60 years ago, when the choice was between full-page ads of Cesar Romero in Petrocelli suits or a "lo-rise boxer swim suit," gay and ostensibly straight were in opposition. And only gay style directly addressed sexuality. It was as if you wore either Swank cuff-link sets or nylon-tricot jumpsuits, prim menswear convention or "showbiz" exhibitionism. Today, Frederick's of Hollywood and Victoria's Secret are not so far apart, and the designs of Gianni Versate and John Bartlett are knocked off by International Male just as much as they may be inspired by that "hunkalog."

Today, fashion without sex is a fraud. Even mainstream designers give us images drenched in sexuality: Donna Karan's voluptuous and independent women and the streamlined modernist body-cleaving cuts of Calvin Klein. Contemporary fashion without homo sex is likewise a fraud. Sex overtly entered contemporary fashion in the early 1970s just as "society" exited. It arrived with peacocks; it was skintight by the late 1970s in designer jeans.

In the past 30 years, fashion has changed dramatically, chiefly under the impulse of sexuality. As men have come to some detente with their heterosexually imprisoned bodies and women have seized initiatives both from menswear and from pragmatic sportswear, fashion has accepted sex as if finally acknowledging Dr. Alfred Kinsey. Lesbian artist Zoe Leonard photographed a Geoffrey Beene runway show in 1992 from below to get a panties view of fashion, but Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, and many other designers had already shown in the 1980s and 1990s a polymorphic sexuality that tried--not only for shock value--to capture the electricity of ambiguous and unruly sexualities.

Thirty years from now you won't have to read fashion magazines backward to get to sex or homo sex. You won't have to get prone on the floor to look up skirts. Hardly will there be utopian conditions of complete tolerance and universalism, but fashion is that arena where sex matters and sexual preference matters less. Versace, Marc Jacobs, Bartlett, and Gaultier have already shown us that menswear can be pansexual. k.d. lang and Ellen DeGeneres shop at Prada and Banana Republic. The future of fashion promises ever greater cultural diversity and assimilation. For sure, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and others are offering ideas that white bodies and pasty minds never dreamed of, way beyond Tommy Hilfiger's 1990s charisma.

Abandoning the class structure as its aspirational system, fashion in this lifetime necessarily admires and assumes diversity, wherein style begins. Gay and lesbian fashion are less likely to be segregated in the future. Probably there will always be subculture traits for homosexual people, but gone forever are the 1920s red ties of "pansy" identity or the tweed slacks of clubby lesbianism. Fashion is sharing our wardrobe and style. The adventuresome will set style, and gay people will always be discoverers. But we won't have to look like the Village People or other clones, lesbian or gay. And we won't ride in the back of the fashion magazine.

Martin is curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.