Designer Haider Ackermann has announced he will present his first full menswear collection at the shows in Paris next month, although he's actually calling it a 'men's wardrobe', because he's offbeat like that.

The Antwerp-based designer has done a men's capsule before, which was shown to great acclaim at the Pitti fair in 2010, but this will be his first full adventure into the discipline.

It's an interesting move to make right now, given the weight of success in the menswear realm and the soaring sales to be found therein. But it's also part of a broader trend – Ackermann's take on dressing has evolved, since he started his womenswear brand in 2001, from something sinuous and really quite slinky to something far more androgynous in style. He has reinvented tailoring for women, in boxy and mannish but fabulously well-cut pieces, often made from opulent fabrics and jacquard, modern-day Chinoiserie and paisley almost. His postergirl Tilda Swinton has long been held up as the face of fashionable androgyny – she once played Orlando, so there's clearly some consensus.

So Haider Ackermann's diversion into menswear speaks more perhaps of the opening up of taste levels within the male wardrobe, that it has developed – thanks to the very crossover between the genders, in fashion terms at least – into something so much more interesting than grey flannels and black shoes.

Long live unisex dressing!