A Queer History of Fashion - From The Closet To The Catwalk - Steele, Valerie, Editor - 2013 - New Haven - Yale University Press in Association With - 9780300196702 - Anna's Archive

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A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION: FROM THE CLOSET TO THE CATWALK
EDITED BY VALERIE STEELE
A ground-breaking exploration of gay contributions

to fashion.
From Christian Dior to Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander

McQueen, many of the greatest fashion designers of the
past century have been gay. Indeed, as early as the eight-
eenth century, fashion and style were central to the
emerging gay subculture. This important and fascinating
book transforms our understanding of fashion history
by acknowledging the historic contributions of LGBTQ
people, examining both high fashion and street style as
sites of gay cultural production, and demonstrating the
centrality of gay culture to the creation of modern fashion.
Published to coincide with an exhibition at The Museum

at FIT, this book features contributions by some of
the world’s most acclaimed scholars of gay history and
fashion — including Christopher Breward, Shaun Cole,
Vicki Karaminas, Jonathan D. Katz, Peter McNeil, and
Elizabeth Wilson. They trace the archeology of queer
attire back to the homosexual underworld of eighteenth-
century Europe, explore the context in which designers’
lives and works form part of a broader gay history, and
demonstrate the influence of gay and lesbian subcultural
styles, from Marlene Dietrich’s appropriation of the male
tuxedo (which inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking)
to the erotic iconography of leather. The book is lavishly
illustrated with fashion photographs and archival imagery.
Published in association with The Fashion Institute of Technology,

New York City
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2023 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/queerhistoryotfa0000unse
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NEW YORK
Copyright © 2013 Fashion Institute of Technology New York
All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by
Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without
written permission from the publishers.
Designed by Paul Sloman
Printed in Italy
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A queer history of fashion : from the closet to the catwalk / edited by Valerie Steele ; contributions by
Christopher Breward, Shaun Cole, Vicki Karaminas, Peter McNeil, Elizabeth Wilson.
pages cm.
ISBN 978-0-300-19670-2 (hardback)
1. Fashion design—History. 2. Fashion designers—Biography. 3. Gay men—Biography. 4. Clothing and
dress—Psychological aspects. I. Steele, Valerie.
TT507.Q62 2013
746.9’ 2—DC23
2013016219
CONTENTS
VALERIE STEELE A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION: FROM THE CLOSET TO THE CATWALK
PETER MCNEIL CONSPICUOUS WAIST: QUEER DRESS IN THE “LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY”
CHRISTOPHER BREWARD COUTURE AS QUEER AUTO/ BIOGRAPHY
SHAUN COLE QUEERLY VISIBLE: GAY MEN, DRESS, AND STYLE 1960-2012
ELIZABETH WILSON WHAT DOES A LESBIAN LOOK LIKE?
VICKI KARAMINAS BORN THIS WAY: LESBIAN STYLE SINCE THE EIGHTIES
JONATHAN D KATZ QUEER ACTIVIST FASHION
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Var
ed
et
VAEERIEPS IE ELE
From Cristobal Balenciaga and Christian Dior to Yves Saint Laurent and
Alexander McQueen, many of the greatest fashion designers of the past
century have been gay. Indeed, it 1s widely believed that most male fashion
designers are gay. Is this just a stereotype? Or do gay men really have a
special relationship with fashion? To what extent have lesbians, bisexuals, and
transgender people also made significant contributions to fashion? Do gay
styles set trends that straight people follow? Fashion and style have played an
important role within the LGBTQ (lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer)
community, both pre- and post-Stonewall, and even as early as the eighteenth
century. Yet surprisingly little has been published about high fashion as a site
of gay cultural production. But if we look at the history of fashion through
a queer lens, exploring the aesthetic sensibilities and unconventional dress
choices made by LGBTQ people, we see how central gay culture has been to
the creation of modern fashion.
eee Mgstock, NYC, 1992 It was Fred Dennis, senior curator of costume at The Museum at FIT, who
Photograph by Michael James
came up with the idea of organizing an exhibition about fashion and homo-
A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION / 7

sexuality. I was immediately convinced that this was an extremely important
subject, albeit one that is complicated and controversial. My essay, based on
research for our exhibition, is only a very preliminary outline. However, we
also commissioned essays from some of the world’s most acclaimed scholars
of gay history and style — Christopher Breward, Shaun Cole, Vicki Karaminas,
Jonathan D. Katz, Peter McNeil, and Elizabeth Wilson. They investigate topics
such as the history of gay and lesbian styles, their influence on fashion, and
the context in which designers’ lives and works form part of a broader gay
history. Some members of the LGBTQ community have proudly proclaimed
their significant role in fashion. Writing for The Advocate in 1997, Fred Gross
argued that “The vast numbers of gay men and lesbians working in the 1n-
dustry” provided “compelling proof that fashion owes its very life to the gay
sensibility.’ Yet he also observed that the fashion world remained “strangely
closeted.”' More than a decade later, although many designers are openly gay,
the subject of fashion and homosexuality remains an open secret.We know it,
but we don’t name it — except on the internet where gossip flourishes.
Who cares whether a designer or other fashion professional 1s gay? Today,
at least in much of the world, “discretion” about one’s sexual identity may no
longer derive from a fear of direct homophobic retaliation (“lll be fired”),
but rather from a sense that “It’s nobody’s business, because it 1s irrelevant to
my work.” Even people who are technically “out” may not want to be labeled
as gay or lesbian, because they don’t want their work to be stereotyped — or
their own accomplishments minimized. As the singer k. d. lang put it, “I’m
a lesbian, but my music isn’t lesbian music.”? Within the fashion world, a
number of designers apparently agree with Marc Jacobs, who once said, “I
don’t believe my sexuality has any bearing on how I design clothes.”
But can something as important as one’s sexual identity ever be completely
irrelevant to an individual’s creative work? In their history of homosexuality
in the American theater, Robert Schanke and Kim Marra argue that “‘sexual-
ity permeates people’s beliefs, actions, and social relations.” If sexuality is “‘a
historical force,’ as they suggest, then it 1s “far from irrelevant’; it is, in fact,
entirely legitimate to ask why homosexuals have played such an important
role in fashion. Indeed, not to write the history of gays and lesbians in fashion
“is to be complicit in what has been called ‘inning, the perpetuation of sys-
tematic denials that foster the climate of shame and risk surrounding same-sex

eroticism.”* This would seem to be a compelling reason to explore the subject
of fashion and homosexuality. Furthermore, to echo William Mann’s book
on gays and lesbians in Hollywood, we believe that, by seeing these fashion
“pioneers” not only as designers, fashion professionals, and trendsetters, “but
also as gay men and lesbians,’ we can “cast new light not only on their experi-
ences but also on the very history” of fashion itself.
While planning our exhibition, Fred Dennis and I decided that we would
not “out” living designers, but we believe that it is entirely legitimate to
discuss the sexuality of the deceased, since there is nothing shameful about
variant sexuality. On the contrary, we hope that our exhibition and book will
help foster a climate of inclusion for those who have often been marginalized
as a result of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gendered expression.
In light of the fact that LGBTQ people are still being harassed, arrested, and
murdered in many countries around the world, we believe that it is especially
important now to speak openly about sexuality and to emphasize that gay
rights are human rights.
How do we know who was gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender? Docu-
mentary evidence of sexual acts or desires 1s elusive, although not impossible
to find. There have always been some people who were open about their
sexuality, people who kept diaries or wrote letters, talking about their love
life — or those of their acquaintances. However, “the “burden of proof’
for homosexuality has traditionally been held far higher than that for
heterosexuality.” Like many Hollywood costume designers, Gilbert Adrian
(1903-1959), for example, was overtly gay within his circle, wearing capes
and extravagant clothing, when in 1939, he married the movie star Janet
Gaynor, perhaps as protection against growing homophobia in the studio sys-
tem. Yet, as Mann observes, there are still those who try “to situate ... Adrian
(Adrian!) as heterosexual. (Who’s next, Liberace?)”’” In later decades, ofcourse,
as homosexuality was legalized and became increasingly accepted, more
designers have come out publicly. Biographers and journalists have also
found that individuals’ friends, lovers, and even relatives have been more
willing to speak candidly about previously taboo subjects.
A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk seeks to explore
the “gayness” or “queerness” of fashion by focusing on several related themes.
Firstly, we draw attention to the historic presence of gay men, lesbians,

Leigh Bowery bisexuals, and transgender people in the fashion system, not only as fashion
Photograph by ¢ : p 5 :
Fergus Greer designers, but also as journalists, photographers, hairdressers, make-up artists,
: stylists, retailers, and models. Secondly, we stress the creativity and resistance
to oppression expressed by LGBTQ subcultural and street styles, which have
often transgressed sex and gender roles. These styles demonstrate that it is
not only as fashion professionals that gays, lesbians, and “queers” have influ-
enced the world of fashion and style. Thirdly, by exploring the relationship
between fashion and gay culture, we suggest how dissident ways ofrelating to
fashion as a cultural form have resulted in a gay or queer sensibility that em-
braces both idealizing and transgressive aesthetic styles. Ultimately, we argue
that fashion history cannot truly be understood without taking account of
the creative contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other
“queer” individuals and communities.
We are aware that the word “queer” has often been used in a derogatory
sense. However, in recent years it has increasingly been appropriated by many
LGBTQ people. We chose to use it here because, for many people, “queer”
seems more encompassing than “gay.” We recognize, however, that for many
other people, the word still carries negative connotations. The use in our title
of the expression, “the Closet,” is also problematic, because many LGBTQ
people have been neither “inside” nor “outside” the closet, but have rather re-
vealed or concealed their sexuality, more or less overtly or discreetly, accord-
ing to the situation. They might be “out” to their friends and colleagues, but
“in” to their parents and the state authorities. As Bill Blass wrote in his mem-
oir, “I have lived most of my life in a contradictory position — with one part
of myself safely in the closet and the other out and up to all kinds of things.”®
Nevertheless, “the Closet” is a vivid metaphor to convey how “the his-
tory of oppression, and consequent secrecy, ofdifferently inflected sexualities,
has meant that gay men and lesbians have evolved not only coded clothing
practices by which they might recognize others with a similar sexual orienta-
tion or interest, but also a nuanced vocabulary for reading dress.”° By using
the subtitle “From the Closet to the Catwalk,” we do not mean to imply that
history shows a pattern of steadily increasing sexual “liberation.” It does not.
In many ways, it was easier to be gay in 1925, or even 1900, than in 1950. The
term “Catwalk” refers to recent decades, roughly from 1970 on, when gays
and lesbians were increasingly visible and influential players in fashion. By
A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION 7/7 11

“performing” fashion, often in such a way as to convey “signs of gayness”
to other gays, LGBTQ people, whether fashion professionals or not, have
- been instrumental in creating queer subcultural styles and a queer sensibility
that have profoundly influenced mainstream fashion.We might call this the
subculture-to-mainstream paradigm. However, it is not always easy to tell
where “subculture” ends and mainstream fashion begins, so closely have
they been intertwined and for so long. In reality, all three concepts — closet,
subculture, and catwalk — frequently coexisted, and some of the earliest queer
styles were anything but closeted.
PRETTY GENTLEMEN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:

THE MOLLY, THE MACARONI, AND THE MAN-MILLINER
Same-sex desire and behavior have existed throughout world history — in

ancient Greece and Rome, in the courts and cities of imperial China and Persia,
and among tribal peoples from New Guinea to North America. However,
throughout most of recorded history, people did not think of themselves as
being gay or straight or bisexual; they simply engaged in certain sexual acts. In
many cultures, it was quite common for adult males to penetrate other (usually
younger) males, as well as females. As late as the seventeenth century, the
English Lord Rochester could write libertine poems about having sex with
both his whore and his page.'® As long as people did not perceive themselves
as having a particular sexual identity, they wore the same clothing as everyone
else of their gender, age, and class. The one exception would be for males who
consistently assumed the passive role, who might, in certain cultures, dress as
women.
Historians of sexuality used to believe that a sense of gay identity arose only
late in the nineteenth century, approximately concurrent with the invention
of the word “homosexuality.”
More recently, however, scholars have argued that the first “gay” subcultures
developed in early eighteenth-century Europe, in large cities such as London,
Paris, and Amsterdam. It is undeniably true that sodomite subcultures or
networks existed prior to the eighteenth century. Certain Italian cities were
notorious for homosexuality during the Renaissance, and European courts

also often harbored homosexual coteries, such
as the mignons (favorites) at the court of Henri
Il. Philippe d’Orleans, the younger brother
of Louis XIV, was predominantly homosexual
and an enthusiastic cross-dresser whose noble
ase status protected him from prosecution at a time
when other ““sodomites” faced harsh punish-
ment, including execution.
But during the eighteenth century it seems
that a new sexual era, marked by an emerg-
i ing gender revolution, began — and it 1s for
this reason that we open the exhibition (and
this book) with the eighteenth century. What
was new, argues Randolph Trumbach, was the
emergence around 1700 in northern Europe
of “a minority of adult men whose sexual de-
sires were directed exclusively toward adult
and adolescent males. These men could be
identified by what seemed to their contem-
poraries to be effeminate behavior in speech,
be movement, and dress. They had not, however,
ott entirely transformed themselves into women
but instead combined into a third gender se-
George Townshend, 4th Viscount lected aspects of the behavior of the majority of men and women." As Lady
and 1st Marat
George William Hervey, 2
Mary Wortley Montagu put it, there were three sexes: “men, women and
Bristol, 1751-8, pe Herveys’— a joke that referred to the bisexual Lord John Hervey, an English
© National Portrait Gallery,
London
courtier and writer of the period.”
Evidence of this “gay” subculture can be found in texts, such as the mid-
eighteenth-century attack on the “Fraternity of PRETTY GENTLEMEN” united
by “mutual Love." Three categories of men received particular attention in
the English press. First, and perhaps most important, were the “effeminate
sodomites” of the popular classes, known as “mollies,’ who gathered in inns
and public houses to socialize and cross-dress. At least some of the mollies
wore “gowns, petticoats, head-cloths, fine laced shoes . . . some had riding
hoods; some were dressed like milkmaids, others like shepherdesses with

: is ? i? ye ae :
R oe C7 Lhe (Naegay - Mies :

Ler ,or The Nosegay green hats, waistcoats, and petticoats; and others had their faces patched and
Macaroni. Plate from The
Macaroni and Theatrical Magazine,
painted.”"* Some mollies reportedly engaged in mock marriage ceremonies.
or, Monthly Register of the After the 1726 police raid on Mother Clapp’s molly house, three mollies were
Fashions and Diversions of the
Times, _ondon: John Williams, executed for sodomy. A number of others were put in the pillory, where they
peomany 1773. Courtesy of were violently assaulted.
The Lewis Walpole Library, = As heat 6 oN : :
Yale University Second were the effetely stylish “macaronis,’ whose foppishness called into
question contemporary ideas of masculinity. In the 1760s and 1770s, there
appeared in England numerous caricatures of macaronis, which carried a
range ofsocial and political connotations. Some ofthe individuals caricatured
as macaronis were probably homosexual, others not. However, the reference
to pasta alluded to the stereotype of sodomy in Italy, and many caricatures
emphasized the sexual ambiguity of the macaroni: “Is it a man? ’Tis hard to
say — / A woman then? —A moment pray — / So doubtful is that thing, that no
man / Can say if ’tis a man or woman: / Unknown as yet by sex or feature, /
It moves — a mere amphibious creature.””»
Third, the rise of the “man-milliner” played a significant role in the emerg-
ing gay subculture. Milliners, like couturiers, were then almost always women
(in contrast to tailors who were men). The term “man-milliner” refers to men
in the fashion trades who made, decorated, and/or sold dresses, hats, and other
fashionable items of women’s clothing. According to Trumbach, “Beginning in
the early eighteenth century, man-milliners are described as very likely to be
effeminate sodomites.”*®
2916
Plays and novels of the period implied that the man-
milliner entered the fashion world in part because he wanted to wear women’s
clothes.As Fanny Burney wrote in Evelina (1778),““At the milliners ... we were
more frequently served by men than by women; and such men! So finical, so
affected! They seemed to understand every part of a woman’s dress better than
we do ourselves; and they recommended caps and ribbons with an air of so
much importance, that I wished to ask them how long they had left off wear-
ing them!’”"7 David Garrick’s play Miss in Her Teens (1747) includes a character,
Fribble, a man-milliner, who says, “There is a club of us, all young bachelors .
.who ... invent fashions for ladies, make models of ’em and cut out patterns
on paper.’* This is, perhaps, the beginning of what later became the stereotype
of the gay, male fashion designer.
Of course, not every fop or macaroni was queer, but as soon as a sense of
gay identity began to emerge in public, it was expressed in fashion. A color-
A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION 7 15

Or Peree Betibin, cheap ascoherFolks.
IRs SHOP Fiber an eporpsaied wert Husuderto make thine Eveswitth wersder Stare,
SO
ihboSWave NS Fasc z9 Viste fer APIS
ERLE Awa Soriate, Farthing) averaceSeraach theRevalfare
ful silk suit embroidered with flowers, trimmed with lace, and accessorized
with diamonds, had been considered perfectly masculine until the mid 1700s,
when a plainer, darker style of male attire began to become fashionable. Color,
decoration, and other forms of“excess” in menswear were viewed with in-
creasing suspicion, especially when men of the popular classes imitated aristo-
cratic beaux. The reasons for “the great masculine renunciation” are complex,
and the profound change in men’s clothed appearance was clearly caused in
large part by the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie and the increasing democ-
ratization of western society. But this paradigm shift in male fashion was also
almost certainly influenced by the appearance of“pretty gentlemen,” such as
the molly, the macaroni, and the man-milliner, who de-legitimized what had
previously been considered ideally “masculine” and aristocratic styles, and

which were now beginning to be perceived
as “effeminate.” This would not be the last
time that a gay style transgressed sex and
gender norms, influencing fashion history
in the process.
After about 1770, there also appeared a
“minority of masculinized women who ex-
clusively desired other women.” In con-
trast to the sodomites, who came from all
classes, many of the Sapphists appear to
have been middle or upper class, like the
Ladies of Llandgolen described in Elizabeth
Wilson’s essay (although this class imbal-
ance may also reflect lacunae in the his-
torical record). Predictably, the guardians
of public morality criticized women who
adopted elements of traditionally masculine
dress, but as long as the women appeared
otherwise “respectable,” they were tolerated.
Eighteenth-century literature on lesbianism
tends to treat Sapphism or “tribadism” as an
upper-class vice or titillating behavior oc-
curring in all-female communities, such as
‘A Man Millener,’ detail from harems, convents, or brothels. Lesbian style had as yet little impact on fashion.
Henry Kingsbury, A Man Milliner : . 4 : 4
The Muff Published February But as Peter McNeil will demonstrate in his essay, in the homosexual un-
16, 1787 by S. W. Fores at the
Caricature Warehouse,
derworld of eighteenth-century Paris and London, police records document
No. 3 Piccadilly, London. ~the style of “pederasts” down to their shoelaces, and even certain colors had
Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole ‘
Library, Yale University. 42 deviant charge.
WILDE STYLE: AESTHETES AND DANDIES
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of “sodomy” as a sinful
behavior (potentially punishable by death) gradually gave way to the medico—
legal concept of “homosexuality” or “inversion” as a sexual and gender iden-
e : A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION

/ 17
tity. This resulted both in a new era of repression
marked by the pathologizing of “inverts” and in
the rise of the first homosexual liberation move-
ments. The trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde
in 1895 led to increased public awareness of ho-
mosexuality. Because Wilde was associated with
certain fashions, these, too, came under suspicion.
But long before Wilde made homosexuality no-
torious, both the police and the medical profes-
sion were obsessed with identifying “pederasts.”
Although some observers noted the exis-
tence of “virile” homosexuals, such as Balzac’s
character Vautrin, most descriptions of “peder-
asts’”” emphasized their effeminacy. One of the
most influential studies was Ambroise-Auguste
Tardieu’s Medicolegal Study of Assaults on Decency
(1857), which characterized pederasty in terms of
an effeminate appearance and suspicious inter-
est in fashion: “Curled hair, made-up skin, open
collar, waist tucked in to accentuate the figure;
fingers, ears, chest loaded with jewelry, the whole
body exuding an odor of the most penetrat-
ing perfumes, and, in one hand, a handkerchief,
flowers, or some needlework: such is the strange, revolting, and rightfully Detail of The Judge: A Thing
of Beauty not a Joy forever,
suspect physiognomy that betrays the pederast . . .”?° caricature of Oscar Wilde,
In New York, as in Paris, the most visible type of urban homosexual was _ published in New York, 1883
Private collection. Photo
the effeminate “fairy.” George Chauncey discovered a guidebook published 4,2 3..4joman art Library
in the 1870s which depicted social figures such as the prostitute, the shoeshine
boy, and the “fairy” — the last of whom wore very tight trousers, a short jacket,
and a boldly striped neck tie, as well as curled hair and a funny little hat.
In his pioneering book Gay New York, Chauncy also quoted Ralph Werther,
who explained that a fairy’s clothing was “‘as fancy and flashy as a youth dare
adopt.”As a young person in the 1890s, Werther proclaimed his sexuality by
wearing a “large red neck-bow with fringed ends hanging down over my
lapels.” He also identified several “low class fairies” in a Bowery saloon partly

on the basis of their “hair a la mode de Oscar Wilde (that is, hanging down 1n
ringlets over the ears and collar).’”
Wilde is, of course, a key figure in the history of homosexuality and style.
Over the course of his life, he was perceived both as an aesthete and as a
dandy — two categories of men in the nineteenth century who defined them-
selves by their appearance. Wilde was closely associated with the Aesthetic
movement, which advocated “artistic” styles of clothing for both men and
women. “One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art,” declared
Wilde in 1884 in one ofhis popular lectures on dress.** During his aesthetic
period, and especially during his American tour, Wilde wore his hair long
and adopted velvet coats, eighteenth-century-style knee breeches, long capes,
flowing ties, and unusual boutonnieres — especially lilies, sunflowers, and most
notoriously, green carnations. Green was a color that Wilde associated with
persons “ofa subtle artistic temperament,” and, among nations,“a laxity, if not
a decadence, of morals.”
Even in their heyday, male aesthetes were widely mocked, and Wilde grad-
ually abandoned most elements of aesthetic dress, repositioning himself as
more of a dandy. His wife, Constance, however, continued to wear aesthetic
dress, inspired by Grecian, medieval, or other picturesque historical styles.
They sometimes dressed in complementary outfits. In 1887, for example, at
the Grosvenor Gallery, they were “a harmony in green. The coat of the apos-
tle of culture was of a Lincoln green cloth heavily trimmed with fur, while
Mrs. Oscar had a very pretty and graceful velvet gown of exactly the same
shade of colour.”*4
In contrast to aesthetes, most dandies were not flamboyant in their dress.
On the contrary, the dandy was sometimes characterized as “the black prince
of elegance,” whose aesthetic was one of perfect simplicity. By following the
male sartorial code so precisely, however, the dandy effectively distinguished
himself from everyone else. As one French observer put it, the dandy wore
“written on his forehead — in English — this insolent inscription: What is
there in common between you and me?”*> Dandyism was thus a type of sartorial
conformity with the potential to be profoundly nonconformist — indeed,
proudly to assert elite outsider status.
Although most nineteenth-century dandies (such as George “Beau” Brummell
and Charles Baudelaire) were not homosexual, the literature on dandyism fre-

Social types from New York quently associated dandies and women.As Barbey D’Aurevilly observed, “For
City in the 1870s, including
the “fairy” (upper right and
dandies, as for women, to seem is to be,” (Paraitre, c'est etre, pour les Dandys
detail). Private collection comune pour lestes feremimes. 25 INA oreover, ther
ere were al
also some al
notorious ho-
no
of David Kahn, Executive
Director, The Adirondack
mosexual dandies, such as Count Robert de Montesquiou, who inspired both
Museum —Huysmans’s fictional Duke des Esseintes and Marcel Proust’s Baron de Charlus.
Although de Montesquiou was elegance personified, his interest in dress was
only one manifestation of an aestheticism that dominated his life. It is not clear
if Montesquiou ever really wore “a bouquet of Parma violets at the opening
of his shirt as a. substitute for a tie” (or whether Huysmans made this up), but
he did love flowers, especially hydrangeas, and his neck ties, gloves, and other
haberdashery were the focus of considerable press attention. Descriptions of
his house mention that his dressing room contained glass cases full of art-
fully arranged neck ties.*7 And gossips commented that his longtime compan-
ion, Gabriel Yturri, had been “‘a salesman in the men’s glove department in a

nj Boldini, Count Robert de
quiou, 1897, oil on canvas
5 cm. Musée d'Orsay
Hervé Lewandowski

store near the Madeleine.”** Montesquiou’s taste was so perfect that not only
actresses but also society ladies valued his fashion advice. One press account
describes Sarah Bernhardt wearing “a dress of pale sea-green, a colour as dear
to M. de Montesquiou as to Mlle Abbema.”*”? (Louise Abbema was a painter
who often dressed as a man and was said to have had an affair with Bernhardt.)
There exist two extraordinary portraits of de Montesquiou, one by
Giovanni Boldini, depicting him in a beautiful, gray, three-piece suit with a
heavily starched linen shirt, loosely tied black cravat, and white kidskin gloves,
and carrying a cane with a handle of lapis lazuli or turquoise, the other by
J. A. M. Whistler, showing him in a black evening suit with Madame de
Greffuhl’s chinchilla wrap thrown over one arm. “He wears suits of clothes
of the most delicate hues, lined and faced with silk of the most exquisite co-
lours,” wrote one journalist. “The colour of the clothes is always in keeping
with the general scheme of decoration of the room.”*° He allegedly refused
to visit the painter Giuseppe de Nittis until he had changed into clothing of
dove gray: “Now I have the right nuances for him." Even his obituary noted
that “each fold of his tie too was knowingly adjusted, and the exposed por-
tions of his shirt cuff was calibrated to the millimeter.”
With his portrait of Charlus, Proust suggests that “the intentional and artis-
tic simplicity’? of his clothing could function both to conceal and reveal the
dandy’s sexual identity. By creating a look of irreproachable masculinity, the
dandy’s sober attire protected him from the hostility of ahomophobic society,
while also subtly signaling to other homosexuals that such an impeccable
sense of style was actually a sign of his sexual “deviance.” Proust observes,
however, that some homosexuals, including Charlus in his youth (and also in
his old age) dressed with a startling conspicuousness. So both austere dandy-
ism and conspicuous flamboyance could be read as signs of homosexuality.*#
Nor were dandies always men. The “Sapphic” subculture that emerged in
large cities such as Paris late in the nineteenth century was closely associated
with dandyish menswear styles, especially tailored suits. Of course, tailored suits
and jackets were also worn by conventional women, and some well-known
lesbians, such as Natalie Barney, preferred elegant “feminine” fashions. But be-
cause the tailored suit was obviously based on upper-class men’s attire, it had
a subversive charge when worn by women. The addition of such masculine
accessories as top hats, neck ties, and starched white shirts reinforced this effect.

