Summary: We discuss an alternative to the Higgs mechanism which leads to gauge invariant masses for the electroweak bosons. The key idea is to reformulate the gauge invariance principle which, instead of being applied as usual at the level of the action, is applied at the level of the quantum fields. In other words, we define gauge invariant quantum fields which are used to build the action. In that framework, the Higgs field is not necessarily a physical degree of freedom but can merely be a dressing field that does not propagate. If the Higgs boson is not propagating, the weak interactions must become strongly coupled below 1 TeV and have a nontrivial fixed point and would thus be renormalizable at the nonperturbative level. On the other hand, if a gauge invariant Higgs boson is introduced in the model, its couplings to the fermions and the electroweak bosons can be quite different from those expected in the Standard Model.