02 / 2026
On Wholeness
What Plato's Symposium taught me about duality — and dressing
Long before fashion became a language of identity, the ancient Greeks were already asking the same questions we ask today: what does it mean to be whole? What does it mean to be split? And what do we reach for when we feel incomplete?
In Plato's Symposium, written around 385 BCE, a group of Athenians gather at a dinner party and take turns delivering speeches in praise of love. It is Aristophanes — the comic playwright — who offers the strangest and most enduring theory of all.
The Myth
According to Aristophanes, human beings were not always the shape we are now. Originally, we were round — great spherical creatures with two faces looking in opposite directions, four arms, four legs, and two sets of everything. We came in three kinds: some were double-male, some double-female, and some — the androgynous — were half male and half female.
These original beings were powerful. So powerful, in fact, that they threatened the gods. And so Zeus, unwilling to destroy them but needing to weaken them, cut each one in two — slicing them apart like a hard-boiled egg, leaving each half to wander the earth searching desperately for the other.
"Each of us is a matching half of a human whole, because we were sliced like a flatfish, making two out of one."
— Aristophanes, in Plato's Symposium
What Aristophanes describes as love — that ache of longing, that pull toward another — is really the body's memory of what it once was. We are not incomplete because we are broken. We are incomplete because we were made whole once, and we have not forgotten it.
Duality and the Line
What strikes me most about this myth is not the romance of it, but the shape of it. Those original beings did not belong to one gender. The androgynous form — half masculine, half feminine — was not an anomaly. It was one of the three original states of being. It was natural. It was whole.
This is the idea that lives at the heart of Unlearn the Norm. The masculine and the feminine were never meant to be opposing forces — they were, once, the same body. The line does not ask you to choose a side. It recognises that the blending of both is not a modern invention or a radical act. It is, in the oldest story we have about human longing, simply what we already were.
"To dress between definitions is not to break a rule. It is to remember a shape we once knew."
The norms we wear — the expectations stitched into what is considered masculine dress and what is considered feminine — are recent. They are cultural. They are constructed. But the impulse to reach across that divide, to hold both at once? That, Plato suggests, is ancient. That is human.
Unlearn the Norm · 2026