LESBIAN ELEGANCE AND THE GAY WORLD
By the 1880s, lesbians in Paris were often depicted as wearing mannish, dark,
woollen jackets and white shirts with starched collars and bow ties. Among
the lesbian community were actresses and courtesans, as well as business-
women and streetwalkers. Some wore men’s clothes, others the most elegant
female fashions. Naturalist literature also depicted characters like Chochotte,
“a leather-jacketed lesbian hoodlum.”*’ But the predominant style among
lesbians derived from elite male tailoring. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec often
painted lesbians, and in La Loge (1896) he portrays Armande Brazier, owner ofa
lesbian brasserie, wearing a masculine coat and tie, sitting in a theater box with
the elegant bisexual actress, dancer, and courtesan, Emillienne d’Alencon.*®
Emillienne d’Alencon had affairs with La Goulou and Renée Vivien,
among others, but she is known to fashion historians as the official mis-
tress of Etienne Balsan, at a time when his secondary mistress was the young
Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883-1971). Whether or not Chanel herself ever
had affairs with women, it was certainly common in her milieu — and so was
her habit of wearing masculine-inspired clothes. Many people believed that
Chanel had a love affair with her closest female friend, Misia Sert. According
to Sert’s biographers, “Coco and Misia were seen together so constantly and
their relations were so highly charged that it was said they were lovers . . .
Certainly they were gossiped about.To this day, many of their friends insist
that they were sexually involved, while others, with equal conviction, swear
that they were not.”3”7 Chanel has also been linked to other women.
However, it is clear from her biography that Chanel’s most important
relationships were with men — and her androgynous style was probably
primarily an expression of her identification with powerful males. Speaking
of herself in the third person, Chanel once said, “All her life, all she did
was change men’s clothing into women’s: jackets, hair, neck ties . . . Chanel
always dressed like the strong independent male she had dreamed ofbeing.”*
Certainly, Chanel has entered fashion history as, in effect, the first female
dandy. Or, as Rhonda K. Garelick puts it, Chanel’s style “usher[ed] women
into dandyism’s all-male inner circle_’2?
It is striking, though, to see how the tailored clothes of upper-class men
were also experienced as liberation for many lesbians, including Radclyffe

Cleeeantets
Teuay

Hall, Romaine Brooks, Una Lady Troubridge, and the Marquise de Belboeuf.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the English artist Hannah Gluckstein, known i
as Gluck, dressed as a man: shoes from John Lobb, shirts from Jermyn Street, — Vontine 193
men’s trousers, neck ties, jackets, coats, hats, even her hair was cut at Truefit —
gentlemen’s haircutters on Bond Street. Occasionally, her lover, Constance
Spry, coaxed her into androgynous fashions by designers such as Chanel’s rival, gpssc5 le Menten
Elsa Schiaparelli (1890-1973), who made her a pair of pleated black, chiffon
coulottes.*°
It is not simply that many lesbians had a “mannish” style of self-pre-
sentation. In the 1920s, fashion was radically transformed by the so-called — Beliot. ©AMN-Grand Pala
garconne [boyish] look, which was characterized by an absence of feminine

curves and very short hairstyles.The term itself seems to have derived from
Victor Margueritte’s notorious novel La Garconne (1922), whose protago-
nist engages in promiscuous sex with numerous partners, including another
woman. Because it seemed to blur traditional boundaries between men and

women, the new style was deeply controversial.
Conservative observers were horrified at the
sight of young women “without breasts, with-
out hips,’ no longer wearing corsets, hemlines
raised to the knee, their hair cropped, smoking
and drinking like men.*!
Although the gargonne style was worn by in-
numerable fashionable heterosexual women, it
was also associated with lesbianism, which was
increasingly visible in the period after World War
I, when France had lost so many young men.
Brassai’s photographs of women at the lesbian
club Le Monocle, show many women in vari-
ants of the garconne look, as does J. H. Lartigue’s
photograph, Les garconnes, whose central figure
is especially masculine in her self-presentation.
A contemporary review, Fantasio, describes
another lesbian club, Fétiche, in Montmartre,
where “many ladies willingly dress in the style of
gentlemen. The patronne herself, in order to give
the correct tone, wears a man’s jacket above her
skirt, a shirt with masculine cuffs and collar, and
a neck tie, all well arranged. Short hair — not 4 la
garconne [in the style of a boyish girl], but really a
la garcon [in the style of the female boy].
The painter Héléne Azénor remembers “the
lesbian elegance” of the 1930s.““We wore tailored
suits,’ and “our hairstyles, which had something
indefinable for others were, among us, a sign of
recognition.” As these examples demonstrate,
it is not only as fashion professionals that gay men
and lesbians have influenced the world ofstyle.
Sexually variant people have often been fashion
trendsetters. Marlene Dietrich, for example, was
a bisexual woman whose penchant for wearing

trousers (and complete male ensembles) both on and off-screen had a pro-
found influence on women’s fashion — not only in the 1930s, but also later,
when her look inspired designers such as Yves Saint Laurent. It was said that
Dietrich was “the best-dressed man in Hollywood.’
Not all lesbians adopted mannish tailoring, at least not all the time. The
writer Mercedes d’Acosta, for example, who boasted about having slept with
both Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, was known for wearing man-style
tailored suits, but she also wore feminine gowns by designers like Mariano
Fortuny. Brassai’s photographs of lesbian clubs often show couples in which
one woman wears tailored clothing and the other a feminine dress. This pair-
ing of “butch-femme” has played an important role in the history oflesbian
style, a subject explored further in Elizabeth Wilson’s essay.
In contrast to Chanel, who created clothes for the modern female dan-
dy, Madeleine Vionnet (1876-1975) created bias-cut, body-worshipping
gowns for other women — tall, slender women, whose beauty appealed to
her. Although she was married twice (to men), in her old age Vionnet told
the journalist Bruce Chatwin how the anatomy of beautiful women had
inspired her. Her Cuban clients “moved well,” she recalled, and the Argentine
women had “undulating buttocks, like carnivores.” At this point, she leaned
back and sighed: “They always said I loved women too much!’ If Vionnet
was bisexual (and one remark, of course, is not proof), this may be relevant to
fashion history, because she designed sexually alluring clothes that were also
physically liberating.
Early in the twentieth century, gay men and lesbians were quite visible in
large cities, such as Berlin, London, New York, and Paris. In New York, many
gay men “boldly announced their presence by wearing red ties, bleached
hair, and the era’s other insignia of homosexuality.’#° Paul Cadmus’s painting
The Fleet’s In (1934), for example, depicts a gay man with bleached blond
hair and a red neck tie. Other distinctively homosexual styles in New York
included “green suits” (or at least a preference for the color green), suede
shoes, “flowered bathing trunks, and half-length flaring top-coats,” as well as
plucked eyebrows and the use of cosmetics.” In London, Liberty ties, suede
shoes, and camel-hair coats were gay signifiers.**
In his satirical novel of the 1920s, Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh describes how
“Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eyelashes in the din-

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FACING ing room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked
Marlene Dietrich in the film
Morocco, 1930. Phot by
to leave”’#? Waugh based Miles in part on Stephen Tennant, a British aristo-
Eugene Robert Rict crat known for his extravagant tastes. On a trip to Palermo, Tennant wore
Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
clothes made for him by his friend, the American designer Charles James
ABOVE LEFT (1906-1978), including “the stunningest fancy-dress — black trousers that seem
Coco Chanel. Photo by Buffotot
Paris. From Kathe von Pore da, glued to every fissure & ripple of thigh and bottom & an ineffably limp shirt
Mode in Paris, 1932 of creamy satin like ultra, ultra Devonshire cream mixed with mother-of-
ABOVE RIGHT pearl!”° On another occasion, in the 1930s, Tennant visited James’s studio in
Model wearing gown by Madeline
London, where “they tried on some of the couturier’s creations [for women].”
Vionnet, 1930s. From Ka on
Porada, Mode in Paris, 19° As Tennant’s biographer, Philip Hoare, notes: “The idea of these two in haute
couture ... must rank high in images of between-the-wars camp.”

Meanwhile, in 1920s Paris, a guidebook warned (or promised) that “along —°2u) Cadmu The Fleet's In
the Champs-Elysées,’ one might come across young men “‘squeezed into a (detail), E
19 Courtesy Naval
tege.Com aaa
tightly-cinched jacket, outrageously emphasizing the shape of the buttocks, —Weshinaten oc
with ridiculously waved hair.’** The actor Jean Weber recalled that in the years
between the wars, “Male elegance was very ambiguous.” Gay and straight
men often looked very similar, and a cultivated gay man might frequent artis-
tic and society circles with “equal facility.’ According to the novelist André
du Dognon, even extreme styles were tolerated: “Everyone wore make-up ...
Marshall Lyautey went out in the most extraordinary outfits. In fact, the great

lords of inversion didn’t hide themselves at all ... I used to come home at
three in the morning in the most unimaginable outfits, with bracelets, neck-
laces.” In particular, he recalled the annual drag ball at Magic City, which “was
fantastic, because all the tantes, who, during the day were very conventional,
came out for this occasion dressed as duchesses.”*
Historically, both men and women have cross-dressed for a variety of reasons,
ranging from the practical (women had greater freedom when dressed as men)
to the erotic. Cross-dressing is not necessarily a sign of homosexuality, but there
have been many historical and literary examples of cross-dressing individuals
who were gay or lesbian. The prevalence of drag balls is one manifestation of
this, along with the fame of certain cross-dressing performers, such as Barbette,
EstariOh 1020s Paris:
Yet even in this relatively tolerant era, social prejudice and discriminatory
laws often forced gays and lesbians to keep quiet about their sexuality. Dorothy
Todd, editor of British Vogue, was a lesbian who flourished in the relatively
gay-friendly fashion world. But when she was fired in 1926, Condé Nast
threatened to expose her “morals,” if she sued for breach of contract. Todd
backed down, but several days later her lover, the fashion writer Madge Garland,
was also fired.** Although there were no laws against lesbianism like those that
criminalized gay men, the threat of public exposure remained terrifying.
Many gay men and lesbians tried to protect themselves by adopting
conventional modes of self-presentation. The writer and actor Noel Coward,
for example, was known to be gay within the trans-Atlantic queer community,
but he maintained a rigorously masculine appearance. When they first met,
Coward harshly criticized the fashion photographer Cecil Beaton for looking
and sounding too gay, accusing him of “flamboyant” gestures, an “undulating”
walk, and “conspicuously exaggerated” clothes. Later Coward admitted that
he had been “absolutely beastly,’ but he insisted, “Let’s hope you’ve learnt a
lesson. It is important not to let the public have a loophole to lampoon you
... It’s hard, I know. One would like to indulge one’s own taste. I myself
dearly love a good match, yet I know it is overdoing it to wear tie, socks, and
handkerchief of the same colour. I take ruthless stock of myself in the mirror
before going out.A polo jumper or unfortunate tie exposes one to danger.”*®
Coward was a fashion icon to both gays and straights in the 1930s. Although
aspects of his appearance, such as his famous dressing gown or his dinner

jacket, may have sent coded messages to other gays, his look was unreadable
to most heterosexuals.
THE RISE OF THE GAY MALE DESIGNER
“Hairstyles and dress constitute one of the most continual preoccupations of

pederasts,” wrote Ambroise-Auguste Tardieu in 1857.57 As a gay male culture
developed in Europe and America over the course of the nineteenth century,
it acquired, as one ofits defining characteristics, an atypical interest in fashion.
To what extent this manifested itself in gay participation in the emerging
fashion industry is still unknown. Until the appearance of the great male
couturier Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895), most dressmakers were
women. But even by the late eighteenth century, the “man-milliner” was
associated with the emerging gay subculture, and in the mid-nineteenth
century, Tardieu argued that tailors were among the professions in which
pederasts were conspicuous.** Gay or bisexual men may have played other
roles in fashion, ranging from the humble role of shop clerk to the profession
of dessinateur industriel (industrial designer), who was responsible for creating
fashion designs for department stores, manufacturers, and the burgeoning
fashion press. The most famous industrial designers were male, but we have
no information on their sexual orientation.
In Napoleonic France, Louis Hippolyte Leroy, a former hairdresser,
became famous as the creator ofladies’ dresses for clients such as the Empress
Josephine. “Millinery and dressmaking were always women’s occupations,”
observed the Almanach de Mode in 1814. “When one sees how men have
invaded the feminine domain this confusion of taste makes one wonder
whether nature has not made some sort of mistake in them.’®° This reference
to a “mistake” in “nature” does not necessarily imply homosexuality, of
course. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, many journalists
were complaining about the “bearded couturiers” or “bearded milliners” who
dressed fashionable women.”
There is no evidence that Charles Frederick Worth was gay or bisexual,
and the fact that he was married and had two sons is not necessarily evi-
dence to the contrary, since Oscar Wilde was also married with two sons.

Gertrude Lawrence and Noel
Coward in the play, Tonight at
8.30, 1936. Photograph
© Bettmann/CORBIS
Many predominantly homosexual men were married (sometimes to lesbians)

and some had children. Harold Nicolson, a homosexual man married to a
lesbian, implied in a letter to his wife that he had an affair with his “funny
new friend,’ the couturier Edward Molyneux (1891-1974), the creator of
discreetly elegant fashions. Although Molyneux was briefly married in 1923,
he is characterized as gay in memozrs published later.”
Certain professions — such as fashion design, fashion photography, hair-
dressing, the performing arts, and costume design for film and theater — have
historically provided a relatively tolerant haven for gays, lesbians, and bisexu-
als. Indeed, there was “a highly interconnected transatlantic web” of gay men
(and some women) in various “artistic” fields.°? Molyneux, for example,
designed costumes for many of Noel Coward’s productions, and Cecil Beaton
designed film costumes, as well as photographing fashion. Norman Norell
(1900-1972) worked as a costume designer for Paramount Pictures before
moving into fashion design in 1928, working initially for Hattie Carnegie.

‘tie
“Everybody knew [that he was gay], but
Norman would never admit it,’ recalls the il-
lustrator Hilary Knight.** Norman Hartnell
(1901-1979) was known for a flashy and
glamorous style that sometimes approached
drag-queen-camp — yet he became dress-
maker to the British Royal Family in 1938.
In business since the 1920s, Hartnell later
created the wedding dresses of the prin-
cesses Elizabeth and Margaret, designed the
Coronation gowns in 1953, and in 1977 he
was knighted.®
Cristobal Balenciaga (1895-1972) and
Christian Dior (1905—57) were two of the
greatest designers of the twentieth century.
Although they were not widely known to
be gay during their lifetime, others in the
fashion world, such as Chanel, were cer-
tainly aware of their sexual orientation.
Although they are often thought of as post-
war designers, both men were active in the
world of Paris fashion from the 1930s on.
Until recently, almost nothing was known
about Balenciaga’s personal life, but 1t now
FACING appears that Wladzio Jaworowski d’Attainville was his companion of twenty
Pierre Balmain, Jean Cocteau, : : : : ae :
Christian
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years — from 1928 until he died in 1948 at the age of forty-nine. The two men
for LAigle 2 Deu 1947 lived and worked together in both Spain and France. According to Balenciaga’s
Photo © 1991 J F 26 eae : : = : Dee
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NYC. Cour biographer
te) Mary) Blume, ‘“Wladzio joined Balenciaga
(oy and Balenciaga’s
c sister
and brother in the Spanish company, designed witty hats, and smoothly made
contacts.’°°
In light of Balenciaga’s devout Catholicism and the conservatism of
Spanish society, this relationship confounds stereotypes.
The son of the Polish-
born Ladislas Jaworowski and Marie Helene d’Attainville, a distinguished
French aristocrat, Wladzio apparently had exquisite taste and manners.”
His “excellent social connections” were especially helpful after Balenciaga

opened his couture house in Paris in 1937.”
When Wladzio died, Balenciaga was in such
despair that he nearly entered a monastery.
But friends found him a new companion,
the twenty-four-year-old Ramon Esparza,
who worked with Balenciaga in his atelier,
making hats.
Born into an upper-middle-class French
family, Dior was designing and making fash-
ions from early childhood. By the early 1920s,
he was living in Paris, where he had a cir-
cle of artistic and musical friends, many of
whom were gay. Although his friends were
aware that he was attracted to men, Dior kept
his homosexuality a secret from his parents.
As Suzanne Lemoine recalled, “He knew he
would have upset his mother terribly.’ Dior
had always enjoyed making fancy-dress cos-
tumes, and in 1934 he decided to try selling
his fashion sketches. Soon, his designs were
being purchased by many of the top couture
houses. Then he began working as a design-
er, first for Robert Piguet, and later for Lucien Lelong, where he became Christian Dior, cacktail ensemble
5 3 , F ; . a 6 é in aubergine silk faille, 1953-1954,
friends with Pierre Balmain. By 1938, Dior was sharing his life with Jacques 2
Homberg, who was a decade younger than the shy and pudgy Dior. Little is
known about Homberg except that he was tall, slim, and well bred.” “Dior
had always been discreet about his liaison with Jacques Homberg, who was
to remain his real companion,’ writes his biographer Marie-France Pochna.
But he also engaged in “dalliances” with other young men, such as Pierre
Perrotino, who was hired in 1947 as his driver.”
The Anglo-American couturier Charles James was quite open about
his homosexuality. “James was gay from birth, I think,” says Hilary Knight.
“He was very sexy. He talked about sex all the time.’7} Expelled from Harrow
for a “sexual escapade,” he established himself first in Chicago as a milliner
and then, by 1928, as a fashion designer in New York.” One of the most

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brilliant designers of the twentieth century,
James was also a difficult personality with a
troubled career. At one point, he married and
had children, but then separated and returned
to New York City alone. “In the late 1940s
there were many gay bars in New York,’ re-
calls Knight. Among the most popular was
The Blue Parrot, and one evening there, he
and John Moore (Norman Norell’s longtime
partner) met James’s assistant, Miguel Ferrera,
who “invited us back to James’s studio, where
he was finishing up two evening coats for a
356
client. He suggested we try them on... *”
Knight has commemorated the event in an
illustration especially made for this book.
Meanwhile, Dior’s friend Pierre Balmain
(1914-1982) opened his own couture house
in 1945, having previously worked for Edward
Molyneux from 1934 to 1939. Balmain’s long-
time companion was the Danish-born design-
er Erik Mortensen. Gertrude Stein attended
Balmain’s fashion shows and wore his clothes.
Both Dior and Balmain were close friends
with such gay artists as Christian Berard and
Jean Cocteau, who often collaborated on fash-
ion and theatrical costumes. It has been said
that Jacques Fath (1912-1954) was also gay
or bisexual, although he married Genevieve
Boucher de la Bruyere, a former model who
FACING had been a secretary to Chanel.
cde In 1947, Dior launched the New Look, an
ary Knight ultra-feminine style, characterized by volup-
ABOVE tuous curves and longer hemlines. The first
by Edward collection for his own couture house, it har-
1930s. From Kathe
BeReae) Meceunieane lege kened back to the glamorous femininity of

the Belle Epoch, the era of Dior’s childhood. The sight of women in Dior’s
New Look gowns acted on Chanel “as a red flag on a bull,” recalled the gay
filmmaker Franco Zefferelli. He describes Chanel hissing at girls: “Look at
them. Fools, dressed by queens living out their fantasies. They dream of being
women so they make real women look like transvestites .. . they can barely
walk. I made clothes for the new woman. She could move and live naturally
in my clothes. Now look at what those creatures have done.They don’t know
women, they’ve never had a woman.””°
Chanel had closed her fashion house in 1939 and blamed the initial
failure of her 1954 comeback on journalists who were “under the sway of
the little queers.” Of Dior’s New Look, she said: “Was he mad, this man?
Was he making fun of women? How, dressed in that thing, could they come
and go, live, or anything? And that other fellow with his Velazquez style!”’””
She referred, of course, to the Spanish-born Crist6bal Balenciaga. “Fashion
is now in the hands of American Seventh Avenue and the pederasts,” Chanel
tactlessly informed Cecil Beaton.”
Chanel’s homophobic diatribes were echoed in the work of the Freudian
psychiatrist Edmund Bergler, whose book Fashion and the Unconscious,
published in 1953, argued that gay, male fashion designers were misogynistic,
and women were foolish to allow themselves to be “dressed by their bitterest
enemies.” According to Bergler, “it is common knowledge that male
homosexuals in extraordinary numbers are involved in fashion-creation.”
This was a problem, he argued, because “every homosexual” has an extreme
unconscious “hatred” and “fear” of women.As a result, feminine fashion was
“cruel,” “uncomfortable,” and “constrictive.”
The “czars of fashion-creation”
were “responsible” for many of “the dress absurdities ofthe last half century.”
Bergler may have been correct in his estimation that there were “‘extraor-
dinary numbers” of gay male designers in the early 1950s. If so, there were
probably quite a few gay designers in the previous decades, as well. But they
could not have been “responsible” for fifty years of “dress absurdities”— if only
because the fashion world of the 1920s and 1930s had actually been dom-
inated by women — Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet, Jeanne Lanvin, Alix
(Madame Grés), Augusta Bernard, Louise Boulanger, and Elsa Schiaparelli.
At that time, Chanel’s hostility had been directed primarily toward her
female rivals, and she tended to ignore male designers, whether gay (like

Molyneux and Hartnell) or straight (like Patou and probably Lelong), who, in
any case, were also creating soft, physically liberating styles.
After World War II, the structure of the fashion business changed, and men
became increasingly visible as designers. However, there is no evidence that
male designers’ postwar fashions were anymore uncomfortable than those cre-
ated by the majority of female designers of the 1950s. Dior featured cinched
waists, but so did such designers as Anne Fogarty (1919-1980), the author of
the book Wife Dressing. In the era of the feminine mystique, women’s clothes,
like women’s roles in society, were increasingly restrictive. Yet Balenciaga
pioneered very freeing clothes, like the sack dress. Thus, quite apart from
Bergler’s hate-filled psychologizing, his theory 1s disproved simply on the basis
of fashion history.
But such attitudes as Bergler’s created a profoundly hostile environment
for young LGBTQ people. From a very young age, Yves Saint Laurent (1936—
2008), born in Oran, Algeria, was clearly gay. “I wasn’t like the other boys,”
he recalled much later. “I didn’t fit in, no doubt because I was homosexual.”
He was “mocked, intimidated and beaten” by his classmates, whose savage
bullying made him feel sick with fear every morning, and he dreamed of
becoming famous as a way of getting back at them.*° “T lived a double life,”
he recalled. “On one side, the joyfulness of the family home and the world
that I created with my drawings, costumes and theater. On the other, the
calvary of Catholic school, where I was ostracized." French colonial society
was macho and homophobic, but all around him in Algeria were young Arabs
willing to have sex with a well-to-do French boy. But that type of sex was
secretive and often anonymous. “I was ashamed,” Saint Laurent told a French
journalist, Lawrence Benaim. “Everything was poisoned by fear and anxiety.
A terrible fear that remained with me for a long time. To be a homosexual in
Oran was like being a murderer.’ 9982 Fortunately, he won a prestigious fashion
competition and moved to Paris. When Dior died suddenly in 1957, his
assistant, the twenty-one-year-old Saint Laurent, took over artistic direction
of the couture house.
A year later, in 1958, the young designer met Pierre Bergé, and they fell in
love. Saint Laurent gradually came to accept his sexuality, in part, no doubt,
because of his lover’s support. “I never came out of the closet, because I was
never in the closet,’ recalled Bergé.“I had the good fortune to grow up in an

open-minded family ... For me, being gay is natural.’ Looking back in 1995
on their life together, Bergé told Out magazine: “It’s easy to be [openly] gay
when your name is Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé, or Andy Warhol, but
it’s very difficult when your name is Mr. Smith and you live in a little town
or work in a hostile environment. So those who have power must [be open
about] their homosexuality and do everything they can so that it will be
considered just like being left-handed or right-handed.’ Freedom is necessary
to nourish creativity, he added, and fashion “‘is a very gay field. It’s hard to
think of fashion that’s not made by gays or by women.”®
BEFORE AND AFTER STONEWALL
After the relative tolerance of the early twentieth century (and for many
gays, the camaraderie of the wartime experience), the postwar period was
characterized by a savage reaction, which has been called “the 1950s Kultur-
kampf, or state-sponsored culture war, against homosexuals and other
gender-benders.”** In the United States, a new discourse of sexual “devi-
ance’ contributed to a homosexual panic comparable to the anti-communist
hysteria of the era. Anti-homosexual harassment and arrests skyrocketed, as
“unprecedented numbers of gay people” were arrested for consensual same-
sex intimacy, “which was illegal in every state during this period?’ In other
countries also, the mood became increasingly punitive. In 1953, more than
half a century since the Oscar Wilde trials, “the Montague trial” sent shock
waves through English society.
During the postwar period, many homosexuals became, in effect, “invisible
men” (to use Shaun Cole’s phrase). Because they experienced a “very real fear
of exposure .. . and arrest,” gay men tended to wear conventional masculine
styles, trying to “look like everyone else,” with only the most subtle signifiers of
gay identity, such as suede shoes.*°“ 8666 When I was growing up in 1950s England...
homosexuals were shamed publicly and imprisoned,” recalled the actor Ian
McKellen.*”
Although lesbianism was not actually illegal in most countries, lesbi-
ans still faced severe social disapproval. Whereas upper-class lesbians of the
early twentieth century had flaunted their mannish apparel, by the 1950s

most middle-class lesbians dressed to “pass” in a
vaguely androgynous style. The butch-femme
code of dress was primarily found among
working-class lesbians. As Elizabeth Wilson
points out, “the style du jour for most lesbi-
ans then would have been ... discretion and
invisibility.”
Even in the 1950s, however, there were
signs of what would later blossom as the 1960s
“Peacock Revolution” in menswear — a revo-
lution that involved a number of gay men. In
England, gay men helped pioneer the dandy-
ish New Edwardian style. Later, the “Italian
look” with its tight, brightly colored casual
clothing became popular.** Vince Man’s Shop
in Soho, notorious for its homoerotic adver-
tising brochures and window displays, was
founded by Bill Green, a former “physique”
photographer. Vince specialized in skin-tight
trousers and other body-conscious, sometimes
camp designs, such as leather posing pouches.
Vince’s core clientele was gay, but it spawned
a host of other male boutiques, which increas-
ingly catered to a more diverse audience.
John Stephen, later known as the King of
Carnaby Street, worked briefly at Vince be-
Three-piece Neo Edwardian suit, fore setting up his own store in 1956. Stephen would play an important role
originally worn by Bunny Rogers
and now in the collection of _
in bringing a “queer” look to a heterosexual market with the rise of mod
Hamish Bowles. Photograph fashion. The tailor Tommy Nutter was also influential in introducing greater
The Museum at FIT
color into formal menswear. “Back in the 1960s, in London, there was a more
specifically gay camp flamboyant aesthetic: art nouveau and silk foulards,” re-
calls the author and window-dresser Simon Doonan. * After mod style, the
hippy countercultural movement further blurred the lines between gay and
straight people. Colorful, decorative clothes (and long hair) were increasingly
sported by men of all sexual persuasions, while both men and women dressed

androgynously in blue jeans and tee-shirts. Some also adopted nonwestern
“unisex” styles such as caftans.
The Peacock Revolution occurred within the context of profound social
and cultural change. Demonstrations and political lobbying eventually began
to result in legal changes in the civil rights of gay people. In 1967 in Great
Britain, the Sexual Offenses Act decriminalized sex between consenting males
over twenty-one 1n private. The anti-homosexual witch-hunts of the postwar
era had also inspired the formation of homophile organizations in the United
States. One of them, the Mattachine Society, intersects with the history of
fashion, since 1t was founded in Los Angeles in 1950 by the communist Harry
Hay and the future fashion designer Rudi Gernreich (1922-1985).
On their first date, Hay showed Gernreich his manifesto, calling for a secret
homosexual liberation group. According to Hay, after finishing it, Gernreich
said, “This is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever read, and I’m with you one
hundred percent.”A year later, Gernreich flew east for a job on 7th Avenue.
Although Hay tried to reassure him that his fellow designers were “all gay,”
Gernreich replied, “They're all gay. And their employers and the people who
put the money up have no idea and must not find out.” Terrified that he
would be exposed and his career ruined, possibly that he would even be de-
ported, Gernreich resigned from the Mattachine Society in 1953, and came
out publicly only just before his death.”
But Hay always believed that Gernreich’s sexual identity and his political
thinking influenced his designs: “As a gay man, he thought of women as free
agents — not sex objects. Their clothes needed to enhance their freedom, on
their terms.” Gernreich was especially interested in the possibilities of “unisex”
fashions and “the liberation of the body,’ which he believed would “cure our
society of its sex hang-up.’ Looking back in 2000, his friend the artist Don
Bachardy said, “Talking about the freedom of his designs, I would suggest
that for a homosexual man in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, freedom would
be a very real consideration, because you would have certainly experienced
all kinds of restrictions of freedom ...So that freedom would have been a
concept that would appeal to him for both sexes.”
In New York, the Stonewall Riots took place in the early morning hours
of June 28, 1969, when a police raid at a bar triggered a violent reaction from
LGBTQ patrons and bystanders, especially the much put-upon drag queens.

