STOP Genderlocking Cosmetics!!

[Iscah]

Can't female characters wear most masculine looking gear in the game already? Or am I missing something

There are definitely issues with continued locks and gear that transforms by gender, but the claim that it's all about giving feminine gear to male characters is cherry-picking data to drive a narrative that doesn't actually exist.

Even if we only look at recently unlocked gear, ladies got two fancy tailcoats (wedding and butler) and the frilly-but-historically-masculine High House justaucorps.

Plus they've had the male half of gendered sets for years: the Best Man's suit, Thavnairian bolero, the sailor suit*, the Ishgardian men's coat**, possibly some others I'm forgetting... The original reasoning presumably being that men wouldn't want to wear the counterpart, so it wasn't worth the work of modelling it, but apparently they've shifted stance on that. So that's why the balance of newly unlocked gear is leaning towards feminine outfits for men at the moment: the other half of the unlock already happened years ago.

* Admittedly the sailor suit is a poor counterpart to the spring dress, thematically and as a male-targeted outfit, and I would love to see them take a second shot at it. I'm picturing something like a blazer and straw boater hat.

** We get the Alpine coat from MSQ and the Adept's set as crafting gear – these are the two variants of menswear for Ishgardian NPCs. Meanwhile we only much later got the Adept-equivalent dress, which is still gender-locked, and have not received the Alpine dress or the hat.

I do wish the male version of the Thavnairian bustier had been altered along the lines of the level 80 DNC top – I think it would have looked great, and more flattering than the exact copy of the female bustier minus the bust. (Plus the dancer top has silver decorations and a gold version would be nice.) But for things like the maid dress, being feminine is kind of the point, so maybe they don't want to get into questions of when to alter things and when to leave them alone.

Besides I thought a recent update addressed this.

They are gradually releasing unlocked versions of models since a number were leaked a while ago. From what I can remember them showing, we can still expect the Riviera and Oasis sets – Glade already being unisex, possibly at the expense of us never getting access to the "peasant dress" that I suspect is the intended counterpart.

Beyond that, there are still a number of things that are gender-locked and neither side can wear the other, and I think those unlocks are going to favour female characters far more than male. There's the Quaintrelle/Boulevardier sets, Frontier, Songbird/Seneschal, two Valentione sets, the black- and pink-ribboned hats, all the yukatas and other beach gear.