Exactly one year later, the first gay pride parades took place in New York,
Los Angeles, and Chicago. As LGBTQ people increasingly asserted their
rights, variant sexualities became more accepted in the 1970s. More people
lived openly gay lives, and fashion reflected this.
Pre-Stonewall, the most visible styles of homosexuality had been, in
varying degrees, elegant and effeminate, whether manifested as upper-class
elegance, as camp (the stylization ofstereotypical femininity), or as drag. There
had always also been masculine queers, and the “butch” was much admired,
although often associated with “trade.” Post-Stonewall, the “Clone” emerged
to symbolize modern, “macho” homosexuality. Rejecting “countercultural
androgyny,’ and modeling themselves instead on an idealized image of
working-class masculinity, a new generation of gay men embraced butch
style, “modifying it into a more stylized uniform.” Newly “gym-toned”
bodies were clad in “blue-collar garb — flannel shirts over muscle tee-shirts,
Levis so1s over work boots, bomber jackets over hooded sweatshirts.’?? Many
Clones wore leather jackets, but some adopted a complete leatherman” look
and lifestyle. In the United States, some gay men also adopted an elaborate
sexual code involving colored handkerchiefs and keys.
Lesbian style also evolved in the 1970s in the era of “women’s liberation”
and “‘gay liberation.” Some middle-class lesbians adopted the classic “butch”
and “femme” styles of the 1950s. However, other lesbians rejected butch—
femme as an imitation of traditional masculine-feminine roles, choosing in-
stead an androgynous “‘anti-fashion” style. This was predominantly masculine
in its components — jeans or overalls, flannel shirts, Birkenstocks, “newsboy”
caps — and radically feminist 1n its rejection of cosmetics, shaved legs, and
other capitulations to capitalism and patriarchy. Since “androgyny” dominated
female fashion in the 1970s, the basic components oflesbian style were not
dissimilar to mainstream fashion, although the lesbian style of presentation
was often visibly distinctive. In the 1980s and 1990s, lesbian style diversified
under the impact of subcultural styles, such as punk, and evolving discourses
within the lesbian community, which began to expose the constructedness
of the “natural” look. Younger lesbians and lesbians of color increasingly pro-
claimed a range of sexual styles.
The appearance of the so-called “lipstick lesbian” was controversial at first,
but it signaled a willingness to go beyond the old butch—femme or radical

feminist styles. ““Lesbian chic” even became a
popular phrase early in the twenty-first cen-
tury, although some women complained that
only a certain type of young, slim, slightly
butch lesbian was acceptable to mainstream
society. Yet certain “high fashion dykes” pro-
claimed, “We are grrls, we are bois, we are
young women with a taste for rock n’ roll, a
penchant for sex appeal and an undying love
for Alexander McQueen, may he rest in peace
... We're here, we’re queer, and their defini-
tions of style were originally ours.”°* Elizabeth
Wilson and Vicki Karaminas explore the his-
tory oflesbian style in their respective essays
in this book.
Popular music in the post-Stonewall era
has repeatedly reflected the influence of gay
styles, such as disco, glam rock, and punk.
The gay aspects of disco and glam rock have long been recognized, but it Gay Pride “kings and Queens 3,
is less well known that punk also had a significant gay component. From =
its beginnings, however, punk’s deliberate association with “deviant” sexuali-
ties made it relevant to many LGBTQ youth. “Themes of sexual ambigu-
ity and gender confusion were explored by members of both sexes through
their body adornment, and the asexual nature of much of punk style further
upset conventional ideas about the display of masculinity and femininity.’
Simon Doonan, for example, bought and wore a punk ensemble by Vivienne
Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, consisting of a plaid kilt over matching
leggings, accessorized with a punk tee-shirt and Doc Marten boots.
“Homosexuality played a big part in the early punk ideology,” says Karlo
Steel, an African—American man who works in the retail business.“ Westwood’s
store SEX was based on the idea of taking taboos out of the closet and onto
the street. The male shop assistant at SEX was openly queer. Early tee-shirts
included the two cowboys and the nude black basketball player — people were
arrested for wearing these clothes. Early followers of this scene included the
Bromley contingent, several of whom were gay or bi. They tried to look as

extreme as possible, wearing fetish on their
sleeve, and all of them worshipped Bowie.
They went to clubs like Louise, a lesbian dive
bar. By the time punk was defined, in about
1976, it had become a uniform; everyone was
Wearing it, not just queers and art students.
By 1977, punk had become thuggish and
mainstream — so the queers moved out. They
moved into New Wave or Gothic Punk.’%
By the 1980s, gay and lesbian punk had
evolved into Queercore music with bands
like Pansy Division.%”
Punk was not the only way that young peo-
ple used fashion and style to assert their indi-
viduality — including their sexual orientation.
“As an adolescent, Idreaded my family’s judg-
ment, and clothes gave me an indirect way of
affirming my homosexuality,” recalls Xavier
Vivienne Westwood, printed light Chaumette, a fashion historian and educator born in Bordeaux in 1960.
grey cotton tee-shirt, 1999
The Museum at FIT 2001.
44.4 “I added my personal touch to the dandy allure of my literary heroes, like
,
Proust and Pierre Loti. Arriving in Paris in 1980, I asserted my own look
Photograph © The Museum st Fit. by discovering Comme des Gar¢ons, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Paul Smith, and, of
course, Dries Van Noten, for whom I had a true passion. I mixed their roman-
tic and poetic styles to affirm my singularity.”
In 1981, AIDS (Acquired Immune De-ficiency Syndrome) had been iden-
tified as a disease that could be communicated sexually, as well as through the
exchange of blood. From the beginning, it was often described as the “gay
plague” or the “gay cancer.” The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s devastated
the queer community and triggered a new wave of prejudice against homo-
sexuals. The conservative pundit William Buckley argued that gays should
be tattooed and put in concentration camps. Religious zealots claimed that
AIDS was God’s punishment for the “sin” of homosexuality.
AIDS also devastated the fashion world. Among those who died of AIDS
were many gay or bisexual fashion designers, including Perry Ellis, Angel
Estrada, Halston, Bill Robinson, Isaia Rankin, and Willie Smith, as well as

the fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez and the make-up artists Kevin Aucoin
and Way Bandy. Mary McFadden told John Fairchild, “This AIDS thing is
a scourge. People are dying like flies. I’ve lost two assistants. The other day
I went to yet another funeral, and all the boys were there. When they kissed
me, I turned my cheek to the side so they wouldn’t touch my skin, only
my hair.’ Investors began insisting that male designers take and pass AIDS
tests. Often male designers lost financial support, “because backers were afraid
that AIDS made them too risky an investment.” '? Despite AIDS phobia on
Seventh Avenue, a significant segment of the fashion industry supported the
cause to fight AIDS. Calvin Klein and Elizabeth Taylor hosted a major fund-
raiser, Kim Hastreiter held the Love Ball, and organizations like the Council
of Fashion Designers of America launched its AIDS Fund.
But the central role in the fight against AIDS was played by gay activists
and organizations like ACT UP. Along with the gay club and bar tee-shirts
which had proliferated in happier years, political tee-shirts were now pro-
duced, as a way of communicating new and urgent messages of resistance, a
subject that Jonathan D. Katz addresses in his essay in this book.
SEXUALITY AND STYLE
In 1990, five years after Rudi Gernreich died, The Advocate published an
article in which Gernreich was quoted as saying that “everybody” in the fash-
ion business was gay. When the journalist Stuart Timmons asked if he really
meant that all fashion designers were gay, Gernreich replied, “All the good
ones. | mean the men. There are a few pretty good women designing these
days who are heterosexual.” Why were gay designers “all in the closet?” asked
Timmons. “To protect their jobs,’ replied Gernreich."" The exploration into
possible connections between sexuality and style might seem to be only an
exercise in vain speculation or, worse, prurient curiosity.Yet the subject has
already been raised in queer publications and on the internet, and it exists as
a subtext in many discourses on fashion.
The issue of sexual identity may usefully be compared with that of gen-
der. When I wrote my book, Women of Fashion: 20th-Century Designers, my

Advertisement research indicated that gender only sometimes clearly influenced the work
for Yves Saint Laurent’s
“Pour Homme” fragrance, 1971
of an individual female designer, but when women were considered as a
Photograph by Jeanloup Sieff group and studied over time, certain patterns emerged. For example, although
© Estate Jeanloup Sieff
women fashion designers flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, after World
War II, male designers became much more numerous and influential. '°* Only
in the past few decades have such women as Donna Karan and Miuccia
Prada begun to achieve parity with men. Yet even today the majority of
really successful designers are men — and many of these men are, apparent-
ly, gay. (Interestingly, when I interviewed her in 1990, Vivienne Westwood
suggested that homosexuals had contributed more to fashion than women.)
Looking back at the history of fashion, we find that, as early as the
eighteenth century, some gay men were very interested in fashion — both
women’s fashion and their own style of dress. In the nineteenth century
also, gay men were said to be preoccupied with hairstyles and dress, with
many “fairies” adopting flashy and effeminate styles. Conversely, lesbians
were inclined toward the adoption of masculine modes of dress. Over the
years, gay and lesbian subcultural styles repeatedly influenced the direction of
mainstream fashion, as with the garconne look of the 1920s.
It is only in the 1920s and 1930s that we can identify certain gay or bisexual
designers by name, among them Norman Hartnell, Edward Molyneux,
Charles James, and Cristobal Balenciaga. After World War II, their numbers
increase and include major figures such as Christian Dior, Pierre Balmain,
Rudi Gernreich, and Yves Saint Laurent.
Yet it remains difficult to determine
whether, and to what extent, stereotypes about large numbers of gay male
designers actually reflect reality. In her 1967 book, The Beautiful People, the
journalist Marilyn Bender admitted that “There are no statistics to prove that
Seventh Avenue has more homosexuals than Wall Street. But clearly, the arts ...
are more hospitable to those with unconventional sexual habits . .. Desperate
manufacturers are known to say, ‘I'll get myself a fairy designer’ ””'*
While admitting that “the word ‘fag’ is being thrown about the jealous
jungle of Seventh Avenue as irresponsibly as ‘pink’ was in the McCarthy
era,’ Bender nevertheless believed that American fashion was becoming
“increasingly homosexual.’ The public certainly thought so, she added, and
quoted historian Barbara Tuchman: “Fashion is being taken over by the pansy
boys. We’re being made to look like Lolitas and lion tamers. All those boots and

sag mms te ee; AT:
v\
Aaa
Calvin Klein billboard in Times helmets."°* (In fact, the youth styles Tuchman mentions were promoted most
Square, New York, 1982
Beeea iby Hodly. Levin by Mary Quant and André Courréges, both of whom were heterosexual.)
On the other hand, when Ross Higgins interviewed gay men in the
fashion community in Montreal, many of his sources reported that, from
the 1940s until the late 1960s, “Some male designers were probably gay but
there were not a lot of them. This was just the beginnings of male designers
in Quebec fashion culture. Afterwards it became very gay.’°’ Nor was this
just a peculiarity of Canadian fashion culture. The New York designer, Stan
Herman, also recalled that when he traveled around the United States in the
1960s, showing his fashions, many people just assumed that he was a married
(heterosexual) man.'°°
In the 1970s and 1980s, as we have seen, an increasing number of people,
including fashion designers, were more-or-less openly gay or bisexual. In
1981, Calvin Klein bragged about his sex life in Playboy magazine: “I’ve
fooled around a lot. I stopped at nothing. I would do anything. I stayed up
all night, carried on, lived out fantasies, anything ... My best sex has been
with people who didn’t know who I was.” He stopped just short of revealing
“everything.’"’ A year later, Klein revolutionized fashion with billboard-sized
advertisements featuring a muscular male model wearing nothing but a pair
of white underpants. “We did not try to appeal to gays,” said a spokesperson
for Calvin Klein. “We try to appeal period. If there’s an awareness of health
and grooming in that community, then they’ll respond to the ads. You really
want to reach a bigger market than just gays, but you don’t want to alienate
iiemie<
Although Calvin Klein’s advertising, then and later, was widely perceived
as homoerotic, it also clearly appealed to heterosexual men and to women
of all sexual orientations, reinforcing what would become a long-term trend
for the use of homoerotic imagery, especially in fashion advertising. It is
sometimes forgotten that gay sexuality is widely “considered extraordinary,
inviting as well as taboo.”As Michael Bronsky has observed, “Ironically, when
gay sensibility is used as a sales pitch, the strategy is that gay images imply
distinction and non-conformity, granting straight consumers a longed-for
place outside the humdrum mainstream.”'”
It is not clear, however, to what extent the public was aware of the sexual
orientation of even celebrity designers. Roy Halston Frowick (1932-1990)

may have been, in his biographer’s words, “almost a caricature of a sissy Jean Paul Gaultier, orange shirred
velvet dress with cone bust and
homosexual4 fashion
: i designer,
i haughty and superficial,”""°
+] 22110
but he kept his: sex 3) \.-in5 1984 The Museum at
life private and surrounded himself with a posse of his favorite models — the _ FIT, 92.8.1 Photograph © The
Halstonettes — when he went out to Studio 54. Halston was already dying adie
of AIDS in 1989 when The Andy Warhol Diaries were published, revealing
numerous stories about his sex life. Similarly, although Yves Saint Laurent
lived with Pierre Bergé for decades, it was only in 2002 that he actually talked
publicly about being gay.
“Oh, yes, my sexuality has been very important to my creativity,’ Saint
Laurent told a French film-maker in 2002.'" He has often been described as
the type of gay man who seems to worship women, and this adoration was
expressed in the idealizing fashions that he created. He was deeply struck by
a photograph of Marlene Dietrich wearing men’s clothes, for example, and
often incorporated elements of men’s clothing into fashion, but in such a way
as to make women look both strong and intensely feminine. Especially famous
and influential was “Le smoking,” his tuxedo suit for women, which he first
showed in the 1970s, and which continues to influence fashion today. “When
I sat in Saint Laurent’s shows, they felt like a love letter he had written to you,”
remembers the fashion editor Irene Silvagni.'? Or, as Saint Laurent himself
put it: “I utterly reject the fantasies of those who seek to satisfy their egos
through fashion. Unlike them, I wanted to put myself at women’s disposal .. .
to serve them ...It was my wish to accompany them in that great movement
ofliberation that occurred during the last century.’™
Saint Laurent may be said to epitomize the image of the homosexual
designer as the friend of women. As we shall see, this remains a powerful
trope, although it has also evolved over time as both the fashion system and
society have changed. Back in the 1950s, when haute couture was at its height,
there were articles with titles like ‘““That Friend of Your Wife’s Named Dior,”
which implicitly promised men that their wives were “safe” in the hands of
a gay couturier."* By the 1970s, Saint Laurent’s heyday, the prét-a-porter was
beginning to challenge the couture, and designers did not necessarily have
intimate physical contact with their clients. However, they were increasingly
expected to understand the lifestyles of young, independent women. Saint
Laurent was in the forefront of this, both with the development of his Rive

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in his identification with liberal trends in society,
including the greater independence of women.
As the actress Catherine Deneuve put it, “Saint
Laurent designs for women with double lives. His
day clothes help a woman confront the world
of strangers. They permit her to go everywhere
without drawing unwelcome attention and, with
their somewhat masculine quality, they give her
a certain force, prepare her for encounters that
may become a conflict of wills. In the evening,
when a woman chooses to be with those she 1s
fond of, he makes her seductive."
The fashion culture that emerged in the 1980s
was more aggressive and irreverent. In contrast
to Saint Laurent’s idealizing vision, the designer
Jean Paul Gaultier (b. 1952) was unafraid of play-
ing fast and loose with sex and gender stereotypes
.
os
«
«
in both his menswear and his women’s fashions.
«
*
.
*
Gaultier’s fascination with corsets, which dated
°
.
* from early childhood, helped launch a vogue
*.
.
‘ for underwear-as-outerwear, especially after he
dressed Madonna for her Blonde Ambition tour.
Yet he was not alone in experimenting with the
Gianni Versace, leather evening iconography of sexual fetishism. Vivienne Westwood had already made the
dress, Autumn/W te
fetishism of punk fashion central to her aesthetic, and would later influence
Courtesy Fashion Gro
Foundation. other transgressive designers, such as John Galliano and Alexander McQueen.
Although French, Gaultier was greatly attracted to English youth culture, and
this, combined with his own openness to other gay, subcultural styles, would
make him a leading figure in fashion. The sailor, long a homoerotic icon,
inspired a host of Gaultier’s fashions for both men and women, as well as his
perfume advertisements and commercials featuring sexy gay or bisexual sail-
ors. The charisma of deviance likewise permeated the fashion extravaganzas
of such designers as Thierry Mugler (b. 1948), who also pioneered the use of
transgender or transvestite runway models.

Perhaps Gaultier’s greatest contribution to fashion was his focus on men
in skirts. For although women had long been permitted to wear trousers,
skirts for men remained one of the last sartorial taboos. The kilt, of course,
was the one exception, and in the early 1990s, many young gay men adopted
short kilts worn with heavy, macho boots. Gaultier himself frequently wore
a kilt and/or a striped sailor top. As the French designer Darrell Moos (b.
1960) recalls, “Gaultier was the quintessential icon ofgay fashion. His personal
commitment and the different mixes in his fashion had, for us, a very strong
symbolism. His style seduced me, and I never felt feminine wearing my jupe-
culottes or skirts, but, on the contrary, I felt like a warrior, proudly showing off
his characteristic nature.”
Sexuality became an increasingly overt influence on fashion in the
1990s. Another openly gay designer, Gianni Versace (1946-1997), drew on
the iconography of 1970s gay “leathersex” for his famous 1992 “bondage”
collection. Although some women took offense at his S&M clothes, others
interpreted them as a positive expression of female sexual power — or simply
as the latest fashion. The look had, in any case, been percolating up from the
street for decades, from punks and goths, as well as gay “leathermen” and
“leather dykes.’"7? Already in the early 1980s, Claude Montana (b. 1949) had
attracted attention with his tough, almost fascistic, chic styles, often in leather,
for both women and men. Versace would also create dramatic, sexy looks
for men, from skin-tight leather trousers to boldly patterned silk shirts and
studded cowboy boots. After Versace was murdered by Andrew Cunanan, his
sister, Donatella, took over design responsibilities.
Although some gay designers, such as Gaultier and Versace, have created
clothing that appears to be influenced by their sexuality, this is not necessarily
true of other gay designers. What could be more different from Gianni
Versace’s flamboyance than Giorgio Armani’ discretion? Or Valentino’s classic
elegance? If Domenico Dolce (b. 1958) and Stefano Gabbana (b. 1962) share
some ofVersace’s focus on sex appeal, this is not necessarily because they are
gay. After all, Roberto Cavalli, who is apparently straight, shares their love
of leopard-skin prints and corsetry, and, for that matter, so does Donatella
Versace. There may also be national differences in the complex relationship
between fashion, sex, and gender. Italian culture, for example, places high value
on personal style — for men as well as for women, in contrast to American
culture, which has traditionally viewed fashion as a “feminine” sphere. To

JULY 1998
AN AMERICAN HERO
CERI what extent such differences might have an influence on gay participation in
John Bartlett on the cover of OUT
magazine, July 1998. Courtesy of
fashion has never been investigated.
Here Media Inc. © 1998 In 1995, the fashion curator Richard Martin wrote an article on what he
All rights reserved
called “the menswear closet,” in which he argued that, in contrast to the many
RIGHT. gay designers creating clothing for women, “most of the important American
Bartlett, John (b. 1964). Ensemble
Fall/Winter 2000-01. Black leather designers who actually specialize in menswear are apparently heterosexual”
black rayon lining, silver metal, black
or have “chosen to let customers assume [they are].’ He hypothesized that,
wool knit with jet beading, black wool
twill, black cotton lining, black wool/ “though women may find gay men’s attention unthreatening, men may be as
polyester gabardine. Gift of John
Bartlett, 2004 (2004.146a-f)
paranoid as Jonathan Schmitz about being dressed or addressed by a gay man.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (Schmitz shot and killed Scott Amedure for being his not-so-secret admirer
New York © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Image source
on The Jenny Jones Show.) Martin admitted that there were exceptions, such
Art Resource, NY. as the openly gay American menswear designer John Bartlett (b. 1964); he
also thought there appeared to be more gay menswear designers in Europe."*

Today, the number of gay American menswear designers seems to be increas-
ing gradually, but it is unclear whether this 1s related to declining homophobia
in the United States.
“There are many gay men in fashion,” says John Bartlett. “I know I was
drawn to this career knowing that I would be welcome there and encouraged
to be creative and expressive. Fashion is one of the rare industries that accept
gay men.’ Bartlett believes that “The otherness of being gay informs our eye
in a very different way from a young age. We relate to both men and women
and therefore have a unique perspective on both sexes. We also identify a lot
with our sexuality, so we think a lot about what defines gender.”"”
By the late 1990s, a fertile period offashion innovation, many ofthe world’s
most famous fashion designers were gay or bisexual. But they were not always
comfortable with having their sexuality labeled. Heralded as “Gucci’s Gay
Superstar” on the cover of The Advocate (June 10, 1997), Tom Ford (b. 1961)
was pressed to discuss his sexuality. He said that he was “‘very happy” with his
long-term partner, and admitted, “I’m certainly gay at this particular moment
in my life,” but he also described having a girlfriend when he was younger
and mused about the possibility of living with a woman again in the future.
Speaking about contemporary fashion, he said, “There’s not such a hard line
any more between gay and straight.”"’° Fifteen years later, he told Fern Mallis:
“T hate that word [gay]. Of course I’m gay, but I don’t like these labels."
Karl Lagerfeld (b. 1933) would probably agree: ““That’s one of the good
things about the fashion world. Those things [sexual orientations] are non-
existent subjects. You are never strange enough, bizarre enough, or different
enough ... It’s not a question of political correctness. Be correct, but don’t
feel the need to tell the whole world.’'? He was atypically candid in the film
Lagerfeld Confidential and in a 2010 interview with Vice, saying that when he
was a child, he asked his mother about homosexuality and she said, “It’s like
hair color. It’s nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark
hair.’ He regards this as “a very healthy attitude” and disapproves when “some
people make a drama out of it,” insisting, “It’s not a problem." In the film,
he goes into more detail about his sexuality, adding that he “hated the idea of
bourgeois marriage. They [homosexuals] wanted to be different. Now they
want to be like the bourgeoisie. ’m against it .. . Let’s invent something else,
not ape the despised bourgeoisie.”’* Yet attitudes evolve, and at his couture

Lady Gaga, wearinga gown by show in January 2013, Lagerfeld sent two brides down the runway. He told
Alexander McQueen, attends the
MTV Video Music Awards, 2010
Harper’s Bazaar:“One thing I find very natural is the concept that two women
Photograph by Jeffrey Mayer/ could marry. I like this idea very much.’
Wirelmage
There is nothing bourgeois about Rick Owens (b. 1961), who openly
admits to being bisexual and says that he met his wife, Michéle Lamy, through
“my boyfriend, one of her best friends. So it’s true I’m bisexual . . . People
are against bisexuality. It’s either shit or get off the pot. It would be great if
things were that black and white, but life is all about ambiguities.”° Owens’s
aesthetic is both raw and refined, with inspirations ranging from Greta Garbo
to Kurt Cobain. He makes clothes for both men and women, including heels
for men: “I don’t mean them as feminizing, but more as a Kiss, heavy-metal
kind of thing. It’s gender-bending, but it’s like Marlene Dietrich wearing
men’s suits to exaggerate her femininity.”"’7
Two of the most celebrated designers of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries were openly gay men: John Galliano (b.1960) and
Alexander McQueen (1969-2010). Both were immensely creative and often
compared with each other. Galliano notoriously imploded in 2011 when he
was videotaped making anti-Semitic and racist statements in a Paris bar, and
McQueen committed suicide. McQueen spoke often about his sexuality.
The youngest child of aLondon taxi driver, Lee Alexander McQueen once
described himself as “the pink sheep” of his family, saying, “I went straight
from my mother’s womb on to the gay parade.”’** But in other interviews,
he hinted that it was not easy growing up gay in a tough, working-class
neighborhood where people have “the mental attitudes of the past.’ He was
very close to his mother, Joyce, who recalled that he was a “pretty” child,
doted on by his sisters, who “spent most of his time in his bedroom, drawing
and designing, hardly ever going out.”'”?
“My collections have always been autobiographical,” said McQueen,“a lot
to do with my own sexuality and coming to terms with the person I am — it
was like exorcizing my ghosts in the collections.’"° After a brilliant collection,
inspired by the martyrdom ofJoan of Arc, McQueen said: “Anyone can be a
martyr for their cause. Maybe I was a martyr for homosexuality when I was
six.” But he quickly added, “If you don’t like me, fuck off. Just because I’m a
faggot, I can still give someone a whack if Iwant to.’"™" It may be significant
that McQueen reached puberty just as the AIDS epidemic swept the world,

reigniting waves of homophobia. As Judith Thurman observed, “He was
forced to witness a primal scene that haunted the youth of his generation: sex
and death in the same bed.”"”
The emotional intensity of McQueen’s work, with its combination of
darkly beautiful and disturbingly aggressive themes, polarized audiences, and
he was frequently accused of misogyny. He utilized extreme and theatrical
imagery, often presenting women as highly sexualized, and his collections often
carried deliberately provocative titles, such as “Highland Rape” and “Jack the
Ripper Stalks His Victims.” When critics responded with predictable horror,
he would argue that he wanted to “empower” women, or that the show was
not about women being raped, but about England’s rape of Scotland. Indeed,
his “perverse” and transgressive aesthetic may have had much less to do with
women at all than with himself. He also collected dark, macabre art about
sex and death.
“The marginalized status of gay men produces the freakish, anarchic bursts
of creativity and daring which are fundamental to fashion innovation,” argues
Simon Doonan, who first became famous for his window displays and is now
best known for his books.““Gay men’s lives have always been oriented around
fantasy and disguise and transformation. They desire to escape from the nega-
tivity in their situation. Fashion is the ticket ...The sad thing is that both
gays and straights continue to disdain effeminacy in men. Many gay men still
have tremendous ambivalence about their proximity to fashion. They remain
evasive about their sexuality and they suffer as a result.’ He speculated that
“The psychological struggles of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano are
traceable to their working-class homophobic roots. Their huge success only
increased the unresolved conflicts and dissonances.” '°
Gay and bisexual women have been much less visible in the fashion world
than gay and bisexual men. According to Ilene Chaiken, creator and executive
producer of The L Word,““There are a lot of gay women working in fashion.”
Only a few, however, are mentioned by name in the 2004 article “The Subtle
Power of Lesbian Style,’ among them the the knitwear designer and artist Liz
Collins (b. 1968), and the designer Patricia Fields (b. 1941), best known for her
costumes for Sex in the City, which included lesbian styles such as “newsboy”
caps and ultra-femme ballerina outfits."+ There are also well-known lesbian

fashion editors and photographers. Yet few
female designers have come out publicly —
although several have been outed.
Jil Sander (b. 1943), for example, who is fa-
mous for her high-quality, understated women’s
clothes, had long been rumored to be lesbian,
when in 2006, The Times of London published
the headline, “Gay stalker threatened to kill the
queen of fashion,” reporting that a woman iden-
tified only as “Sandra D” claimed to have fallen
passionately in love with Sander and threat-
ened to kill her “and her lesbian lover,’ if she
did not break up with her partner, Frau Dickie
Mommsen. Multiple death threats were sent to
Sander and Mommsen over a period of several
years.’ Eventually, the stalker was sentenced to
six months injail.
“Sometimes women designers say that they
know best what women want and need,” says
Olivier Theyskens (b. 1977). “But I have always
loved everything connected to femininity, this
world of my sister and my mother, and I think
Model Jenny Shimizu wearinga that I can imagine what it’s like being a woman. Sometimes, there is a danger
enim shirt
that male designers can be only observateurs of the silhouette of a woman, and
they say ‘It’s more beautiful like this, | don’t care how she feels.’ But I really
think it is more interesting to develop a sense of why, if Iwere a woman, |
would choose this.”"°
“T don’t know anything about psychology, but I think that a lot of gay
people are really passionate about everything connected with aestheticism,”
muses Theyskens:
Sometimes, when you see a dress or the most beautiful flower bouquet,
you know it can only be a gay guy who did this. You think, only a gay guy
could have that sense of bringing beauty into our normal reality. And |

believe that [historically] gays were more accepted in aesthetic fields. Even
if it was just to decorate something for rich people, they would close their
eyes [to the designers’ sexuality] and give them a chance. It was an entry
for tolerance, because when where there is admiration, there is more toler-
ance. But, at the same time, there are other professions where there are a
lot of gays. For example, my sister is a nurse, and she says that lots of her
colleagues are gay.'*7
Not many garage mechanics are women, but the garage-mechanic-turned-

fashion-model Jenny Shimizu became “the lesbian darling of the fashion
runways” in the 1990s, perhaps in part because she was one of the only
openly lesbian models."* Butch, tattooed, and beautiful, the Japanese-
American Shimizu walked for Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Jean Paul Gaultier,
and Gianni Versace, and was featured in Calvin Klein’s CK One perfume
advertisements. According to the scholar Reina Lewis, “The fact that she
presents as a butch dyke and not a glamour femme only reinforces her au-
thenticity and heightens the transgressive appeal of using a lesbian model
who deviates not only from the norm but also from the over-exposed media
creature of the (femme) lipstick lesbian of lesbian chic.”"?
Shimizu’s visible ethnicity and lesbianism demonstrate how the acceptance
of alternative styles of beauty has been a significant theme in recent fashion
history. Just as ethnic diversity among fashion models mirrored changes in
society from the 1960s on, so also does the more recent appearance of andro-
gynous and transgender fashion models, such as LeaT (a transgender model),
Andrj Peji’c (a male model who has been called one of the “sexiest women
in the world” and who models both menswear and womenswear), and Casey
Legler (the first woman who signed as a male model). Although the increas-
ing visibility of transgender people may indicate a more inclusive attitude,
there are still blatant examples of homophobia in contemporary society.
Eric Wilson’s 2005 article “In Fashion, Who Really Gets Ahead?” described
the controversy that ensued when Tara Subkoff, the American actress and
designer, complained publicly that fashion “is a gay man’s profession” and
that fashion editors favored “young, gay men.’ Although most of the design-
ers interviewed denied that the fashion industry was biased in favor of men,
they agreed that men seemed to have greater visibility. As Wilson pointed out,

“There is no way to accurately measure the success rate of designers based on
sex or sexual orientation,” let alone determine “if men are more talented at
design than women,” although he did note certain “imbalances,” such as the
fact that Who's Who in Fashion is split 60-40 in favor of men, and that, since
1986, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) annual “Perry
Ellis awards for young talent have been given to eight women and twenty-
nine men (twenty of them openly gay). A statistic like this, limited as it is,
implies that more than two-thirds of young male designers are openly gay.
The gender gap exists, of course, in many other professions also — from
finance to politics. Research indicates that the gap is caused, not by differences
in qualifications (or talent), but by a combination of obstacles that women
disproportionately face (such as the work-life issues involved with raising
children), together with the perception that women lack leadership abilities.
It is likely that the gender gap in fashion can also be explained in terms of
similar cultural and sociopolitical factors, but it is further complicated by
stereotypes and homophobia, which falsely pit women and gay men against
each other.
Amazingly, Edmund Bergler’s homophobic diatribe of 1953 was recently
cited approvingly by a feminist academic, Sheila Jeffries, who argued that
“gay fashion designers project their unalleviated hatred and fear onto women
through cruel fashions.” She wrote: “It is interesting that Bergler had noticed,
even in 1953, that the fashions women were required to wear were degrading,
since they were tame by comparison with what was designed for women in
the last decades of the twentieth century.’™' Among the designers she labeled
musogynistic are Tom Ford, Jean Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, and
Thierry Mugler, as well as photographers like David LaChapelle. Jeftries bases
her interpretation not on psychoanalysis, like Bergler, but on a combination
of Andrea Dworkin-style anti-pornographic feminism and a theory of
“transfemininity” which attacks the “cult of femininity among men.”'*”
Accusations of gay fashion misogyny are as unconvincing as conspiracy
theories about a “gay mafia” that supposedly dominates fashion. While it is
certainly legitimate to investigate possible instances of misogyny or bias in
fashion, blanket statements about gay male misogyny are irresponsible and
misleading. The absence of sexual desire does not imply hatred or even indif-

ference. Many women have found that their closest male friends are gay. Acts
of violence toward women are far more likely to be the work ofheterosexual
men who are obsessed with exercising control over women and their sexuality.
Although some women regard as “degrading” the overtly sexual fashions
(and fashion imagery) that became increasingly prevalent after the 1970s, these
fashions were made possible by the social and sexual liberation of women. If
you want modest clothing, you have to go to authoritarian and profoundly
misogynistic societies, where women are not allowed to expose their bodies.
Feminists should stop reflexively attacking gay designers, whom it is irratio-
nal to blame for ultra-sexy clothes and “pre-pubescent” or “boyish” fashions
models. Our culture’s emphasis on youth, slenderness, and sex appeal has no
one source — certainly not fashion designers, who lack the power to “dictate”
to women today, if, indeed, they ever had it.
All historical and cross-cultural evidence demonstrates that progress in
women’s rights goes hand-in-hand with human rights for all minorities,
including homosexuals. Olivier Theyskens put it very well when he said, “I
remember thinking that McQueen’s work was misogynist. But now I think that
misogyny has more to do with the condition of women, and not something
to do with aesthetics.
An aesthetic, like McQueen’, questions things; it is not
necessarily presenting a philosophy oflife.”"
“When you're growing up and you realize that you are different from
everyone else, that feeling of being different can often be alienating,” says
Karlo Steel:
At a very young age, queer people tend to create their own reality as a
place of refuge. Often it’s a place of beauty. That was certainly my story.
And helping to create beauty is a part ofit. I believe that fashion is a place
that has been a kind of refuge [for queer people]. There is an adherence to
surface values — a glittering facade — that is part of queer culture. It might
have to do with saying something about yourself that you can’t speak
about. Perhaps young gay men have a greater receptiveness to aesthetics
than people who are non-queer. We have to be careful, though, not to use
queerness as a term [that implies] creativity [or] a higher aesthetic, because
for a lot of queer people, it’s not part of who they are."

Growing up in a Cuban-American fam-
ily, Narciso Rodriguez (b. 1961) remem-
bers that when he decided to study fash-
ion at Parsons, “That didn’t go over very
well. My parents literally said, “You can’t
do that, because you’ll go gay!’” Looking
back, he explains their reaction as partly
a function of their generation (“It’s easier
now for parents to accept and nurture dif-
ference in their children”) and partly “that
macho thing” in Latin culture: “It would
be a woman’s job to sew.’ But inspired
by the fashion illustrations of Antonio
Lopez, he “understood it was fashion that
I loved.” There are many gay men in fash-
ion, Rodriguez suggests, “because fash-
ion is about creating beautiful things for
women. Speaking for myself, it’s about my
love of women. It’s all very romantic .. .
creating beauty and being surrounded by
very strong and stylish women. I’m always
searching for beauty."
Does queer style still exist in the age of
the metrosexual? Does it influence what
straight people wear? For Simon Doonan,
“Queer style is most often a quintessen-
tialized version of straight style. Gay men
Narciso Rodriguez, blust love to steal butch archetypes from the hetero world (like leather boys, 70s
charmeuse evening c
Spring 2011, USA. The \v
preppies, and surfer dudes), and then sell them back to straight people — at a
at FIT, 2010.92.2. Photograph marked-up price!” He admits, however, that “in the chaotic landscape of today,
© The Museum at FIT
it is hard to distill a queer aesthetic ... The heritage Brooklyn hipster look, for
example, is popular with [both] middle-class gays and straights . . . Sometimes
I look at an advertisement and see clear gay influences, only to realize that the
influence comes from somewhere else, such as hip hop . . . Fully accessorized
men are now seen in all designer advertisements. This is a gay thing.’”’*°

“Por men, the dandy, of course, is one of the most significant queer styles — Steven} y Inkpen on
their we ecembe
Oscar
Yer Wilde’s
1 Z
legacy,”
BV
says John Bartlett,
aye
37 2019. Phokaaeaainl atin
sy Steven Kolb
And on the other side of the spectrum, the Clone, a visual imitation and
emulation of the “macho” uniforms of western culture. In menswear, the
dandy and the “Clone” are constant inspirations, and sometimes at the
same time. Queer style is also prevalent in the gender-bending style of
such artists as Annie Lennox, Klaus Nomi, and Leigh Bowery.
The lesbian,
gender-bending look of modern women continues to inform the mascu-
line/feminine play in fashion that is continually mined by designers [both]
straight and gay.
'*’
There is no evidence of a“gay gene” for fashion or creativity. If queer people

have contributed disproportionately to fashion, the reasons are profoundly
over-determined, involving our complicated perceptions ofboth fashion and
sexuality. But one thing is clear: fashion cannot truly be understood without
taking account ofthe creative contributions, both individual and collective, of
generations of LGBTQ people.

Fred Gross, “Stars of Style,’ Advocate (June 10, 1997), p. 27- George Chauncy, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and
Phillip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C.Thomas (eds.), the Making ofthe Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York,
Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology 1995), Pp. 52, 54.
(New York, 2006), p. 269. Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the
Peter Davis, “Men a la Mode,” Genre (March 1995), p. 30. Young,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [1894] (London,
Robert A. Schanke and Kimberley Bell Marra, Passing 2003),p. 1245.
Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York, 1987), p. 300.
Theater History (Ann Arbor, 1998), pp. 3-4. Ladies Pictorial (January 8, 1887), quoted in Franny Moyle,
William Mann, Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde
Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 (New York, 2001), p. xii. (London and New York, 2011), p. 95.
Ibid., p. xvii. Quoted in Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History
Ibid., p. xviii. (Oxford and New York, 1998), p. 96.
Bill Blass, Bare Blass, ed. Cathy Horyn (New York, 2002), Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, Dandyism (New York, 1988), p. 64.
p. 30. Philippe Jullian, Prince ofAesthetes: Count Robert de
Clare Lomas, Peter McNeil, and Sally Gray, “Beyond the Montesquiou, 1855-1921 (New York, 1968), pp. 46, 50.
Rainbow: Queer Shoes,” in McNeil and Ruello (eds.), Shoes: Edgar Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the
A History from Sandals to Sneakers, (Oxford and New York, Bat (Paris, 1995), p. 40.
2006), p. 291. Jullian, Prince ofAesthetes, p. 61.
a0) Graham Greene, Lord Rochester’s Monkey (New York, 1974), Quoted in Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou, p. 144.
Pp. 73-4. Jullian, Prince ofAesthetes, p. 99.
II Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution,vol. 1: Munhall, Whistler and Montesquiou, p. 144.
Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London Ibid., p. 146.
(Chicago and London, 1998), p. 3. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford and
12 Robert Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu New York, 1998).
(Oxford and New York, 1960), p. 118. Jeffrey Merrick and Michael Sibalis (eds.), Homosexuality in
13 Quoted in George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and French History and Culture (New York and London, 2001),
Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999), p. 79. pp. 150-2, 160-1.
Randolph Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy Ibid., pp. 160-1.
and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, Robert Fizadale and Arthur Gold, Misia: The Life of Misia
1660-1750, in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Sert (New York, 1980), p. 231.
Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Baum Duberman, Martha Vicanus, Valerie Steele, Women of Fashion: Tiventieth Century Designers
and George Chauncey Jr. (London, 1991), p. 138. (New York, Paris, and London, 1991), p. 41.
15 Macaroni, Savoir Vivre, and Theatrical Magazine (March 1774), 39 Rhonda K. Garelick, “The Layered Look: Coco Chanel and
p. 241, quoted in Valerie Steele, “The Social and Political Contagious Celebrity,’ in Susan Fillin-Yeh (ed.), Fashion and
Significance of Macaroni Fashion,’ Costume, no. 19 (198s), Finesse in Art and Culture (New York and London, 2007), p.
p. 103. 35.
16 Randolph Trumbach, e-mail message to author, March 3, 40 Diana Souhami, Gluck 1895-1978: Her Biography (Ontario,
2013. 1989), pp. 10-11.
17 Fanny Burney, Evelina, or AYoung Lady's Entrance into the 41 Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes:
World (London, 1964), p. 24, Letter X. Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago
18 Randolph Trumbach, “From Age to Gender, c. 1500-1750: and London, 1994), p. 20.
From the Adolescent Male to the Adult Effeminate Body,’ in 42 Quoted in Gilles Barbedette and Michel Carassou, Paris Gay
The Routledge History ofSex and the Body, 1500 to the Present, 1925 (Paris, 1981), p. 25.
ed. Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (London and New York, 43 Ibid., p. 71.
2013), p. 135. 44 Donald Spoto, Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (New
19 Trumbach, in Duberman, Vicanus, and Chauncy, Hidden from York, 2000), p. 104.
History, p. 3. 45 Bruce Chatwin, What am I doing Here? (New York, 1989),
20 Ambroise-Auguste Tardieu quoted in Vernon A. Rosario, The i226 2)
Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (Oxford and 46 Chauncy, Gay New York, p. 3.
New York, 1997), pp. 75-6. 47 Ibid., p. 52.

Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress Hilary Knight, interview with Valerie Steele, March 23, 2013.
in the Tiventieth Century (Oxford and New York, 2000), p. 62. Valerie Steele, Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now (New
Quoted in Judith Watt (ed.), The Penguin Book ofTiwentieth- Haven and London, 1997), p. 28.
Century Fashion Writing (New York, 2000), p. 55. Quoted in Steele, Women of Fashion, p. 50.
Patrick Hoare, Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant Cecil Beaton, Self-Portrait with Friends, ed. Richard Buckles
(London, 1990), p. 148. (London, 1979), p. 305.
Ibid., p. 206. Edmund Bergler, Fashion and the Unconscious (New York,
Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, p. 37. 1953), pp. XX11I—XxIVv.
Ibid., p. 65. Yves Saint Laurent to Giesbert and Samet in Le Figaro
Quoted in Barbedette and Carassou, Paris Gay 1925, (November 7, 1991), p. 26, quoted in Alice Rawsthorn, Yves
Pp. 56-7. Saint Laurent: A Biography (New York, 1996), p. 7.
Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (New York, 2012), Laurence Benaim, Yves Saint Laurent (Paris, 1993), p. 25.
p. 265. Lawrence Benaim, interview 1993, quoted in Benaim, Yves
Philip Hoare, Noel Coward:A Biography (Chicago and Saint Laurent, pp. 541-2.
London, 1998), p. 201. Edward M. Gomez, “Monsieur: Le President,’ OUT (April
Quoted in Vernon A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French 1995), pp. 105—6.
Histories of Perversity (Oxford and New York, 1997), p. 76. William N. Eskridge, Gaylaw: Challenging the Apardheid ofthe
Ibid., p. 73. Closet (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1999), p. I.
Francoise Tétart-Vittu, “Who Creates Fashion?” in Gloria Ibid., p. 65.
Groom (ed.), Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (Chicago, Shaun Cole, “Invisible Men: Gay Men’s Dress in Britain,
New Haven, and London, 2012), pp. 63-8. 1950-70,” in Amy de la Haye and Elizabeth Wilson
60 Quoted in Amy Latour, Kings of Fashion (New York, 1958), (eds.), Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity
1D) Silt (Manchester and New York, 1999), pp. 143-4.
61 Journal des Modes d’Hommes (January 1869), n. p., and Charles David M. Halperin, How to be Gay (Cambridge, Mass., 2012),
Dickens, All The Year Round (periodical) (February 28, 1863), p- 99.
p- 9. Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel, 2000), pp. 59-72.
See Hugh David, On Queer Street: A Social History ofBritish Simon Doonan, interview with Valerie Steele, October 4, 2012.
Homosexuality 1895-1995 (London, 1997), p. 74, and Godfrey Brigitte Felderer, Rudi Gernreich: Fashion Will Go Out of
Winn, The Infirm Glory (London, 1967), pp. 289-290. Fashion (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 60-3.
63 Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Harry Hay quoted in Felderer, Rudi Gernreich, p.63, and
Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall (New Rudi Gernreich quoted, p. 77.
York, 1996), p. 109. Ibid., p. 78.
Hilary Knight, interview with Valerie Steele, March 23, 2013. Michael S. Levine (ed.), Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the
Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, Who’ Who in Gay Homosexual Clone (New York and London, 1998), pp. 58, 57.
and Lesbian History from Antiquity to World War II (London “In Praise of Lesbian Chic: Conquering the Dyke Fashion
and New York, 2002). Paradigm,” www.modellesbians.com (2012).
Mary Blume, The Master of Us All: Balenciaga, His Workrooms, Daniel Wojcik, Punk and Neo- Tribal Body Art (Jackson, Miss.,
His World (New York, 2013), p. 22. 1995), P- 15-
Miren Arzalluz, Cristébal Balenciaga: The Making ofaMaster Karlo Steel, interview with Valerie Steele, December 4, 2012.
(1895-1936) (London, 2011), pp. 141—2, 182 Adam Rathe, “Queer to the Core,’ OUT (May 2012).
Blume, The Master of Us All, p. 25. Xavier Chaumette, e-mail message to author, August 2, 2012.
Ibid., pp. 79-82. John Fairchild, Chic Savages (New York, 1989), p. 170.
Marie-France Pochna, Christian Dior: The Biography (New 100 Brendan Lemon, “Gucci’s Gay Guru,” Advocate (June 10,
York, 2008), p. 33. 1997), p- 35.
Ibid., pp. 59, 64, 73. IOI Stuart Timmons, “Designer Rudi Gernreich stayed in the
Ibid., pp. 141-2. Fashion Closet,” Advocate (September 25, 1990), p. 45.
Hilary Knight, interview with Valerie Steele, March 23, 2013. 102 See Steele, Women of Fashion.
Elizabeth Ann Coleman, The Genius of Charles James (New 103 Marylin Bender, The Beautiful People (New York, 1967),
York, 1982), p. 78. pp. 36-7.

104 Ibid. 128 Booth Moore, “Alexander McQueen opens at the Met,”
105 Ross Higgins, “A la Mode: Fashioning Gay Community Los Angeles Times (blog) (May 2, 2011). http://latimesblogs.
in Montreal,’ in Anne Brydon and Sandra Niessen (eds.), latimes.com/alltherage/2011/05/alexander-mcqueen-opens-
Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Tiansnational Body (Oxford at-the-met.html
and New York, 1998), p. 139. Interview with Joyce McQueen in the Daily Mail, quoted
106 Stan Herman, interview with Valerie Steele, May 31, 2012. in Tony Marcus,“I am the Resurrection,’ i-D Magazine
107 Steven Gaines and Sharon Churcher, Obsession:
The Lives and (September 1998), p. 148.
Times of Calvin Klein (New York, 1994), pp. 286-7. Andrew Bolton, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (New
108 Michael Bronsky, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility York, New Haven, and London, 2011), p. 16.
(Boston, 1984), p. 180. 131 Marcus,“I am the Resurrection,” p. 148.
109 Ibid., p. 187. 132 Judith Thurman, “Dressed to Thrill: Alexander McQueen at
110 Steven Gaines, Simply Halston: The Untold Story (New York, the Met,” New Yorker (May 16, 2011), p. 118.
1991), p.179. 133 Simon Doonan, interview with Valerie Steele, October 4, 2012.
III Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious 134 Guy Trebay, “The Subtle Power of Lesbian Style,’ New
Excess in 1970s Paris (New York, 2006), p. 330. York Times online (June 27, 2004), http://www.nytimes.
112 Ibid., p. 289. com/2004/06/27/style/the-subtle-power-of-lesbian-style.
113 Ibid., p. 367. html
114 Steele, Fifty Years ofFashion, p. 19. 135 Roger Boyes, “Gay stalker threatened to kill Queen of
115 Quoted in Steele, Fifty Years of Fashion, p. 100. Fashion,” The Times, (May 5, 2006), News: p. 40.
116 Darrell Moos, email message to author, August 2, 2012. 136 Olivier Theyskens, interview with Valerie Steele, November
117 See Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (Oxford and 28, 2012.
New York, 1996). 137 Ibid.
118 Richard Martin, “Out and In Fashion,” Art Forum (May 138 Peter Galvin, “Schmoozing Shimizu,” Advocate (March 7,
1995), Pp. 10. 1995); P- 53.
119 John Bartlett, interview with Valerie Steele, March 13, 2012. 139 Reina Lewis, “Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and
120 Lemon, “Gucci’s Gay Guru,” pp. 30, 23. Fashion Imagery,’ Feminist Review, no. 55 (Spring 1997),
121 Rosemary Feitelberg, “Tom Ford on Family, Fashion and p. 104.
Film,” Women’s Wear Daily (May 9, 2012). 140 Eric Wilson, “In Fashion,
Who Really Gets Ahead?” New
122 Karl Lagerfeld quoted in “Conversation between Rick York Times (December 8, 2005), http://www.nytimes.
Owens and Karl Lagerfeld,’ Jo-Ann Furniss, moderator, in com/2005/12/08/fashion/thursdaystyles/O8FASHION.
Rick Owens, by Rick Owens (New York, 2011), p. 100. html?pagewanted=all&_r=o
123 Bruce LaBruce, “Karl Lagerfeld:An Interview with the Sheila Jeffreys, Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices
Kaiser Himself,’ Vice (March 1, 2010), http://www.vice. in the West (London and New York, 2005), p. 96.
com/read/karl-lagerfeld-369-v17n3 Ibid., p. 46.
124 Lagerfeld Confidential, DVD, directed by Rodolphe Marconi, Olivier Theyskens, interview with Valerie Steele, November
(Port Washington, New York: Koch Lorber films, 2008). 28, 2012.
125 Alan Cumming, “Brides, Revisited,” Harpers Bazaar (April Karlo Steel, interview with Valerie Steele, April 12, 2012, at
2013), p. 279. his studio.
126 Lee Carter, “Hinterview, Rick Owens: Haunted House,” Narciso Rodriguez, interview with Valerie Steele, November
Hint Fashion Magazine, http://www.hintmag.com/ 15, 2012.
hinterview/rickowens/rickowens1.php Simon Doonan, interview with Valerie Steele, October 4,
127 Carson Chan, “From Rags to Rags: Rick Owens,” 032C, 2012.
Issue r9 (Summer 2010), http://032c.com/2010/from-rags- John Bartlett, interview with Valerie Steele, March 13, 2012.
to-rags-rick-owens/

PETER MCNEIL
CONSPICUOUS WAIST: QUEER DRESS IN THE “LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY’
IN THE PRESENT CONFUSION BETWEEN THE SEXES IT IS ALMOST A MIRACLE TO

BELONG TO ONE'S OWN SEX.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile?
MEN SAY THEY DON'T PARTICULARLY CARE HOW THEY DRESS, AND THAT IT IS
LITTLE MATTER. | AM BOUND TO REPLY THAT | DON'T BELIEVE THEM AND DON'T
THINK THAT YOU DO EITHER.
Oscar Wilde, on tour in Canada, 18823
CONTOURS OF QUEER
What are the main contours of the history of queer men’s fashion? What are
its narratives? How has the concept of queer men’s fashion been put together
eee, . within the history ofdress and the history of sexuality? How do the body and
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto. gesture work together to create a fashionable image? Why are young gay men
CONSPICUOUS WAIST / 77
attacked if they appear thin and pretty? What are the precursors for this way
of being in the world? Why does society blame gay male designers for attract-
ing female shoppers? How do persecuted minorities manage their identity
via clothing and fashionable looks? These are big questions indeed. They can
be tested in part through an historical overview and a series of case studies
reaching back in time, and in so doing, we see both how stereotypes travel
across time and how they are formed at specific historical moments.
This chapter will consider the tantalizing but difficult hypothesis that “gay
style actually sets trends. It’s what straight people take fashion from.” Richard
Martin proposed this in his short article “The Gay Factor in Fashion” in
Esquire Gentlemen in 1993, when he argued that gay male influence in the
refining and defining of masculine style “by dint of their attraction to their
own gender” had never been more pronounced than in the street-style ofthat
period: “Straight suburban males in recent years have absorbed gay style sig-
natures, including earrings and bandannas, and are now often indistinguish-
able from the gay clones of the 1970s . . . Christopher Street is our sartorial
Ellis Island.”4
But “gay fashion” before that point was often far from butch. This over-
view begins with the development of sodomitical subcultures in early-mod-
ern western Europe, that is, the period 1500-1800. Much can be recovered
of the fashionable taste of outsider males including their apparent liking of
vibrant colors, clashing colors and patterns, and sometimes also cross-dressing,
which seems to have fulfilled the roles of entertainment, ironic pleasure, or
occasional sex work. Against this “backdrop,” I unpack the “archaeology” of
queer dressing and explore the “queer trace” in eighteenth-century western
Europe. I examine the lure of the masquerade ball as an exciting queer space
and recover in terms of fashion, for the first time, a documented possible
“macaroni” scandal. We shall learn what was worn in the molly houses of
London in this period and how the devotees addressed each other there.
We shall explore the homosexual underworld of eighteenth-century Paris
and Utrecht through police records that recorded clothing. Did certain
colors have a ludic and deviant charge to them? How were the “pederasts”’
of Paris to be recognized by their shoelaces? The significance of contem-
porary writing and images to subsequent understandings of the queer man
cannot be underestimated. As the literary theorist George Haggerty remarks,

“already in these documents a kind of codification is going on: monstrous
and inextricably internal, the sodomite haunts the century with his lethal
familiarity.»
CONSPICUOUS WAIST
It is necessary to step back in time in order to understand the attitudes sur-

rounding fashion today in the modern west. In the early-modern period
there was as much interested in the difference between men and boys as men
and women. A type of triangulated gender system emerged that was always
in flux. It had a major impact on fashion since in many Italian Renaissance
cities men under thirty could not wear civic clothes until they came of age.
Thus they had to wear clothes in which there was temptation to engage
with fashion, and there was also more innuendo about same-sex attraction
and effeminacy. The thirteenth-century theologian Albertus Magnus argued
that sodomy was “more common in persons of high station than in humble
persons.’”° Moralists complained particularly of young men wearing body-
hugging fashions. Most saw this as a source of weakness or decline; one,
however, the author of the chronicle of Limbourg, a cleric in Mainz in 1377,
interpreted it as a sign ofjoy after the spectre of the Black Death.’
Elizabeth Currie has made a detailed study of sixteenth-century Italian
conduct literature. She notes that a distinction was made between old and
new in all forms of behavior, with outmoded things being considered
all’antica. Portraits of both men and women, with their trance-like faces, sig-
nal sprezzatura, the art of concealing art. Women, Currie argues, did not have
the means to represent the country or city through their clothing, and this
made women’s dress more open to accusations of deception and narcissism.
Men’s civic dress was prescribed and also public; women did not have a public
dress; so men’s dress was understood to represent wider social practices. Young
males, unable to enter political life until the age of thirty, were also more
likely to engage with changeable fashions, and like women, were accused of
immodesty, effeminacy, and sometimes homosexuality.* Bernadino of Siena
published a sermon in which he claimed that if parents sent their boys out of
the house wearing fashionable clothes with low doublets, showing parts of
the legs, and see-through shirts, then they were essentially acting as pimps for
their children.” Many commentators have reflected on the male prostitutes of
Renaissance Venice, who floated in gondolas dripping with fine clothes,’ an
image that has almost become a template for queerness in modern cultures.
Queerness is not confined to western Europe, of course. John T. Carpenter
has produced an innovative cross-cultural study in which the familiar poses
of English seventeenth-century Van Dyck dress are contrasted with the man-
nerisms of Edo Japan." Carpenter was writing on the kabuku aesthetic in
the early seventeenth century (early Edo), in the context of an exhibition
catalogue on kazari.The latter was the taste for a highly developed decorative
sense in the Japanese visual arts after the fall of Osaka Castle in 1615, when
craft workshops and patronage shifted to the new castle city of Edo. A dis-
placed generation of defeated warriors and their families were excluded from
power and resorted instead to an extreme mannerism of posture and dress.
Their kabuku appearance, with its sense of the “twisted” or outlandish, also
carried connotations of what would today be called “queer,” the former term
suggested by Carpenter, or perhaps “swish,” suggested here by me. Carpenter
compares the poses that appear in Japanese screen paintings of this period
to the “swagger” portraits of British painting by artists such as Anthony van
Dyck and Daniel Mytens in the reign of Charles I (r. 1625-49). The latter
function by contrasting the attributes of action and war, swords and spurs,
with a relaxed yet studied distortion of the body. The kabuku pose in Japan
is also related to kabuki drama, which, as Carpenter notes, was often a front
for sex work including male-to-male activity. The pleasure in watching the
performance was the tension involved in cross-dressing, innuendo, and eroti-
cism. Carpenter also describes the new domestic spaces of samurai mansions
where the young had access to senior military officials. The taste for new
games such as European playing cards, introduced by the Portugese, tobacco
from western traders smoked with elaborate pipes that delayed the pleasure
of the drug, and the tradition of music, indicate that fashion is a constellation
of behaviors and desires. The rebellious kabuku aesthetic was, Carpenter notes,
in their surfaces of costume, make-up, and hedonism, like the fluttering new
playing cards with which they toyed.”

CONDUCT BOOKS AND THE GENTLEMAN
Conduct books are a repository of attitudes towards models of appropriate

masculine fashion engagement. Most are based on the model of Baldesar
Castighone’s The Courtier (1528), which advocated a restraint that appears to
be absent from the eighteenth-century French court. Castiglione explains
that grace is “very agreeable and pleasant to all,’ but argues against excess and
feminine modifications:
I don’t want him to appear soft and feminine as so many try to do, when
they not only curl their hair and pluck their eyebrows but also preen them-
selves like the most wanton and dissolute creatures imaginable. Indeed,
they appear so effeminate and languid in the way they walk, or stand, or do
anything at all, that their limbs look as if they are about to fall apart; and
they pronounce their words in such a drawling way that it seems as if they
are about to expire on the spot. And the more they find themselves in the
company of men of rank, the more they carry on like that. Since Nature
has not in fact made them the ladies they want to seem and be, they should
be treated not as honest women but as common whores, and be driven out
from all gentlemanly society, let alone the Courts of great lords."
These types of phrases are taken up in nearly all of the subsequent attacks on
effeminate young men. They persist today. The connection of dress, body, and
speech is particularly significant.
CLOTHING AND CRIMINALITY
We know a great deal about the appearance of homosexuals (who should be

more correctly called “sodomites”’) in the past, as sodomy (with both women
and men) was a criminal act in many countries, and a number ofjurisdic-
tions kept sophisticated records dating back to the Middle Ages which sur-
vive today.'* In England in the eighteenth century two genders — male and
female — and three sexes — man, woman, and hermaphrodite were recognized.
Sir Edward Coke, in a seventeenth-century commentary on common law,
wrote that “every heir is either a male, or a female, or an hermaphrodite, that
is both male and female?’* Men who had sex with men were not at that
early date assigned to a third gender — both sexes were considered capable
of having sex with either sex."° The English eighteenth century began to
evoke the notion of a third gender to describe what the psycho-pathology of
the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries labelled “homosexuality.” Famous
and recognizable identities of the day were often referred to in the creation
of this understanding. It is for this reason that my essay invokes many named
individuals. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, referring to John, Lord Hervey, a
famous courtier politician (1696-1743) wrote that “there were three sexes:
men, women and Herveys.’?”
Christopher Breward was one of the first researchers to connect the idea
of fashion and sexuality with metropolitan cultures. In 1995 he wrote that it
“is more than coincidental that self-identifying groups of sodomites, choos-
ing to express their difference though dress and the body, should emerge at
a historical moment of material progress, expansion and diversification.’™
From the 1980s, numerous historians, notably Dutch, French, Australian, and
North American scholars, chose to connect the personal and the political by
excavating the archive for the queer trace. They discovered myriad records
of complex subcultures operating in London, Paris, Utrecht, and Rotterdam.
These were coming to the attention of authorities from the late seventeenth
century onward. By the 1730s the Dutch felt that this was a stronger devel-
opment and blamed it on the new prosperity following the Eighty Years War
with Spain (1568-1648). In 1730, for example, a Prebendary of a church in
Utrecht was arrested for sodomy and thrown out of his house for being seen
wearing a shepherdess costume.’ The later interest in “macaroni” men also
took place after a conflict, the Seven Years War (1756-63). In the 1740s English
men gave up the habit of kissing each other as a greeting in public.*' Male
social sobriety was on the rise.
The richest vein ofthis interest in sodomite culture is the famous “Mother
Clap” trials of 1727. In his extraordinary encyclopedia of human sexuality,
the sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote: “‘one gains the impression that homo-
sexual practices were more prevalent in London in the eighteenth century,
bearing in mind its population at that time, than they are today.’?? Raids on
molly houses took place in 1698, 1707, and 1726—7.The latter famous raid was
orchestrated by the Society of the Reformation of Manners, following which

sodomites were executed on the basis of information given in return for
informants’ immunity from prosecution.
A molly house was not a high-class venue but a bit of a dive — lower-class
houses and taverns. “Molly house” was slang for an establishment that was
a cross between a brothel and a drinking-hole. People were interested in
writing about mollies — the frequenters of molly houses — even before the
famous bust of 1726. Many of those reported upon were observed wearing
“masquerade” dress, and a report of 1709 complained that “they rather fancy
themselves women.”*} As revealed in the 1726 case, Margaret (Mother) Clap’s
molly house in Field Lane, Holborn, was for the meeting up of “commonly
30 or 40 of such kind of chaps every night, but more especially on Sunday
nights.’*4 Plus ¢a change, as Sunday night is still the best night for gay men to
go out around the world, as the appearance industries and some restaurants
are not open outside the big cities on Mondays.
Men visiting the molly houses danced downstairs and went to bedrooms
upstairs, and it was claimed that there were men of all social classes present,
from blacksmiths to gentlemen. Ironic female names were popular: Moll Irons
and Molly (for butchers and their bridesmaids); Mary Magdalen; Garter Mary
(a man who sold garters); Judith; Princess Seraphina; Plump Nelly; Nurse
Ashcroft and Fish Hannah (fishmongers). Martin Mackintosh sold oranges
and went by the name of “Orange Deb.”*s There were mock marriages, births
with jointed wooden dolls as babies, and christenings, all of which link the
high jinks to the mood of the carnivalesque. Sometimes the dolls were re-
placed by bellows or even a Cheshire cheese.*° At an alehouse kept by Whittle
in Pall-Mall, near St. James’s Square, there was a “chapel for marrying.’””
Thomas Orme, a silk-dyer, ran another molly house at the Red Lyon in
Crown Curt [sic] in Knaves-Acre.* The pamphlet Hell upon Earth: or the Town
in Uproar claimed that there were twenty such venues in London. The anony-
mous author wrote that such “vile persons” met each other at “what they
call the Markets,” including that centre for the purchase of fashion goods, the
Royal Exchange; as well as the Lincoln’s Inn Bog Houses, the south side of
St. James’s Park, the Piazzas in Covent Garden, St Clement’s Churchyard, etc:
“It would be a pretty scene to behold them in their clubs and cabals, how
they assume the Air and affect the name of Madam or Miss, Betty or Molly,
with a chuck under the chin, and ‘Oh, you bold pullet, Pll break your eggs’;
and then frisk and walk away.’
The mollies seemed to have liked to wear masquerade dress. The liter-
ary theorist Terry Castle has influentially sketched the masquerade as a place
in which unsanctioned desires were released.*? Others have more recent-
ly pointed out that the masquerade venues of eighteenth-century London
were not as subversive and socially mixed as might have been believed.*!
Nonetheless, the mask is a significant device and it extends beyond that ob-
ject simply worn on the face. The participants at a masquerade were called
“masks” themselves.** Masks and disguises were banned after in Bordeaux
in 1797 for their facilitation of moral and political evil.33 On one occasion,
returning from a ball, the London mollies were arrested and found to be
wearing: “gowns, petticoats, headclothes, fine laced shoes, furbelow scarves,
masks and complete dresses like women: others had riding hoods: some were
dressed like shepherdesses; others like milkmaids with fine green hats, waist-
coats and petticoats; and others had their faces painted and patched and very
extensive whoop petticoats which were then very lately introduced.”*+ It is
good to hear that they were in high fashion.
The press of the period seemed particularly interested in the fact that the
men seemed to come from different social groups. This obsession has a long
afterlife and was famously recounted during the Oscar Wilde trial, which also
had a“molly” air to parts of the proceedings. Lengthy description of inappro-
priate clothing was central to the evidence, which also recounted how Wilde
sent young men to have their hair curled by a French hairdresser. Women’s
clothes — dresses, an “Eastern costume,” wigs, shoes, and stockings were found
in the rooms of Mr Taylor, where Wilde had been introduced to young men,
and this was emphasized by the Prosecution, helping to convict Taylor.*s A
Charles Parker gave testimony that same-sex marriages using a real wedding
dress took place there, connecting the case to the older molly tradition.*
The Wilde trial also included evidence that he had dressed one of his young
companions above his station:
Counsel: Did you take the lad [Alphonse Conway] to Brighton? — Yes.
And provided him with a suit of blue serge? — Yes.
And a straw hat with a band of red and blue? — That, I think, was his un-
fortunate selection.
But you paid for it? — Yes.
You dressed this newsboy up to take him to Brighton? — No.I did not want
him to be ashamed of his shabby clothes.;7

FROM MASQUERADE MOLLY TO MACARONI MAN
The masquerade is the vital connector between the molly and the macaroni
in the eighteenth century. In 1771 the clever marketer of fashion satires-
Matthew Darly, published the print The Masquerade Dance, in which all the
costumed dancers are men, including “‘a bishop . . . a Turk, a Greek monk,
a quaker, a Jew and a monk. The devil plays on a pipe.’ At such events,
the early eighteenth-century molly known as “Princess Seraphina” (John
Cooper) liked to wear‘‘a white gown and a scarlet cloak with her hair frizzled
and curled all around her forehead; and then she would so flutter her fan and
make such fine curtsies that you would not have known her from a woman:
she takes great delight in balls and masquerades.”°
This behavior was not unique to London. In Rotterdam, in the late
eighteenth century, a Frenchman walking the streets in drag was mugged
by street boys. They cried out, “it is not a bitch, it is a Frenchman!’*? A man
arrested for sodomy in Utrecht in 1798 had his clothing described in some
detail: he wore “a light frock [an informal coat fashionable for the period]
with brown stripes, a white vest with little red dots, dark trousers, white
stockings, and shoes with yellow ribbons and a triangular black shining hat
with a black little rose, a black lus [sic] with yellow buttons attached to it.”#'
That the costume was recorded in such detail is important, reflecting an inter-
est in describing the colorful and clashing components, which were also of
course, high fashion. Perhaps it was through the clash of extremes that certain
men made themselves known to each other.
In the 1780—90s, according to the investigation of Commissioner “Faucault”
(a rather wonderful precursor to the investigations of twentieth-century the-
orist Michel Foucault) and Inspecteur “Noél” of the Parisian police, only
pederasts were wearing shoelaces instead of buckles, and this acted as a code
to recognize themselves in public places.*? Across the Channel, in 1792, shoe-
laces were also deemed to be “effeminate in appearance.” Yet the lace had
been standard before this time. Blackmail of homosexuals was very com-
mon in the eighteenth century. The indefatigable researcher of our eigh-
teenth-century queer past, Randolph Trumbach, has studied the records and
notes that thin and pretty-looking young men were frequently at risk of this.
“Delicate, good-looking men were more likely to have blackmail attempts
made on them whether they were sodomites or not ...To be small and pretty
and male in the streets of eighteenth-century London must have been some-
thing of a trial.’** Trumbach notes many such famous cases, including Charles
James Fox’s brother Stephen, who had been Lord Hervey’s lover and had to
be defended in a duel.*
The “molly house” format and incident was repeated again and again
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a famous example
being “The Vere Street Coterie,’ part of agroup of men arrested at a molly
house in Vere Street, London in 1810 for sodomy and attempted sodomy.**
In 1813 Robert Holloway published The Phoenix of Sodom, or the Vere Street
Coterie, Being an exhibition of the gambols practised by the ancient lechers of Sodom
and Gomorrah, embellished and improved with the modern refinement in sodomitical
practices, by the members of the Vere Street Coterie, of detestable memory, London,
J. Cook.The work describes the mollies of Exeter and London oftwenty-five
years past, one a chimney sweep, the other a nightman (collecting night soil).
As George Haggerty has argued, the degradation of the Vere Street Coterie,
who were attacked by a mob with refuse and dung, “renders them hideous-
ly and horrifyingly recognizable for what they represent”; they cease to be
human.‘
There was a very long after-life of these “narrative” structures as well as
real social scandals. Examples of cross-dressing are frequently connected
with street prostitution and there were infamous cases of elegantly cross-
dressed “hookers” throughout the nineteenth century, in London and also in
Australia. On October 10, 1863 a woman was seen to be soliciting in Fitzroy,
Melbourne, and was arrested on the basis of a tip-off. Dressed in a crino-
line, she later confessed in the cells to be “John Wilson — I am a man.’#* The
Melbourne press reported that Wilson had been soliciting in women’s clothes
for two years. All of the clients claimed they thought he had been a woman as
he did not remove his dress. Similarly, a few years later, at the 1888 Centennial
Exhibition in Melbourne, an actor was arrested in fashionable elegant female
dress and charged with Insulting Behavior, later Vagrancy; the Herald reported
his “get up was so excellent that it would deceive anybody.’ *? Sydney was
notable for balls including “Drag and Drain” in the 1930s and 1940s, and
“Artists and Models” in the 1950s and 1960s. Press stories include descriptions
of cross-dressed men in enormous dresses riding in delivery vans, and of a live
dove — sometimes a pigeon — worn in a cage as part of aMarie Antoinette

headdress. Police crime photography documented in the exhibition City of
Shadows: Sydney Police Photographs 1912-1948 (2005) held at the city’s Police
Museum shows the arrest of female cocaine dealers in decrepit fox stoles, as
well as cross-dressed male sex workers from the late 1930s or 1940s wear-
ing coats with huge rabbit-fur trimmed sleeves, turbans, and make-up. The
men still look decidedly male, suggesting that a part of their sexual charge
came from precisely this lack of ambiguity; it was clear that they were not
women. The images are reminiscent of the American documentary photo-
grapher Weegee (Arthur Fellig, 1899-1968) who documented the New York
underworld of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1933 a Josephine Naughton of Sydney
was described by the New South Wales Criminal Register as known to the
criminal classes as “the queen of the bitches”; she supposedly kept a brothel
and “rooms especially for the use of male sex perverts.”5° Such haunts were
likely one of the spots that generated the blackmail that dogged gay men in
the west until recently.
FASHION AND FRIENDSHIP
The extreme fashions ofthe mollies were not the only aspect related to same-
sex dressing in the eighteenth century. Clothing also might signal same-sex
love and friendship. How we interpret “men loving men” of the past can be
signaled through the case of Horace (Horatio) Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford
(1717-1797).
We see him here depicted in his separate but distinctly connect-
Pe WINGwing eace
PAG
ed “companion portrait” with Henry Fiennes-Clinton, 9th Earl of Lincoln
Rosalba Giovanna Carriera, and later 2nd Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyme, a gentleman who subsequent-
Henry Fiennes-Clinton Pelham
Clinton, 9th Ear! of Lincoln, later
ly married; a group of personal
:
letters between
;
them ; survives. This pair of
2nd Duke of Newcastle, KG, eXquisite portraits, now in different collections, was painted by the celebrat-
1741, pastel on paper. Courtesy
of The University of Nottingham ed pastel painter Rosalba Carriera in Venice in 1741, and it shows the men
(Trustees of the Newcastle wearing the exact same lavish brocaded blue silk waistcoat.
The mirroring is
Estate Bequest)
reinforced by the way in which the two men look at the viewer but face each
PAGE 69 other bodily, in a clear coupling of friendship, here indicated through fine
Rosalba Giovanna Carriera, ; , . i
Horace Walpole,c1741, pastel mutual dress, likely acquired abroad in Lyons or Italy. Carriera signals some
on paper. Private collection important differences, however. The Earl of Lincoln is dark-haired with a
Photo courtesy of the : : :
Bridgeman Art Library. less curling coiffure; the extra billowing drapery that surrounds his body
“envelope” confers on him more gravitas than Walpole, who also appears
closer to the picture plane, and therefore more “intimate.” Walpole sports a
beautifully tied wig-bag, the earl does not. Rather more of the physical body
of the earl is suggested, giving him a broader chest and a more manly persona.
Walpole also appears to thrust his bosom forward.
Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, Walpole’s “man loving man”
status was ignored and even rebutted until the 1960s. His chief biographer of
the interwar years,W. S. Lewis, the famous Walpole collector and editor of the
forty-eight-volume Yale edition of the Letters, interpreted Walpole’s relation-
ships as gentlemanly and platonic. Walpole was part of anetwork of bachelors
with same-sex inclinations, including the poet Thomas Gray, with whom
Walpole took the Grand Tour between 1739 and 1741, and whose work he
published on his private press, and the architect John Chute, who designed a
part of Walpole’s famous Gothic house, Strawberry Hill.
The historian Timothy Mowl’s anachronistic use of the term “camp” to
describe the strategies of Horace Walpole has been condemned in George
Haggerty’s subtle reading of male-male relationships, in which he argues that
Enlightenment “men of feeling” from the upper classes were capable of a
“sensibility ... so utterly eroticized as to make distinctions between what
is and what is not sexual almost beside the point.’ Haggerty argues that
a man of class and privilege such as Walpole, and also the Gothic promoter
William Beckford was able to “articulate his desire in terms that reconfigured
male—male affection as romantic love.”>? Haggerty focuses on a textual and
literary reading ofthe traces of these lives, to which I would add the aspect of
their dress.
THE MACARONI! MAN
Not well known beyond those who study late-Georgian England, the “maca-
roni” evokes bemused puzzlement when his name is mentioned. Slippery as
the pasta from which his name derives, the term “macaroni” was once widely
recognized in daily life, just as the word “punk” is in our day.““Macaroni” was a
topical term indicating ultra-fashionable dressing in England around 1760-80.
First use of the term appears within David Garrick’s play The Male-Coquette
A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION / go

(1757), which included the foppish character the “Marchese di Macaroni.”®3
Although occasionally used to refer to women noted for their conspicuous
gambling — described, like fashion, as a form of ephemeral expenditure — the
term generally referred to the styling of men. That famous observer of man-
ners, Sir Horace Walpole, makes numerous references to these figures. In the
first relevant letter, dated February 1764, he discussed gambling losses amongst
the sons offoreign aristocrats at the “Maccaroni [sic] club, which is composed
ofall the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses.”** Part
of the joke of the term was that it related to empty-headed men of fashion.
Macaroni, as an early nineteenth-century guidebook noted, means simply
“an Italian paste made of flour and eggs.” In other words, it was food of no
substance, the opposite of the “roast beef of England.” The carnival tradition
can also be linked to recurrent themes of the macaroni as “numbskull” or
“noodle-head,” and the satirical image of the empty-headed man sometimes
emerging fully grown from an “egg,” was used to illustrate one satirical text
on macaroni men.*
To wear macaroni dress generally meant wearing the contemporary con-
tinental court fashion of the male suit or habit a la francaise, which consisted
of a tight-sleeved coat with short skirts, waistcoat, and knee breeches. At
a time when English dress generally consisted of more sober cuts and the
use of monochrome broadcloth, macaronism emphasized the types of effects
associated with French, Spanish, and Italian textiles and trimmings such as
brocaded and embroidered silks and velvets; particular pastel colors such as
pink and green, fashionable patterns of spots, stripes, and small field motifs,
and refined textile surfaces such as those created with the use of chenille
threads and metallic sequins.
Continental textiles were very desirable in eighteenth-century England. In
1749 an Act of Parliament banned “the importation and wear of foreign em-
broidery and brocade, and of gold and silver thread, lace, or other work made
of gold or silver wire manufactured in foreign parts.” There were public burn-
ings of seized goods.*° Edward Maeder notes that this was a result of pressure
exerted by the Antigallican Society established in 1745.°” Foreign embroidery
was considered superior in terms of its design; the seizure of Lord and Lady
Holderness’s baggage full of several hundred prohibited examples in 1764 was
widely publicized.* From 1765 to 1826 there was a complete prohibition of
foreign silk fabrics but smuggling was common, ensuring their availability, —Man's sik coat, c1770-79, England
: : = : : - Photo courtesy Royal Ontario
and presumably doubling their allure.*? There was contraction in the English \.
silk industry from 1763 to 1773, blamed upon imports from France and the
arrival of new printed fabrics including Indian chintzes.°° The new fashion
for both sexes was a silk with much smaller woven patterns. In late 1770
Charles James Fox visited Paris again:
It was an undoubted fact that the sole intention of his journey was to
purchase clothes for the approaching birth-day, in defiance of the laws of
his country, by which a penalty of two hundred pounds was attached to
the wearing of apparel of French manufacture. Purchasing suits and lace
for others, the Customs House impounded those that had not been worn
and burned them."!
In 1763 Lord Riverstone paid £27 10s 3d for a scarlet, uncut velvet suit for
which he paid an extra £2 ss 6d to someone for “bringing them from Paris
and landing them duty-free.’ Walter Stanhope’s diary records the seizure of
plum-colored silk breeches from Paris, part of asuit which was to be embroi-
dered in silver; no similar silk could be found in England to match the top,
and the suit was wasted.’ The Royal Wedding of the future Louis XVI and
the archduchess Maria-Antonia (Marie-Antoinette) was held in Paris on May
16, 1770, and English macaronies including Stanhope witnessed the remark-
able splendor of the celebration and clothing; of the event the duc de Croy
noted, “all that one saw was a solid amphitheatre of fine clothes.’
The preferred color combinations are not without meaning, as they relate
to broader fashion schemes for goods and spaces as diverse as snuftboxes and
boudoirs. The colors particularly associated with macaronism include those
used in the contemporaneous interior design of the neo-classical architect
Robert Adam: pea-green, pink, and deep “barri” orange. (Adam’s architec-
ture was, in fact, despised by Horace Walpole, who was of an older genera-
tion, looking at a newer one.) Such clothes were also perfect for wearing
at the Pantheon, a newly opened masquerade venue built inr770—72 as the
“winter Ranelagh.” Designed by James Wyatt, it had a domed hall and
double-storied aisles and rounded ends, evoking Hagia Sophia. Friezes and
niches were illuminated with green and purple, and the dome was illuminated
by gilt vases. “The Byzantine body, mantled in Hellenistic embroideries, must

have been wonderfully surprising in 1772,” wrote the architectural historian
John Summerson.® A delightful suit, now too fragile to be displayed (in the
collection of the Royal Ontario Museum), makes this clear. It is apple green
with pink-and-green embroidery in neo-classical floral swags that cascade
playfully down the waistcoat front, the rear skirts and across the pockets, high-
lighting the links between modes of appearance in both dress and interior
decoration. Striped or spotted fabrics on stockings, waistcoats, and breeches
became highly fashionable, sometimes worn in contrasting arrangements.
The style in which the hair was worn was a critical element of maca-
roni fashion. Fashionable men in the late 1760s and 1770s replaced the small
scratch-wig of the older generation with elaborate hairstyles that matched the
towering heights of the contemporary female coiffure. For men, a tall toupée
rising in front and a club of hair behind required extensive labor and dressing
with pomade and white powder. This wig was garnished with a large black
satin wig-bag trimmed with bows. The effect of the hair could be copied
with real and partial wigging. The macaroni silhouette dominates the fashion
ideal of many of the men of this era and it is a signature of the notable por-
traiture associated with artists including Pompeo Batoni, Joshua Reynolds,
and Richard Cosway.
Motives for retaining elaborate dress requisite at court but not necessary in
the streets were various, inflected by the social position and personal motiva-
tions of the wearers. Macaroni status was attributed to figures as notable as the
Whig politician Charles James Fox (1749-1806) — “the Original Macaroni”;
the botanist and South Sea explorer Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) — the
“Fly Catching Macaroni”; the renowned miniature painter Richard Cosway
(1742-1821); the famed landscape garden-designer Humphrey Repton (1752—
1818); the St Martin’s Lane luxury upholsterer John Cobb; Julius “Soubise, ”
the freed slave of the duchess of Queensbury — the “Mungo Macaroni”; and
the Reverend William Dodd (1729-1777), the extravagantly dressed chaplain
to George III. Macaroni men included many socially prominent individu-
als who were undoubtedly heterosexual, such as Fox and Banks. A youthful
macaroni phase could be used to suggest professionalism, as in the case of
attacks on Banks’s dilettante practice of science later in his life. Cosway’s sur-
viving letters depict him as rampantly heterosexual, and it is puzzling as to
why he was depicted as a sodomitical fop in the Merchant Ivory film Jefferson

in Paris. It may be that the filmmaker made a simplistic version of the connec-
tion between macaroni and a compromised sexuality.
Hannah Greig’s research on the “beau monde” has indicated that surviv-
ing garments themselves tell us little about the contemporary meanings of
fine clothes. What was worn at court could be read by those in the know
and often did not lend itselftobeing copied by others.°° Macaroni men used
a number ofaccessories that were characteristic of court societies, including
the hanger sword, which was traditionally the preserve of the nobility and
which in England was fading from use. Red-heeled and slipper-like leather
shoes with decorative buckles of diamond, paste, or polished steel; a tiny niver-
nais or nivernois hat, named after the French Ambassador resident in London;
large floral corsages or nosegays; chateleines or hanging watches and seals
suspended around the waist; canes; decorative neo-classical metal snuffboxes
and eye-glasses — all feature in the enormous number of verbal descriptions
and images of macaroni. These objects contributed to an emphasizing of
courtly artifice in posture, gesture, and speech, further underlined by the use
of such cosmetics as face-whiteners and rouge. According to contemporary
reports, there was even a highly mannered macaroni accent and linguistic
idiom, captured in popular ditties and joke-books of the period.
FOPS, FRIBBLES, AND WHIFFLES
FOLLOWING PAGE The macaroni was frequently cast as an indeterminate gender figure. We see
How D’ye Like Me. Printed
for Carington Bowles, Map &
this clearly in the print “How d’ye like me,’ one of the more famous maca-
Printseller, No. 69 in St. Paul's roni images, in which, as well as the simpering figure, the fine setting, and
Church Yard, London, published
as the act directs, November
clothes, there is also the suggestion of a vulva in the man’s breeches which
19, 1772. Courtesy of The Lewis has been emphasized by the draughtsman. The macaroni has been little scru-
Walpole Library, Yale University
tinized within standard histories of sexuality.°” This is because dress has been
PAGE 97 little used as a lens to read early-modern sexual cultures. This is puzzling, since
Charles Grignion, A French Petit
Maitre and His Valet. Printed dress was central to the messages and codes through which people enacted
for Robert Sayer, No. 53 Fleet their lives. Whereas in the early years of the eighteenth century the foppish
Street, London, & J. Smith, No
35 Cheapside, as the act directs, paraphernalia of courtly dress was said to be attractive to women and enhance
November 1. 1771. Courtesy of
sexual allure, by the second half of the century irritation was expressed about
The Lewis Walpole Library,
Yale University this way of dressing, in both England and France. The macaroni is a departure
CONSPICUOUS WAIST 7 95
HOW D’YE LIKE ME.
Printed tor Carin gton Bowles. Map &Printseller, N°C9 tn S'Pauls Church Yard London. Publishidas the Met directs
Y Sp
DB:randown
eae)
flina fO
AGW . fob BS ies4
Gregnion
2
Sp.
¢ y,
c
A FRENCH PETIT MAITRE and HIS VALET.
London,Printed for Rob! Sayer, N°53,in Fleet Street &J. Smith N°35, Cheapfide, as the Act directs Nov 71. -
from the ruggedly bisexual “Restoration” rake, a great figure of fashion with
wonderful hats, feathers, and lace, a real lady-trap, and noted for his wild and
polymorphous couplings with anyone that moved. The macaroni type swiftly
became assimilated to a reading that favoured negative and sodomitical con-
notations; he shifted from being a “lady’s lapdog” as in the case of the French
petit-maitre (courtier fop), and became a figure of more trenchant derision.
Eighteenth-century viewers and readers thus responded to the macaroni
with a candor that was sometimes obliquely observed by the nineteenth-
century researchers who created much of our view of this period. The cata-
loguers of English prints working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were made uncomfortable by some of the overtly homosexual im-
agery connected with macaroni men. Those producing the British Museum
catalogue of satirical prints, for example, took the unusual step of not includ-
ing certain captions accompaying macaroni prints which were overtly sod-
omitical in their suggestion. This is significant, as usually the rigor and exac-
titude o the cataloguers was all-encompassing. Their practice was to print all
the details of relevant captions and also the related periodical texts. The great
cataloguer of the satirical prints belonging to the British Museum, Dorothy
George (1878-1971), tended to use terms from her own era, such as “minc-
ing” and “simpering,” to describe the more queer macaroni images that she
published.* Frederick Stephens, the compiler in the late nineteenth century
of the British Museum collection catalogue, chose not to reprint the follow-
ing section of text from The Town and Country Magazine, May 1772:
Such a figure, essence and perfumed, with a bunch of lace sticking out
under its chin, puzzles the common passenger to determine the thing’s sex;
and many a time an honest laboring porter has said, by your leave, madam,
without intending to give offence.”
Although the stage figure of the fop was allowed to be a sexually rugged
and polymorphous figure, the macaroni was more often cast as much more
distinctively sodomitical within the cultural imagination ofthe theatre. ““Lord
Dimple,” “Sir William Whiffle,” “Marjorie Pattypan,” and certain other fic-
tional macaroni ofthe time extend what is known ofthe eighteenth-century
sexual underworld.
The caricature of the macaroni connected older ideas of

the effects of luxury and mollitude with concepts of the sodomite as a third
sex, with attributes including a type of hysterical instability.
The macaroni on
the stage is always having a “hissy fit.’ He therefore may have connections
with much later conceptions of sexology, such as the late nineteenth-century
concept of homosexuality as the third sex, of male homosexuality, and neuro-
pathology. Central to this connection was the development of a new under-
standing of particular meanings of clothing and appearance.
BROADCLOTH, BROAD SHOULDERS
Macaroni men did not engage simply with a form of Continental court dress-
ing. Many images of them survive that indicate that they were synonymous
with “fashion” more generally. The cut of the clothes should be considered
carefully. Macaroni men always wore tight clothes with very narrow sleeves.
In the 1770s, finely cut suits of broadcloth in monotone colors were also
chic. This is the attire that can be seen in that very rare thing, an eighteenth-
century fine-art painting depicting what is believed to be a young man of
fashion who can be firmly connected to a queer scandal. At Clandon Park,
Surrey, Daniel Gardner (?1750-1805) painted a group portrait of, apparently,
(?)Edward Onslow (1758-1829), the 8th Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion
(1752-1830) and the 11th Earl of Pembroke (1759-1827), a delightful pastel
set into a neo-classical gilt overmantel mirror, of adate — around 1775 — that
accords with the age of the sitters.”
Edward Onslow and Lord Fitzwilliam are playing chess (the board in-
correctly set); the former is seated at the left dressed in a blue coat, the
Earl of Pembroke wears a red coat and stands with his arm around Lord
Fitzwilliam’s shoulder. Beside him is a black page. The picture forms an inte-
gral part of the chimneypiece mirror in a drawing room that has since been
redecorated by the late John Fowler. Onslow has the quintessential appear-
ance of amacaroni man. He was the second son of George Onslow of Imber
Court, later fourth baron and first earl of Onslow. The son went into exile
at Clermont-Ferrand in 1781 following a homosexual incident at the Royal
Academy’s Annual Exhibition, involving himself and one “Phelim Macarty.”
He then married a French wife and created a French Onslow family. In a
letter from the tenth earl to his son, Lord Herbert, wrote “in the name of
wonder, My dear George, what is this Mindening [sic -Maddening?] story
of our cousin Ned Onslow, & Phelim Macarty Esq ...I should hope that no
kinsman ofours donne dans le sexe masculine ...” (a word play that means “‘gives
in” to the masculine sex). The picture was not removed for some reason, nor
was he disowned, and he was visited in France later by the family.”
"FINGER-TWIRLERS” AND TIME-WASTERS72
For men of lower station, being caught in same-sex behavior could lead to the
gallows, although the incidence of hanging for sodomy was in fact quite low in
both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, generally a few cases
a year at most.”’ There is sufficient evidence in the pictorial and written records
to suggest that engagement with retailing high fashion was sometimes equated

in the public mind with sodomitical behaviour. People learned their precon-
ceptions from a great many sources, from ditties to joke-books and images. In
a contemporary joke book, Macaroni Jester, it is recorded, “A Macaroni being
told that none ofhis Fanity [sic - fraternity] could keep a secret: ‘yes (cried he)
but we can for no one yet knows whether we are Male or Female, ””* Same-
sex activity was understood less an affront to men as to women, as it made the
latter redundant. Women are frequently characterized in the period as the ones
offended by homosexuals. Mirroring real-life attacks on sodomites such as the
Vere Street Coterie, in many printed images, women take revenge and attack
over-dressed fops and also Frenchmen in the street. In 1793 a satirical text pub-
lished in Paris, noted that the whores of Paris were trying to have sodomites
outlawed, as they were bad for business, and wanted them to be forced to wear
hats surmounted by a motif such as a penis so as to not waste their time.”
The men’s fashionable coats of the 1760s were shorter than those of
the 1750s, rising above the knee or mid-thigh in the 1770s. This may have
given rise to some of the macaroni wisecracks regarding rumps and rears.An
engraving called The Cold Rump or Taste Alamode refers at the same time
to the short coat-tails of fashion, and to sodomotical taste, the fire de-
picted in it being a fairly obvious sign of the sinful states. Fire tools
stand by the figure’s side, like the cane and sword of the macaroni. Many
images of macaroni men feature the stripe, in stockings, waistcoats, or
frock coats. Michel Pastoureau’s study of the history of the stripe indicates
that the stripe carried vestiges of diabolical, sinister, or ludic connotations
until its use became more common in the 1790s.” The clashing compo-
nents of macaroni dress were not always “harmonious” but suggested
a mode of dressing that carried overtones of carnivalesque mentalités that
reach far back in time. To the mixture of colors and patterns in macaroni
fashions can be added the particular ocular eftects ofstripes, particularly when
woven with metallic threads, which have a disconcerting effect. It has also
been claimed that “many of these macaronis wore colored strings at the knee
of their breeches, but the fashion died away when highwayman Jack Ronn,
‘Sixteen String Jack’, as he was called after this fashion, had been hung in this
make of breeches.”” I have, however, found no evidence for this particular
claim, which connects macaronis with a famous criminal and a type of young
male urban “street fashion,’ which undoubtedly existed in the period.

There are many other indications that macaronism had associations with
sodomites. In May 1772 Town and Country magazine published a report on the
latest masquerade. It criticized the fashionable “Billy whifHles” of the present
age.” Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) included the
character Whiffle, who wears pink satin, crimson velvet breeches, diamond
buckles, an amber cane, a mask on his face, and white gloves. Smollett por-
trays Whiffle as sodomitical, as well as the character Strutwell in this popular
novel.” “Whiffle” was also slang for “penis.”
In his first suite of macaroni images, Matthew Darly included an image en-
titled Ganymede, which Dorothy George claimed refers to Samuel Drybutter,
a bookseller convicted of an “unnatural offence” in 1771.*° Drybutter was
a shopkeeper who was once thought to have written the only sodomitical
passage in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748), and who was killed by the mob
as a sodomite himself.*' Darly spells out the crime clearly in Ganymede and
Jack-Catch, which refers to both sodomy and the subsequent punishment.
Jack-Catch states, “Dammee Sammy your [sic] a sweet pretty creature and
I long to have you at the end of my string.’ Ganymede replies, “You don’t
love me Jacky.” Jack-Catch 1s the soberly dressed hang-man, Ganymede wears
lace ruffles and a nice wig. Other such prints include Ho He, the Blackguard
Macaroni (1773) and its companion Stephen StrutYe Tallow Macaroni, that refer
to the folly “such as Jack Ketch and the Devil hath reservd [sic] for their Own
private purposes.”
Lord Dimple and his Man in the Coal Pit is a story and image about two fops,
a master, and his servant, lowered down a mine, who subsequently cannot be
recognized as human by the miners. Their fine dress and airs is so extraor-
dinary that the miners think the men are aliens until they make friends and
share a drink, with all manner ofscatological assocations.®’ A French petit maitre
and his valet is another such image of obscene depravity. An elderly fop walks
in Paris in the rue d’enfer, the street of hell, bedecked with a huge corsage
and wig-bag, and a coat brocaded with hearts. There is the suggestion of a
penis and scrotum against the wall in the centre; the drain or sewer to the left
is a common enough innuendo in the period. Many satirical images, poems,
and stories, including the famous Fanny Hill, attacked fops for being “the most
worthless and despicable that could be, stripped of all the manly virtues of
their own sex and filled up with only the very worst vices and follies of ours.”

THE "“SHE-HE GENTRY”
Men in the appearance industries were frequently singled out as very dubi-
ous. Trumbach writes that it was strongly suggested from the early-eighteenth
century onwards that “men who were sodomites congregated in the various
trades that dealt with women’s hair and clothes, presumably because they
could there both display an interest in such things and have licence to behave
with an elegance that verged on effeminacy.’ Fanny Burney found male mer-
cers more “entertaining” than the clothes. By the 1790s it was claimed such
men took work from women who had to become servants or prostitutes
instead. Mary Hays called them a “she-he gentry.”™#
The macaroni hairdresser-type, with excessive hair and equally absurd
clients, was translated into a variety of interrelated media including caricature
prints and porcelain figurines. We see the innuendo clearly at work in Isaac
Cruikshank’s print The Man Milliner (1793), one of a great many images of
men serving women in the fashion trades. The lady customer remarks to the
fashionably dressed young man, “Indeed, Mr. Fribble, I am not to be done in
this manner . . . Your yard is to [sic] short by an inch.” The reference to his
yardstick for measuring ribbons concerns his virility, or lack thereof.
“Pribble” was a commonly used term of the period to describe a dubi-
ous man. In the 1750s the most famous actor of the age, David Garrick,
popularized the character of“Fribble,’ an overtly effeminate type of fop. He
wrote for himself the character Fribble in Miss in her'Teens (1747), his seventh
most frequently performed role out of ninety-six different ones. Miss Biddy
describes a fribble thus:
[A fribble] speaks like a lady ... and never swears .. . wears nice white
gloves, and tells me what ribbons become my complexion, where to stick
my patches, who is the best milliner, where they sell the best tea, and which
is the best wash for my face, and the best paste for the hands; he is always
playing with my fan, and shewing his teeth ... and cries The Devil take me,
Miss Biddy, but you’ll be my perdition.*°
In a speech pattern that is strongly reminiscent of the molly trials several de-
cades earlier, Fribble then goes on to explain what interests him:

[Fribble]...there is a Club of us, all young Batchelors [sic], the sweetest
Society in the World; and we meet three times a Week at each other's
Lodgings, where we drink Tea, hear the Chat of the Day, invent Fashions
for the Ladies, make Models of °em, and cut out Patterns in Paper.We were
the first Inventors of Knotting, and this Fringe is the original Produce and
joint Labour ofour little Community.
[Biddy] And who are your Set, pray?
Frib. There’s Phil Whiffle, Jacky Wagtail, my Lord Trip, Billy Dimple, Sir
Dilberry Diddle, and your humble . . .*”
These names had resonance: Whiffle refers to the Smollett character and
Cosway the painter was also called a “Billy Dimple” in a caricature of him at
work.
Fribble goes on to recount a scene in which “three drunken naughty
women ofthe town” break into the fribble Club premises, “curst us all, threw
down the China, broke six Looking-glasses, scalded us with the Slop-Bason
[sic], and scrat [sic] poor Phil Whiffle’s Cheek in such a manner, that he has
kept his Bed these three Weeks.’ The women break the mirrors of the men,
symbol of both narcissism and femininity, and throw the “dregs” of the slop
bowl containing the tea-waste over the poor chaps. There is no ambiguity
when Biddy replies, “Indeed, Mr Fribble, I think all our sex have great reason
to be angry; for if you are so happy now you are Batchelors, the Ladies may
wish and sigh to very little purpose.” Fribble’s love song to Miss Biddy Bellair
concludes, “Then take with me, Love’s better Part, His downy Wing, but not
his Dart.’ The implication that a fribble’s penis is wasted on him is shared with
many of the macaroni images produced as prints.
Garrick also interestingly indicates the speech pattern of Fribble, with pro-
nunciations such as “crateer” (creature), “meister” (master), “serous taalk” [sic]
(serious talk), “ooman nater” (human nature), which may well be the fash-
ionable speech pattern of male fashionables, also referred to in joke-books of
the period. Garrick had a strong interest in Hogarthian types, owned a large
caricature print collection, and held a reflexive view of the theatre and other
forms of popular culture. When Darly dedicated his 1772 suite of macaroni
engravings to Garrick this was a gesture that would have referred to both the
infamous fribble and also to Garrick’s performance of such roles. Mary Darly

MILLIN FT
aiS
————
Indeed M Putlle Sam not tole done in eis manner, your Yard. ts to short by aw Inch’,
Published 16% Deel1793, bv Rob! Sayer & C2 Fleet Street London,
ner repeated the gesture in 1776. Fops were also sometimes called “Jemmys” at
this time, a corruption of James, the name of a famous sodomite king.
Walpole The pose, clothing, and facial expression of stage fops as they survive in
“printed sources relate closely to a surviving porcelain figure of “Octavio,”
produced by the Nymphenburg Porcelain Factory as a part of its commedia
dell’arte series. Octavio is one of the florid names given to the male lover
(others include Flavio, Cinthio, and Lelio) who epitomizes gallantry and
elegance. Octavio was viewed as a light-weight and foppish male figure, char-
acterized by his elegant, affected pose, particularly as visualized by Franz Anton

A QUEER HISTORY
OF FASHION / 106
Bustelli’s famous figure of 1760.Thus types and representations of foppish and
/ or queer male fashionables had complex threads of inter-connection across
cultures, media, and formats. The theatre is an important site for reimagining
lost moods, feelings, and innuendo concerning queer men and fashion.
LADY'S LAPDOGS
Across the Channel there was also change afoot regarding men and finery.
From the 1760s Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the philosophes circle attacked the
urbanity of mode and manners characteristic of the petit maftre, the macaroni’s
French counterpart. In literature and art, the petit-maiftre occupied the “femi-
nized” space of the toilette and the boudoir, female zones and practices that
corrupted men’s reason.
The petit maitres, it was claimed, deferred to women
not only in matters of dress and deportment but in literature and statecraft.
His effeminate behaviour, the philosophes argued, led to a corruption of the
corporeal body and the body politic, and a set of moral and health-relat-
ed concepts was mobilized against him. In Emile (1762), Rousseau links his
theory of gendered education to a critique of contemporary manners. He
advances women’s toilette as caused not by “vanity but lack of occupation.”™
The dancing master 1s discussed as particularly pernicious, in a passage straight
from Castiglione.
I wish there were fewer ofthese dressed-up old ballet masters promenading
our streets. I fear our young people will get more harm from intercourse
with such people than profit from their instruction, and that their jargon,
their tone, their airs and graces, will instil a precocious taste for the frivoli-
ties which the teacher thinks so important, and to which the scholars are
only too likely to devote themselves.”
Notions of the individual underwent change in both France and England,

shifting the emphasis from a stress on surfaces and performativity to the bour-
geois depth-model that had dominated nineteenth-century thought.” As the
macaroni was so frequently pilloried as enfeebled, impotent, and unhealthy,
the discourse has particular relevance for reading the macaroni as a cultural
type, a “typing” more convincing for the strength of subsequent ideas that
circulated around gay or queer men as psychologically sick.

COURTIERS AND INCROYABLES
There were many other great queer fashion scandals that fascinated the new
readers and viewers of the eighteenth century. In 1775 the Chevalier d’Eon
de Beaumont (1728-1810), a diplomat and serial cross-dresser, signed the
“Transaction” agreement, worded by playwright P. A. de Beaumarchais, co-
signed by Louis XVI, stating that the “man” was in fact a “woman.” In 1778
he demanded the right to join the army as a woman, which was declined.
Henceforth he was required to wear female clothing to court and became a
sensation throughout West Europe. From 1785-1810 he performed as a female
fencer in London. On his death doctors determined that he was male. All
educated readers knew about the case of the Chevalier d’Eon.
The period of the French Revolution and after was particularly vola-
tile regarding fashions. Robespierre fell in July 1794 and was executed
(9 Thermidor). After this, power moved to the centre. The Girondins came
to the fore and the Jacobin clubs were closed. This was the period of the
Directoire, the five Directors, who lived lavishly at the Luxembourg palace
and restored social life. Fashion responded and became a part of the spectacle.
The Incroyable and Merveilleuse types replaced knee breeches with tapering
trousers, a garment from the wardrobe of sailors and rivermen, women’s
hooped dresses with near-nude muslin and feather-cut hairstyles, buckled
shoes were replaced with boots and even shoelacing. Street gangs called the
Jeunesse dorée or muscadins retained aspects of court dress as an affront to the
authorities and the sans-culottes (those without knee breeches). Bosio, Isabey,
and Vernet depict them in tight coats with seventeen buttons in memory of
the orphan Louis XVII. They wore wigs supposedly made from the hair of
guillotine victims; black-velvet collars to mourn the decapitated king, chiné
silk stockings, open shoes, whitened hands, and emphasized affected voic-
es. Consisting of absentee conscripts, deserters, the staff of theatres, luxury
shops, and banks, they numbered several thousand and congregated around
the Palais-Royal, the former site ofaristocratic shopping and display. Francois
Gendron theorizes that until Brumaire, the jeunesse dorée were the Committee
of General Secretary’s private militia and were encouraged surreptitiously.”
Numerous images were created of the Incroyables and in some such images
a homoerotic element was at work. In the French print “L’embarrass des
Queuex” (c. 1802), a pair of Incroyables and Merveilleuses walk to the left. The

De Ley Oy: des Cuewea?
Ea Qairee
S75 |
Rue Montmartre, N° 132.
Depowe a la Bibliot Nat.
‘embarrass
e des Queues’ from title is a sexual pun on a “wealth of trains,” that is, that the men might walk
Le Bon Genre, réim,
recueil de 182
997 on the women’s dresses. Queues is slang for penises and the men are in close
les Observa tion. conversation, ignoring the women. One incroyable wears a ribboned bell at his
Fa
115 gravures, pre
Moussinae. Paris: Editions
waist and sports embroideries that resemble the male member on the upper
Albert Lévy 1931.Image part of his breeches. He holds an “Hercules” club, a little erection of sorts.
courtesy of Fashion Institute — x E 4 ; :
of Technology/SUNY, FIT Library This is a good example of the complexity of such images. The men might
Dept. of Special Collections and
be over-excited by the fashionable women or they might be more interested
FIT archi
in themselves. It might simply be a vulgar joke contrasting fine fashion with
base aims.”

QUEER CODA
As early as 1978, the historian A. D. Harvey noted that, “The twentieth-

century archetype of the camp queer, which bears so little relationship to
twentieth-century homosexual customs, almost certainly derived from the
eighteenth century.’ The function and tenacity of aristocratic dress codes
is evident in the fin-de-siécle nineteenth-century dandy and played out well
into the 1960s. It is the point of the generational conflict in the film The
Boys in the Band (1970). These Wildean strategies continue to survive, that
which Alan Sinfield, in The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde, and the
Queer Moment (1994), called the constellation of “effeminacy, leisure, idle-
ness, immorality, luxury, insouciance, decadence and aestheticism.”** The
influential writer Camille Paglia also made Oscar Wilde the linch pin be-
tween Late Romanticism, Baudelarian anti-Naturalism, and the twentieth
century: “Since World War I, only homosexual aesthetes have carried on the
Gaultier-Wilde philosophy, applying it to antiques, opera, and movies.” She
goes on to state, “Even today, as camp has faded, part of the male homosex-
ual world still follows a vanished aristocratic code; class consciousness, racial
stratification, amoral veneration ofyouth, beauty, and glamour, love ofscandal
and gossip, and use of stinging bon mot and theatrical persona of the andro-
gyne of manners.”’’ As well as suggesting difference and excess, aristocratic
dress codes might also have been adopted because the suggestion of wealthy
assurance could excuse out-of-the-ordinary behavior. The corollary is the
interwar “mannish” lesbian such as the artist Gluck (Hannah Gluckstein),
whose eccentric but purposeful adoption of male dress in public was seen as
a privilege of her great wealth and possible outsider status.
This essay on the queer-clothing archaeology ofthe eighteenth century has
tended to emphasize opposites, following what appears in the historical record.
This world of binaries was persistent but the world changed dramatically after
World War IH. For example, it was considered startling and more challenging
when femme/femme and butch/butch coupling became visible in the post-
Stonewall era. The Eisenhower era was the period, after all, when prolific
author Edmund Bergler, M. D., could publish his text Fashion and the — \yark James Daniel, Mr Charles
Unconscious (1953) which argued that the male fashion designer was “suffused y Dress (Side View),
esy Pictures Collection,
with unconsciously illegitimate and malicious intentions” towards women, © State Library of Victoria

beeaa
*
‘|
a
if
rd
male designing being the “homosexual’s fashion-hoax,’ a group whose
“notorious unreliability” and “personality structure and actual behaviour
...remain incomprehensible” (other works include Divorce Won’t Help, Frigidity
in Women, and One Thousand Homosexuals).°° The reader should by now be
able to detect quite easily the backdrop to such commentary. It dates from
nearly 300 years ago in the English-speaking world. Interestingly, Bergler was
arguing against the idea that “every man whose appearance or mannerisms
are ‘effeminate’ must be a homosexual.” Here his attempt was to demolish
the queer man’s claim that “on the conscious level, the homosexual’s story
is that he is merely imitating a heterosexual relationship.” Bergler’s extreme
views are still commonplace today, and despite the example of recent films
such as that about the relationship of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé,
the fashion industry remains something of a walk-in closet. This is hardly
surprising, given the fact that homosexuals experience the vicious, insidious,
and omnipresent workings of both overt harassment and thinly disguised
homophobia, even in industries such as fashion, where history appears to
suggest they belong, even if they are not — it seems — completely welcome.

I take this apt title from the amusing exhibition named connected with both prostitution and witchcraft, and
by Everett P. Lesley Jr. and William Osmun, Conspicuous hence came under a double scrutiny. David Lorenzo Boyd
Waist: Waistcoats and Waistcoat Designs 1700-1952, exhibition and Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Interrogation of aMale
catalogue,
The Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth-century London,” in
Decoration (New York, 1952). A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 1, no. 4 (1995),
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile [1762] (London, 1993), p. 426. pp. 459-65. For Boswell, see their note 1, p. 46.
Oscar Wilde, “The House Beautiful,’ in Kevin O’Brien, Randolph Trumbach, “London’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes
Oscar Wilde in Canada:An Apostle for the Arts (Toronto, 1982), to Four Genders in the Making of Modern Culture,” in
p. 179. Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex Third Gender: Beyond Sexual
Richard Martin, “The Gay Factor in Fashion,” Esquire Dimorphism in Culture and History (New York, 1994), p. 119.
Gentlemen (Spring 1993), p. 135. Ibid., p. 113.
George E. Haggerty, “Dung, Guts and Blood: Sodomy, Patrick Higgins (ed.), A Queer Reader (London, 1993), p. 93.
Abjection and Gothic Fiction in the Early Nineteenth Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History
Century,” Gothic Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, p. 48. ofFashionable Dress (Manchester and New York, 1995),
Wayne Dynes, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of p. 140. See also Betsky on this point: “the emergence of
Homosexuality, Gai Saber Monograph, no. 4, Gay Academic homosexual networks was coincident with the emergence of
Union (New York, 1985),p. 14. ideas about personal freedom and mobile social relations in
Odile Blanc, “From Battlefield to Court: The Invention of which each person could make a space for himself.” Aaron
Fashion in the Fourteenth Century,” in Désirée Koslin and Betsky, Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire (New
Janet Snyder (eds.), Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: York, 1997), p. 62.
Objects, Texts, Images (New York, 2002), p. 159. 19 Theo van der Meer, “Sodomy and the Pursuit of a Third Sex
Elizabeth Currie, “Prescribing Fashion: Dress, Politics and in the Early Modern Period,” in Herdt (ed.), Third Sex Third
Gender in Sixteenth-Century Italian Conduct Literature,” Gender, p. 182.
Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, vol. 4, Ibid.,p.168.
no. 2, (2000), pp. 157-77. Randolph Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy
Helmut Puff, “The Sodomite’s Clothes: Gift-giving and and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture,
Sexual Excess in Early Modern Germany and Switzerland,” 1660-1750,” in Martin Baum Duberman, Martha Vicinus,
in Anne L. McClanan and Karen Rosoff Encarnacion and George Chauncey Jr. (eds.), Hidden from History:
(eds.), The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation and Marriage in Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (London, 1991), p. 134.
Premodern Europe (New York, 2002), p. 261. is) ty Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (New York,
10 This image is well conjured up by Richard Sennett in 1901), vol. 1, part 4, p. 46.
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization [Edward Ward], The History of the London Clubs .. . The
(London, 1994), p. 223. Second Part of the London Clubs: Containing. The No Nose Club,
Il John T. Carpenter, “ ‘Twisted’ Poses: The Kabuku Aesthetic The Beaus Club, The Mollies Club, The Quacks Club (London,
in Early Edo Genre Painting,” in Nicole Coodlidge 1709), facsimile reprint by F[red] M[archmontl, p. 28.
Rousmaniere (ed.), Kazari: Decoration and Display in Japan [Author unknown] Select Trials forMurders, Robberies, Rapes,
15th—19th Centuries (London, 2002), pp. 42-9. Sodomy, Coining, Frauds and Other Offences. At the Sessions
12 Peter Burke famously also compared Renaissance Italy House in the Old-Bailey. To which are added Genuine Accounts of
with a later period, Genroku Japan (1688—1703), in order to the Lives . . . of the most eminent Convicts, second ed., vol. 2
underscore a secularization and a floating world in which of4 (London, 1742), p. 362.
erotic fashion pleasures reigned. Peter Burke, The Italian 25 Trial of Gabriel Lawrence for sodomy, April 1726. Ibid., vol.
Renaissance, second ed. (Princeton, 1987), p. 246. 3 Of 4, p. 36.
13 Baldesar Castiglione, Etiquette
forRenaissance Gentlemen, trans. 26 Randolph Trumbach, “Modern Sodomy: The Origins of
George Bull [1967] (London, abridged edn., 1995), p. 10. Homosexuality, 1700-1800,” in Matt Cook (ed.), with H.
14 For medieval England, there survives the rare testimony of G. Cooks, Robert Mills, and Randolph Trumbach, A Gay
John Rykener, called “Eleanor,” apprehended in London History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men Since the Middle
in December 1394.A prostitute, she also worked in Oxford Ages (Oxford Westport, Conn., 2007), p. 87.
as an embroideress, having sex there with students of the Trial of George Whitle [sic] for sodomy, April 1726, Select
university for money, and also sex with women, the latter Trials
forMurders, vol. 2 of 4, p. 370.
not for money, she claimed. The historian John Boswell Trial of George Kedger for sodomy, April 1726. Ibid., p. 366.
notes that in the Middle Ages, male transvestism was Higgins, A Queer Reader, p. 93.

Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Ibid., p. 159.
Eighteenth-century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, 1986), p. 4. Peter McNeil, “Macaroni Masculinities,” in Peter McNeil
Amanda Vickery, “Venice-on-Thames,” London Review of and Vicki Karaminas (eds.), The Men’s Fashion Reader (New
Books, vol. 35, no. 3 (February 7, 2013), pp. 31-2. York and London, 2009), p. $5.
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution Ibid.
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1984), pp. 66-7. The Macaroni Jester,and Pantheon of Wit (London, n. d. [1773]),
Ibid. frontispiece.
Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen,” p. 138. On the prohibition of foreign embroidery see Edward
[Author unknown], Oscar Wilde, Three Times Tried (London, Maeder, “Made in England? An Eighteenth-century Trade
1911), p. 173. Taylor claimed he had bought the dress for a Embargo of Foreign Embroidery raises Interesting Questions
ball at Covent Garden. His landlady also accused him of about the Meaning of ‘Foreign, ” Rotunda: The Magazine of
wearing a gold brooch with his nightshirt, which was seen as the Royal Ontario Museum, vol. 30, no. 3 (Spring 1998), pp.
damning. 34-40; on burnings see p. 38. On the smuggling of silks see
36 {Author unknown], Oscar Wilde, Three Times Tried, p. 199 Natalie Rothstein, “Nine English Silks,” Bulletin of the Needle
ay) Ibid., p. 61. and Bobbin Club, vol. 48, nos. 1-2 (1964), p. 21.
Frederick George Stephens and Edward Hawkins, Catalogue $7 Maeder, “Made in England?” p. 36.
of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Division I. 58 Ibid., p. 38.
Political and Personal Satires, vol. 4: 1761-1770 (London, 1883), $9 On the trade in prohibited textiles see Anne Buck, Dress in
p- 761. Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1979), pp. 189-91.
Trumbach, “The Birth of the Queen,” p. 139. 60 Natalie Rothstein (ed.), Barbara Johnson’s Album ofFashions
Van der Meer, “Sodomy and the Pursuit of aThird Sex,’ p. and Fabrics (London, 1987), p. 30.
168. OI B.C. Walpole, Recollections of the Life of the Late Right
Ibid., p. 167. Frock refers to a male coat; lus [sic] possibly Honorable Charles James Fox: Exhibiting a Faithful Account of the
to a particular weight oftaffeta often associated with female Most Remarkable Events of His Political Career, and a Delineation
dress, of His Character ... (London, 1806), p. 27. The birthday is the
Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello, “The Art and Science of King’s birthday, at which it was customary for a new suit to
Walking: Gender, Space, and the Fashionable Body in the be worn.
Long Eighteenth Century,’ Fashion Theory: The Journal of The bill and suit survive in the City of Birmingham
Dress, Body and Culture, vol. 9, no. 2, p. 19T. Museum. C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington, Handbook of
43 Appeal from the Buckle Trade of London and Westminster to the English Costume in the Eighteenth Century [1964] (Boston,
Royal Conductor of Fashion (London, 1792), p. 2. 1972), p. 15.
44 Randolph Trumbach, “Blackmail for Sodomy in 18th- A.M.W. Stirling, Annals of a Yorkshire House from the Papers of
Century London,” Historical Reflections / Relexions historiques, a Macaroni & his Kindred (London, 1911), vol. t, p. 326.
vol. 33, no. I, pp. 38-9. Ibid., p. 237. For the duc de Croy’s comment, see Ian
Ibid., p. 37. Dunlop, Marie Antoinette: A Portrait (London, 1993), p. 75.
A. D. Harvey, “Prosecutions for Sodomy in England at the John Summerson, Georgian London, third edn. (London,
Beginning of the Nineteenth Century,’ in The Historical 1978), p. 152.
Journal, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 941-2. Hannah Greig, “Fashion, Prestige and Eighteenth Century
Haggerty, “Dung, Guts and Blood,” p. 36. Beau Monde,” in Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (eds.),
Lucy Cheeser, “Cross Dressing, Sexual (Mis)R epresentation The Fashion History Reader (London and New York, 2010),
and Homosexual Desire, 1863-1893,” in David L. Phillips p. 236.
and Graham Willett, Australia’s Homosexual Histories: Gay 67 On the interlinked sartorial and sexual terms, see Peter
and Lesbian Perspectives 5, Australian Centre for Lesbian and McNeil, “Macaroni Masculinities,” Fashion Theory: The Journal
Gay Research (Sydney) and the Australian Lesbian and Gay ofDress, Body and Culture, vol. 4, no. 4 (2000), pp. 373-404
Archives (Melbourne) (2000), p. 3. and Peter McNeil,
“’ That Doubtful Gender’: Macaroni Dress
49 Ibid., p. 5. and Male Sexualities,’ Fashion Theory:
The Journal of Dress,
50 New South Wales Police Criminal Register, May 10, 1933. Body and Culture, vol. 3, no. 4 (1999),
pp. 411-47.
Courtesy Frank Bongiorno, Canberra. 68 Catalogue ofPolitical and Personal Satires Preserved in the
SI George E. Haggerty, Men in Love; Masculinity and Sexuality in Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, vol.
the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999), p. 154. V, 1771-1783, p. 71." The Macaroni: A Real Character at

the Late Masquerade” [DG 5221] is also described as “in a 80 Stephens claimed that it refers to Samuel Vaughan and Jack
mincing attitude.” Ibid., p. 160. Ketch. Stephens, Catalogue, p. 545.
69 “Character of aMacaroni,” Town and Country Magazine, Terry Eagleton, “Grub Street Snob. Review of ‘Fanny Hill
vol. 4 (May 1772),p.243. in Bombay; The Making and Unmaking of John Cleland’
70 No. 17 in the Clandon inventory by Adshead (typescript), by Hal Gladfelder,’ London Review ofBooks, vol. 34, no. 17
National Trust, Clandon. (September 13, 2012), pp. 27-28.
71 I viewed this painting c. 2003. It is listed but not illustrated George, Catalogue, p. 148. Consider also Refin’d Taste, by
in Clandon Park, Surrey, The National Trust, Handbook (London, Mansergh for R. Sayer (c. May 1773): a reissue ofa plate by
2002), p. 16.1 was kindly sent the notes on this painting Darly (n. d.).
written by Alastair Laing, the National Trust’s picture Lord Dimple and His Man in the Coal Pit, in Oxford magazine,
adviser, by the Clandon House staff. On the work, see vol. 8 (February 1, 1776), p. 418.
Karen Stanworth, “Picturing a Personal History: The Case All quotes from this section from Trumbach, “Modern
of Edward Onslow,” Art History, vol.16, no. 3, September Sodomy: The Origins of Homosexuality,” p. 89.
1993, pp. 408-423. Recently some reservations have been George Winchester Stone Jr. and George M. Kahrl, David
expressed by the family as to whether the attribution is Garrick: A Critical Biography, Appendix B, performances dated
correct. In May 2013 Alison Harpur, Assistant Curator of 1741-76 (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 1979), 59
Pictures and Sculptures at the National Trust, wrote to the performances in total.
present author: “As far as we are aware, the identification of 86 Ibid., pp. 209-10.
the sitter in the dark blue jacket at the left of the portrait 87 “Miss in her Teens,” in David Garrick, The Plays of David
remains that of Edward Onslow, younger brother of the 2nd Garrick, ed. Gerald M. Berkowitz, vol. 1 of 4 (New York and
Earl, although it is recorded as tentative.’ The candor of the London, 1981), pp. 20-1.
Trust, considered by some a conservative body, in labeling 88 Rousseau, Emile, p. 402.
this painting in such a frank manner, is to be commended. 89 Ibid., p. 405.
72 Hester Thrale called Horace Walpole’s great friend in Italy, 90 On this point see Thomas A. King, “Performing ‘Akimbo’:
Horace Mann, a “finger-twirler.”
Trumbach, “Blackmail for Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice,’ in Moe Meyer
Sodomy in 18th-century London,’ p. 37. (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London and New York,
73 Harvey, “Prosecutions for Sodomy in England,” pp. 947-8. 1994), p. 23.
74 The Macaroni Jester, and Pantheon of Wit, p. 79. 91 Frangois Gendron, The Gilded Youth ofthe Thermidor
75 Les petits bougres au manege, ou réponse de M. xxx. Grand (Montreal and Kingston, 1993) [trans. from the French, La
maitre des enculeurs, et de ses adhérents, défendeurs, a la requéte Jeunesse sous Thermidor, 1983].
des fouteuses, des macquerelles et des branleuses, demanderesses, 92 I thank Alison Matthews-David for suggesting this reading
enculons and Paris, an. II (1793), p. 26. of the print.
76 Michel Pastoureau, L’Etoffe du diable: Une histoire des rayures et 93 Harvey, “Prosecutions for Sodomy in England,” p. 945.
des tissus rayés (Paris, 1991). 94 Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and
tif Dion Clayton Calthrop, English Costume Painted and Described the Queer Moment (London and New York, 1994), p. 3.
(London, 1907), p. 434. 95 Camille Pagila, Sexual Personae:
Art and Decadence from
78 Town and Country Magazine, vol. 4 (May 1772), p. 237, article Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New Haven and London, 1990),
signed, “A Mask.” P. 557-
79 Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. Paul- 96 Edmund Bergler, Fashion and the Unconscious [1956]
Gabriel Boucé (Oxford, 1979), p. 459. (Madison, Conn.), p. 51.

Arsen
Seetteaner~y
a aang rn
rod
ae
CHRISTOPHER BREWARD
COUTURE AS QUEER AUTO/ BIOGRAPHY
The prologue to the autobiography of the great couturier Christian Dior,

translated into English by Antonia Fraser in 1958, provides a revealing insight
into the inner life of a man whose name, more than any other, became
synonymous with the production of apowerful form of elegant and luxurious
femininity that defined the imagery and culture of the mid-twentieth-century
couture industry. Offering up the concept of “The Two Christian Diors,” the
great designer complains that,
Reviewers often describe authors of memoirs as “leaning on their past.”

I have never liked this expression .. . it implies that [the writer’s] past is
already dead and done with ...1 am convinced that my finest memories are
yet to come, and that even my past is only just behind me. After all Christian
Christian Dior in the Dior is only nine years old — which explains why the most interesting thing
sitting -room of his hor
1957 *hatoby Loo
about him, for me, is not what has happened to him ... but what is going
& Life Pictures/ to happen to him.’
COUTURE AS QUEER AUTO/BIOGRAPHY / 117

The sad prescience of Dior’s observation is made all the more acute by our
knowledge that he died unexpectedly within a year of publication, though
the business to which he lent his name has survived and prospered to the
present day. And it is the business of Christian Dior that forms the focus of
most of his book, with only the final fifth addressing the private world of
home and family background.As Dior continues:
You will gather ...That there are two Christian Diors: and I am speaking
now of Christian Dior couturier, of Maison Christian Dior, 30 Avenue
Montaigne, born 1947. It was in order to tell the truth about this second
nine-year old Christian Dior that the first Christian Dior decided to write
this book. He had been the subject of quite enough inaccurate discussion
already, and I felt it was time to let the world know the real facts about him
... Ensconced in a magnificent house on the Avenue Montaigne, he 1s a
compound ofpeople, dresses, stockings, perfumes, publicity handouts, press
photographs and every now and then, a small bloodless revolution whose
reverberations are felt all over the world.’
On the subject of the first, flesh and blood Christian Dior, the author is far
more reticent, projecting a guarded characterization that is set in deliberate
contrast to the public pomp of his namesake. In Dior’s words:
I present a very different sort of picture: I was born at Granville in

Normandy on January 21 1905, the son of Alexandre Louis Maurice Dior,
manufacturer, and Madeleine Martin his wife. I am half Parisian, therefore
and half Norman, and I am still very attached to my native Normandy,
although I rarely go there now. I like all the simple things oflife, such as
small parties of old friends. I detest the noise and bustle of the world, and
sudden, violent changes. Yet to suppress this shrinking character altogether
would have seemed to me a form of cheating; it would also have deprived
my story of some of its personal touches.
I am fascinated by this dual presentation ofself and what it might tell us about
the status, practice, and popular understanding ofcouture in the postwar period;
not least because Dior was not the only figure in the fashion world to set his
life and opinions down on paper. Following in the pre-war tradition of Poiret,
Lucile, and Schiaparelli, several designers and journalists produced revealing

and often rather racy accounts of their lives in fashion during the 1950s, which,
though sometimes dismissed by historians as unreliable vehicles for self
promotion, to my mind present a vivid encapsulation of the unique character
of couture and its hidden hinterlands, that deserves a closer examination.
Their books may well operate on the level of gossip, and their brittle
obsession with surface may leave the contemporary reader rather cold, but a
reading between the lines offers valuable clues to the workings of a strange
and secretive world whose glamorous products disguised complex tensions
between an individual creative and psychological impulsiveness, and a rigid
industrial and social system of control, whilst also drawing on the productive
energy that such tensions gave rise to. Not to state it too bluntly, the loaded
words of the men who made spectacular fashion for wealthy women in the
fraught 1940s and 1950s provide a privileged entry into specific forms of
personal and material expression that recent scholars have re-appropriated
for queer studies.* Dior put it all very well indeed through recourse to the
romantic world of nineteenth-century literature, stating that:
My celebrated fellow countryman, Gustave Flaubert, once defended one

of the characters in his novels . . . with the bold words “I am Madame
Bovary.” And were that other Christian Dior ever to involve me in a similar
situation, I should certainly defend him with my last breath: “I am he.”
For whether I like the thought or not, my inmost hopes and dreams are
expressed in his creations.°
Before considering the memoirs of just four key personalities in the postwar
French and British couture industry, it may be worth reflecting for a moment
on the value of popular biography and its prominence as a literary form
in the mid-twentieth-century. As the historian of the genre, Catherine N.
Parke argues, the great intellectual revolutions of the Modern era, namely
Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism, were all contributors to the shape
taken by subsequent biographical writing, but it was Freud’s psychology
that had the most profound effect. His predominant legacy, the “conviction
that a secret life is going on within us that is only partly under our control,
focus[ed] biographical inquiry on the private, unconscious motivational
drives, particularly those imprinted in childhood, [that are] understood to
shape public, conscious life.”

For the sub-genre of autobiography this concept was especially powerful,
intensifying the writer's rhetorical responsibility of “being true to themselves
and to the image they wish to present to their audience” and heightening the
claims ofone literary theorist that autobiography is essentially a “discourse of
anxiety.’ During the 1950s, this sense of uneasiness, this fear that irreconcilable
public and private natures might at any moment be revealed, was acute — and,
not surprisingly, it generally pivoted around the problem ofsex. In the United
States and Great Britain the publication of the two Kinsey Reports on human
sexuality in 1948 and 1953, McCarthyism, the convening of the Wolfenden
Commuittee to review British laws on homosexual offences and prostitution
in 1957, and the Lady Chatterly obscenity trial of 1960, provide just four
examples of the ways in which matters of sexual identity, sexual freedom,
and sexual hypocrisy were increasingly becoming the focus of public debate.’
And in the world of fashion, the style of sex that was most often called into
question was the sort that took place between men; as captured perfectly in
the words of the respected fashion journalist Edna Woolman Chase, holding
forth on the “problem” in the language of the time — in her autobiography
Always in Vogue of 1954:
Since I know nothing of biology, glands and genes, I cannot speak with
medical authority, but as one who has dealt with these people over
many years and among them has found warm friends and entertaining
companions, my impression is that some men, and women, are born with
certain deficiencies impossible for them to correct, while others, who
could be perfectly normal husbands, wives and parents, have, through a
perverted sense of values rather than of sex, deliberately chosen this way
of life for themselves . . . Among nations, the French seem best able to
combine artistic ability with virility. Certainly, in the fashion world, many
a man whose interests and livelihood centre on what the French call
“chiffons” — fabrics and furbelows and sartorial elegance — is contentedly
married to a plump, comfortable wife from the provinces who feeds him
on an admirable French bourgeois cuisine and bears him as many children
as a practical French couple feel they can afford. At least that’s how it used
od ok eee
My intention in the essay that follows is not to reveal the secret sexual pro-
clivities of the great men of couture, nor to offer cod-psychological insights

in the manner of Woolman Chase; but rather to consider the ways in which
certain tropes of desire, repression, innuendo, revelation, and romance inflect
their descriptions of themselves and their work, to the extent that contempo-
rary anxieties about gender and sexual identity inevitably come to color the
hot-house atmosphere of the 1950s couture house itself and the mannered
artificiality of its products, contributing even to the style of their design and
promotion. In other words, my argument is that we cannot fully understand
the creative culture of couture in the period without considering the sexual-
ized dissonances that defined its content and representation — and biographi-
cal accounts ofits nature provide a fascinating starting point for this.
To start at the beginning and with Freudian hindsight, it is surprising how
many of the couturiers share memories of a common childhood, one in
which the sensitive little boy inherits the practical or visionary skills of a
dress-making aunt or grandmother and wiles away a lonely and persecuted
school career drawing imaginary dresses and film-star portraits in his exercise
books. Pierre Balmain, for example, never shy of proclaiming his genius,
recalled in his 1964 autobiography, My Years and Seasons,
I do not remember a time when I was not interested in dress design and
the intriguing play of materials against the feminine form . . . whenever
my homework was done and I had a free moment I hurried off to see my
aunts at the Galeries Parisiennes (the local department store) ... Both were
slightly uneasy about what they teasingly called my girlish interest in dresses,
but it was so genuine that they could not help being impressed. I have been
told that even at that age I had very sure taste, and much to the amusement
of customers and the assistants was not backward in showing it.'°
The British couturier Norman Hartnell, meanwhile, whose Silver and Gold of
1955 must count as one of the most fey and funny fashion autobiographies ever
written asserted that his
interest in Fashion began with a box of crayons. Because I was a sickly

child, forced to remain in bed for long periods, I would sit propped up
with pillows with a drawing book on my knee, weaving crude but fantastic
designs . . . All my school books on mathematics, geometry and algebra
were covered with doodled designs of dresses and likenesses of the leading
actresses of the day ...I had bought and studied so many picture postcards

that I could draw them or their dresses from memory ...so there was Miss
Doris Keane swirling through algebraic symbols in rose tulle crinolines
embroidered with blue butterflies, or a voluminous dress of green velvet
and Brussels lace."
In contrast Hartnell’s contemporary Hardy Amies offered a more clipped and

direct, but no less revealing account of early influences in his own Just So Far
of 1954:
I was born in Maida Vale, London in 1909. I can therefore claim to be a

cockney ...I cannot say that I was anything but happy at school. I was bad
at both football and cricket ... [but] I did not suffer from my lamentable
performance on the playing fields because I was quickly to win a certain
renown on the stage of the school theatricals.”
Significantly, Dior chose to relate his earliest influences through descriptions

of the interiors of his various houses. “Self-portrayal,” he repeats, “is always
difficult ... Probably the simplest way to give an idea of my own character
is to take you with me into various different houses where I have lived from
childhood onwards ...I am sure that this attempt at indirect biography will
be more revealing than a straightforward account ofmny life”’ And his careful
recollections of the family home at Granville unravel beautifully, like random
threads connecting the official “House of Dior” with Dior’s private residen-
cles:
My childhood home was roughcast in a very soft pink, mixed with grey
gravelling, and these two shades have remained my favourite colours in
couture.Asmy mother had a passion for green plants, a protuberance had
been stuck on to the front of the house without the least attempt at har-
mony — a 1900 wrought-iron conservatory. Years later, when I moved to
Paris, my first care was to find a house with the same feature .. . The front
door opened on to an entrance hall and the beginning of a big flight
of stairs. The whole of this area was decorated in imitation pitch-pine
picked out with bamboo borders . . . Large panels painted in imitation of
Japanese prints adorned the whole staircase. These versions of Utamaro
and Hokusai made up my Sistine Chapel. I can remember gazing at them

for hours on end, as, perched on some exotic foot-stall of poker-worked
leather, I would timidly finger the rustling beads of a blind .. . Those long
meditations left me with a strong taste for the Japonaisseries one sees on
screens. I still love those silks embroidered with flowers and fantastic birds
and use them in my collections."
Balmain, who worked with Dior at Lelong, was equally indulgent in his
descriptions of past apartments owned, decorated, and cherished, and inter-
estingly provides a complimentary account of the latter’s house on the rue
Royale:

[It was] furnished in the style of
the Second Empire. There was a
grand black grand piano in the
salon, and what I regarded as a
remarkable number of seemingly
worthless trinkets: photographs
of elderly ladies in plush velvet
frames, small gilded goats drawing
mother-of-pearl shells mounted
on wheels, opaline fruit dishes,
and dominating all, a larger than
life full-length portrait of a wom-
an dressed in the style of 1880.
She bore such a striking resem-
blance to Christian that I could
never believe she was just a friend
of the family."
He continues with an equally re-

vealing anecdote about a summer
visit made by Dior to Balmain’s
country home during the period of
the Occupation: “He brought with
him a mongrel fox-terrier, Bobby,
who never left him. On a walk to
Hautecomte Abbey, Mother asked
jokingly what Bobby’s breed was. “ ‘He belongs to the transition period,
” in. Dior with the meget
Christian replied; ‘Louis XVI in front and Louis XV behind’ I learned much
|
from Christian — he was older than I, had lived in Paris much longer, and
moved in the most elegant circles.”
This evidence in the autobiographies of a profound attachment
by
couturiers to the concept of the private interior (and by extension
to the
haven of private life) as a space for elucidating personal taste, relationships,
and
allegiances and inspiring the creative impulse, accompanies a concern to
set
down the eclectic details of past interiors remembered as a foil for witty sub-
version. This tendency is captured wonderfully by Hartnell, whose
description

of the actress Gertrude Lawrence’s
apartment in Portland Place during
the 1930s, is a classic piece of“gay’
repartee:
Wiping her damp fingers on a long

jade green chiffon handkerchief, she
concocted an over-powering cock-
tail. I started to sweat a little as we
sat down to lunch. The decoration
of the dining room also undermined
me somewhat. It was, I think of pale
grey enlivened with flower vases full
of dyed green tulips, but the large
windows were surprisingly curtained
in gathered luxury of solid silver se-
quins. Now, as some people know,
I am more than partial to the jolly
glitter of sequins, but yards and yards
of these pretty little objects massed
together like a coat of mail and cor-
uscating in the midday sunlight . . .
were not a soothing accompaniment
to the eating of bloaters and mustard
sauce.'®
The art historian Christopher Reed

Norman Hertnell posing with has rediscovered the term “amusing style” to describe this form of early to
fashion models, 1953
Photo by Norman Parkinson, mid-twentieth-century interior design practice that transgressed historical,
Noman Persinserycore's national, and sexual boundaries; and its potency as a canvas for the representa-
tion of otherwise repressed or contained personalities in the world of couture
is even more vividly illustrated in Hartnell’s account of his own home as a
starting point and context for the production of his design ideas:
In my pale coloured drawing room, I pin lengths of gold tissue to the

curtains, watching the fold and grace of the falling stuff, and throw co-
loured satin across two cushions on the sofa, imagining them to be bust

and hips respectively. This effect is not always a happy one . . Inspiration
is unconscious, or perhaps subconscious. The dresses in the pictures of the
great painters are often in my mind; the Italian masters for purest line, and
all the French fun of Boucher, Watteau and Mme Vigee le Brun; Fragonard
for the folies de grandeur ... with Renoir and Tissot for a touch of chi-
chi. The drawings of Drian, Bakst, Sutherland, Cecil Beaton and Ronald
Searle may help. Even common objects such as a slithering sardine or the
steel bright lines ofa railway station can stimulate ideas if a silver reception
gown 1s wanted."7
There is something in these self-conscious attempts to pin down underlying

inspirations and motivations in the design of dresses that takes us closer to an
understanding of the sort of men who found both solace and worldly success
in a profession that was otherwise dismissed as effeminate at best and perverse
at worst. The example of Woolman Chase’s pathologizing of the seemingly
disproportionate presence of homosexual men in the field of fashion cited
earlier was not an isolated occurrence. Vogue Publisher Henry Yoxall’s char-
acterization of the sexual identity of the industry in his autobiography A
Fashion of Life of 1966 was doubly vicious:
The world of haute couture has gone through several revolutions in my

business lifetime, and has ended up, some think, by standing on its head.
When I first knew it, it was dominated by women, later by men, and then
by epicenes ... I always made it my policy to remain a backroom boy in
Vogue's dealings with the Couturiers. Their demands were so staggering
... In comparison, prima-donnas are modest and considerate. "
As if providing grist to Yoxall’s mill, Hardy Amies, in a typically frosty and

blatantly misogynistic broadside, offers an interpretation of the workings of
the mid-twentieth-century couture industry that emphasizes its nature as
some sort of homophile force for the policing of exquisitely good taste:
I do not think girls have half as much chance ofbeing successful designers
as do boys. To be a successful designer you must be objective: you must
be able to view womankind and their clothes as a whole: you must be
able to design for all types of women, and you must be able to view them
dispassionately.Very few women can do this. When a woman designer rises

to a position above the crowd, it is usually found that she designs clothes
suitable only to her type. I don’t think any girl should ever be encour-
aged to think ofherself as a potential dress designer: she should become a
dressmaker . .. Many sensible young men realize that a girl who is a good
needlewoman makes a good wife. My father did. [But] it is difficult to ad-
vise a young man how to become a dress designer.We cannot teach him to
make a dress because no men are employed in the dressmaking rooms. The
three most important requisites are invention, intelligence and taste. These
cannot be taught. Invention is the click that goes on in your brain when
you suddenly imagine a new pocket, a pleat, or a sleeve . . . Intelligence
makes you sensitive to the atmosphere of the world — to sense the Zeitgeist
so that you produce appropriate clothes . . . Taste cannot be taught, but
it can be acquired. You must be born with the good taste of wishing to
acquire good taste."
Never was a concluding epigram more Wildean in tone, drawing to mind

Christopher Reed’s comments on the emergence in the 1920s of a particular
sensibility commonly referred to by its adherents as “Camp”:
An updated form ofAestheticism, camp’s knowing, often exaggerated, re-

hearsal of Wildean tastes and styles uses the act of quotation to assert an
ironic distance that allows for connotative meanings other than — even
diametrically opposed to — denotative content.As such, camp is often cor-
related to the situation of homosexuality in the first half (at least) of the
twentieth century, which relied on forms of signification carefully cali-
brated to be recognisable to some, but not all. Not only an attribute of
dress and deportment, camp was also associated with the elements ofvisual
décor.”°
In 1964, Susan Sontag brought the term out into the open in her widely cited
“Notes on Camp,’ where she assembled a series of “jottings” summarizing
the qualities of the style for a more liberal and accepting Pop-era audience.”!
Originally published in the literary journal The Partisan Review, then re-
presented in Sontag’s collection of essays Against Interpretation in 1966, “Notes
on Camp” found a particular resonance in the worlds of fashion, perfor-
mance, film, art, and design through the 1970s. Though its content lead to
later rebuttals from the author herself and a generation of more assertive

queer theorists in the 1990s, the con-
cept that it introduced, with its heavy
emphasis on signification and taste,
offered a useful tool for unpacking
those hidden meanings embedded in
the public personae of Dior and his
contemporaries.” As the semiotician
Harold Beaver has suggested:
The homosexual is beset by signs,

by the urge to interpret whatever
transpires, or fails to transpire, be-
tween himself and every chance
acquaintance. He is a prodigious
consumer of signs, hidden mean-
ings, hidden systems, hidden
potentiality. Exclusion from the
common code impels the frenzied
quest: In the momentary glimpse,
the scrambled figure, the sporadic
gesture, the chance encounter, the
reverse image, the sudden slip-
page, the lowered guard. In a flash
meanings may be disclosed; mys-
teries wrenched out and betrayed
... The need to trace a compat-
ible world becomes the urge to
control one with an unceasing production of signs (the suede shoes and
cigarette holders of the 1950s, the leather and chain accoutrements of the
1960s ...), as if nothing could be determined by trial, except the signature;
nothing deduced from content, only hieroglyphs.”3
It is interesting that Beaver’s interpretation encompasses the stereotypical sar-

torial signifiers of homosexuality (from suede shoes to leathers), for alongside
the coded references on childhood obsessions with glamor and the careful
descriptions of interior design that couturiers inserted in their written remi-

niscences, the dressing and presentation of their bodies also revealed subtle
alignments.** In the staged portrait photographs of Dior, Balmain, Hartnell,
and Amies that frequently appeared in the pages of Vogue and other society
magazines during the 1950s (often in the company of muses and models), it
is notable that all of the men adopted elegantly tailored English-style suits
whose characteristics were described by journalists of the period as the
Edwardian look.** This was no coincidence, for as cultural historian Frank
Mort has recently noted:
The revival of Edwardianism for men followed hard on the heels of the
New Look in women’s fashion . .. Edwardianism complemented the New
Look, with the latter’s stress on flamboyant elegance and the return to an
ultra-feminine profile promoted through cut, colour and a belle époque
silhouette with its wasp waist and long billowing skirts. The social impact
of these styles also paralleled each other; though both began life as high
fashion ... their take up promoted an anxious debate about consumerism,
youth and sexuality.’°
The Edwardian look, with its figure-hugging cut, recherché detailing (vel-
vet collars, turned-back cuffs, and ticket pockets in its most extreme forms)
and militaristic, parade-ground accessorization (bowler hat, highly polished
“winkle-picker” shoes, and tightly furled umbrella or cane) was a complex
construction, referencing both aristocratic resistance to the voluminous tai-
loring associated with American mass culture, a nostalgia for the homosocial
bonhomue of the fin de siécle, and the paradoxical attractions of dandyism.
It is perhaps little wonder that among its early adopters were those men in
the creative and theatrical professions who sought out particular forms of
fashionable distinction as a discrete badge of“belonging.” Michael Bronski,
in his pioneering exploration of the formation of gay sensibilities provides a
convincing rationale:
Because it had to remain hidden, gay sensibility has expressed itself by

implying rather than stating, by indicating with appearance what it was
not allowed to state with content. The circumvention which was part
and parcel of the philosophy of the dandy dovetailed perfectly with the
needs of gay men. Not only could one express oneself through style rather
than statement, but dandyism also offered the distinct possibility of social

advancement .. . [for] Sontag has noted that modern gay men achieve their
integration into society [by] promoting the aesthetic sense.’
Yet mannered Edwardian discretion was not to prevail. In the same year as the
publication of Sontag’s ground breaking essay (1964), Queen Magazine (in a
bravura example of camp pastiche) announced the death of old-style couture
with its fictional obituaries of Balenciaga and Givenchy.** As Alicia Drake’s
dual biography of Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld suggests, a new gen-
eration of designers were less reticent about bringing their “outsider” status to
the fore in their promotion of their craft and acknowledgment of its “queer”
content, and also in their willingness to have their personal and interior lives
opened up for public scrutiny.”
Echoes of the grand tradition of Dior and Balmain did continue to
reverberate, for example in the tortured self-presentation of Saint Laurent as,
simultaneously, naked poster boy for the denim generation and reclusive
master of fairy tale palaces in Paris, Normandy, Marrakesh, and Tangiers. In
his introduction to Diana Vreeland’s notorious 1983 retrospective of his work
at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum New York, he seemed
to be channellingoD Dior’s elegant
ro)
introspection:
Like F Scott Fitzgerald, I love a dying frenzy ... I love Visconti. Decadence
attracts me. It suggests a new world, and, for me, society’s struggle between
life and death is absolutely beautiful ... In my own life, I’ve seen the after-
glow of the sumptuous Paris of before the war ...and the splendour of a
vigorous haute couture. And then I knew the youthfulness of the sixties:
Talitha and Paul Getty lying on a starlit terrace in Marrakech, beautiful and
damned ...And my heart has always been divided between the vestals of
constancy and the avatars of change.*°
But in a way, while Saint Laurent’s aesthetic position championed “a spirit of

total liberation and freedom” through its passionate and public embrace of
sensuality and experience, the extraordinarily controlled verve and dazzle that
had characterized couture in the 1950s — its exquisitely affected artificiality —
was abandoned and destroyed in the process. The price of sexual emancipation
made possible by Stonewall, the revolutionary events of 1968, and the partial
decriminalization of homosexual acts in Britain, was perhaps a devaluation
of the creative power of an enforced secrecy.** High-profile fashion designers

today are more likely to reference openly the inspiration of gay icons in
their work and acknowledge the importance of same-sex partners in their
lives without a second thought, rather than channel hidden aspects of their
characters through elaborately veiled allusions.
As I hope this essay has begun to demonstrate, the archness of the coutur1-
er’s autobiography in the age before the popular acceptance of homosexuality
in Europe and North America, and a shift towards sexual openness, allows us
some purchase on the unspoken social and cultural undercurrents of the pro-
fession in its golden era. On the actual sexual preferences ofits protagonists I
remain uninformed and respectfully silent — maybe they have no bearing at
all on the powerful legacy left by their extraordinary work. But in some sense
the delicate question of queerness in couture and its material manifestation
requires no answer. To “those in the know” British fashion journalist Alison
Adburgham’s pen portrait of Christian Dior published in The Guardian in
1956, says it all:
Smiling, bald, of moderate height and middle age. Christian Dior is a pear-
shaped man. He tapers down to the most elegant pair of shoes which ever
trod the Avenue Montaigne. They cannot be more than size six, and are
chicly pointed: very French feet ... His attractive woman is very soft, not
too tall, very feminine. Himselfhe likes women to have plump cheeks (he
pinches out his own, already prettily plump); not thin and long (he pushes
his cheeks in with finger and thumb and draws down his mouth). He likes
them dark. And he likes them smiling, above all smiling . . . “The world is
a hard place; women must be the smile of the world.” Never did banality
more charmingly fall from the lips of a great dictator. And we accept it;
just as we have already accepted so much from Christian Dior — new looks
and new lines; new hats, new shoes, new perfumes, new stockings, new
jewellery, new stuff and new nonsense.*

Christian Dior, Dior by Dior: The Autobiography of Christian Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” [1964], in E. Hardwick
Dior (London, 1958), p. ix. (ed.), A Susan Sontag Reader (London, 1983), p. 106.
Ibid., p. x. Moe Meyer (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London,
Ibid., p. x. 2000).
David Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, Mass., 2012). Harold Beaver, “Homosexual Signs (In Memory of Roland
Dior, Dior by Dior, p. x. Barthes)” [1981], in F Cleto (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and
WN
FW
Nn Catherine N. Parke, Biography: Writing Lives (Farmington the Performing Subject (Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 164-7.
Hills, Mich., 1996), p. 25. Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress
Mbide peat in the Tiventieth Century (Oxford and New York, 2000).
Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the
Postwar London (Minneapolis, 2010), pp. 28-34. Modern Metropolis (Oxford and New York, 2004), pp. 125—150.
Edna Woolman Chase, Always in Vogue (London, 1954), Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making ofthe
p- 326. Permissive Society (New Haven and London, 2010), p. 81.
Pierre Balmain, My Years and Seasons (London, 1964), p. 14. Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: TheMaking of Gay Sensibility
Norman Hartnell, Silver and Gold (London, 1955), p. 1s. (New York, 1984), p. $7.
Hardy Amies, Just So Far (London, 1954), pp. 11, 2. Claire Wilcox, “The Legacy of Couture,” in Claire Wilcox
Dior, Dior by Dior, p. 165. (ed.), The Golden Age of Couture: Paris and London 1947-57
Balmain, My Years and Seasons, p. 70. (London, 2007), p. 206.
Ibid. Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious
Hartnell, Silver and Gold, p. 56. Excess in 1970s Paris (London, 2006).
Ibid., p. 82. Robert Murphy and Ivan Terestchenko, The Private World of
Harold Yoxall, A Fashion ofLife (London, 1966), pp. 7-8. Yves Saint Laurent & Pierre Berge (London, 2009), p. 14.
Amies, Just So Far, pp. 175-6. Wilcox, Golden Age of Couture, p. 206.
Christopher Reed, Bloomsbury Rooms (New Haven and Alison Adburgham, View of Fashion (New South Wales, 1966),
London, 2004), p. 241. pp. 182-3.

SMe das
BEES
Nenad ne oh ert
ease parecer San
SHAUN COLE
QUEERLY VISIBLE: GAY MEN, DRESS, AND STYLE 1960-2012
| THINK THAT IS THE HUGE PARADOX OF THE GAY WORLD THAT WE'RE NOT
TRADITIONALLY MASCULINE MEN AND YET THE MASCULINITY IS WHAT WE WANT
TO UPHOLD AND SUBSCRIBE TO IN TERMS OF CLOTHES AND APPEARANCE.
Nick Fyhrie'
The notion of masculinity and the authenticity of a “real” masculinity

that can be presented through choices of clothing and behavioral traits is a
perennial concern within the gay male communities of Britain and America.
Similarly matters relating to effeminacy have played a positive or negative role
in gay men’s negotiation of their appearance. Indeed, the history of gay men’s
Radical Drag, Gay Pride parade, style and dress has been marked by a vacillation between strivings towards or
New York, June 24, 1973. Photo by
Leonard Fink, LGBT Community
away from hyper-masculinity and overt femininity. This paradox, outlined by
Center National History Archive. Fyhrie, reflects Jamie Gough’s observation in 1989 that “Gay masculinity is
QUEERLY VISIBLE / 135

not in any simple way, ‘real’ masculinity any more than ‘camp’ is femininity.”
What Gough, but not necessarily Fyhrie, alludes to here is a notion of the
performance of these roles and identities asserted by the gender theorist
Judith Butler, who proposes that gendered identities are constantly negotiated
and performed in relation to both external societal and internal personal
pressures and considerations, are regulated by cultural discourses, and that
“identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said
to be its results.’ In discussing the binary frame in which sex and gender has
operated within hegemonic constructions, Butler considers conformity to a
“heterosexual matrix.” It could be argued in light of this that men are locked
into performances of masculinity and have, on the whole, reflected conformity
to traditional male norms concerning nonchalance about appearance; that
“do not notice clothes” and “dress for fit and comfort, rather than style.”*
We have to ask specifically if this is the case for gay as well as straight men.
Various scholars, myself included, have argued that gay men have specifically
and definitively contradicted these denials, and indeed this book and the
exhibition 1t accompanies is intended to articulate the complex relationship
that gay men have with fashion, dress, and style. While this essay is not
intended to offer a full and comprehensive investigation of the multitude of
styles adopted by gay men over the past fifty years, 1t attempts to articulate
some of the ways in which British and American gay men have negotiated
matters of their sexual identity and personal appearance. Thus concerns over
the perceptions and presentations of“masculine” and “effeminate” identities
will be outlined drawing on a series of direct interviews with a range of gay
men conducted over the past fifteen years.
In February 1970 the American trade journal Menswear ran an article entitled
“Homosexuality in Men’s Wear” that set out to try and establish “to what
extent homosexuals have been involved in fashion” and questioned behavioral
therapists, psychoanalysts, fashion professionals, and one “homosexual.” The
answers and opinions provided identified the presence of gay men within the
fashion design and modeling industries, discussed gay men’s relationship with
their bodies and compared “closeted” and “covert” gay men’s styles to those
of more fashion-forward gay men who were “the first to buy what is new”
and “played a very important role” in “help[ing] give them exposure.’ This
comparison of the overt and covert re-emphasizes the difference between

those who selected their clothes to blend in and those who were “more
daring” in their choices and were quick to “adapt or adopt new fashion ideas.”
The question of whether gay men are in fact more stylish and “‘fashion-
forward” than straight men is raised in this article. It continues to be of at
least some concern to gay men throughout the later part of the twentieth
century and into the twenty-first, as the following statements demonstrate:
‘
‘gay style actually sets trends. It’s what people take fashion from’”;’ “gay style
is basically what becomes straight fashion six months later”; “borrowing from
gay men allows straight men to be concerned about . .. while retaining their
masculinity, something gay fashion has tried to do for ages”;? “I think there’s
a perception that straight men, even well-dressed ones, are a step behind the
trend curve.’
While there is a validity in these opinions, the reality is, of course, not
as simple as straight men copying gay men; there is a much more cyclical
and complex process involved, with gay men influencing straight styles and
adopting hegemonic straight male clothing to create a new gay identity or
style. Reminiscences from men who were Mods in the late 1950s in London,
for example, reflect the queer influences that were being drawn upon. Richard
Barnes recalled that wearing the colored denim that was sold at Vince’s
Man’s Shop and John Stephen’s His Clothes were worn by men who “were
obviously homosexual and I realized that homosexuals had been buying the
stuff for years," and Ken Brown that “gays [were] wearing outrageous white
suits with big high heels,’ and “Mods took that influence.’ That these were
gay styles is reinforced by the fact that Bill Green, owner and designer of
Vince's, and John Stephen, were both gay men and had directly targeted gay
male customers through their promotional advertising and catalogues.'’ The
new 1970s post-gay liberation style that became known as the Clone, adopted
conventional blue-collar work clothing and rejected the nonchalance with
which these garments were worn by straight men. Thus they were stylized
into anew gay masculinity that expressed hegemonic straight masculine values
of virility, strength, and toughness that were the opposite of the effeminate
stereotypes and clichés that had prevailed in popular culture until that point.
This style of dress in turn was readopted in its “queered” parodic form by
straight men who “started wearing ...the crew cuts ...and the moustaches ...
the sots [and] the Timberland [boots].”"

The cultural commentator Michael Bracewell identified the breaking
down of the distinctions between gay and straight in 1993 when he wrote
“there is no longer any ‘us and them’, in fashion terms; what remains are more
simple notions of style which adapt to the sexuality of the individual.’® This
is reflected in more contemporary opinion such as Joe Harris’s, who stated
that “whether you are gay or straight if you are just your own person and you
dress the way you dress it doesn’t matter about your sexuality.’"® Alex Jeffcoat
noted that “there 1s a mixing of gay men’s and straight men’s fashion . . . they
are wearing the same styles ... and it is difficult telling the difference between
the two.””” Reflecting on the similarities of choice of items of clothing David
McGovern believes that “it’s about placement as much as it’s about straight or
gay," and that the way in which a garment is worn can act as an indicator
of a man’s sexual orientation. Although these considerations would seem to
indicate a breaking down of barriers between gay and straight, interviewees
still believed that many straight men were concerned with being perceived
as gay through their choice of clothing: “I think a lot of straight men want
to dress well but they are scared to,’ and “while there are so many straight
men out there who arejust as creative with their clothes, some are not doing
it because of not wanting to be seen as homosexual.””? Erich Goodman sees
a blurring between the boundaries of gay and straight style but feels that
straight men “would not wear any of the flamboyant clothing, they’re not as
willing to push the boundaries.” This does reflect the perception, considered
by some of these interviewees, that all gay men are concerned about their
clothes, follow the latest fashion trends, and are much better dressed than
straight men. But to assume that all gay men are immaculately dressed and
avid followers ofthe latest fashion trends is misguided, and perhaps we could
even acknowledge that, as the gay American radio-talk-show host Al Rantel
contends, “gay people dress just as badly as anybody else’? Once again an
extreme view, this seems to deny that for many gay men, appearance, clothing,
and style really matter. Mario Roman acknowledges that “just because you
are gay doesn’t mean you are interested in fashion. In fact you can have really
bad style,” but “there is a part of every larger gay community that is leading
ideas about style.’ Appearance, particularly that which is projected in public,
has been of concern to gay men throughout the twentieth century, whether

this has manifested as an identifiable visibility, an intentional invisibility, or a
conscious playing with gendered and social signifiers.
The beginnings of the postwar gay rights movements in Britain and
the United States inevitably raised questions of appearance, particularly in
relation to the appropriateness of traditionally gender-appropriate clothing.
Organizations such as the Homosexual Law Reform Society in Britain
and the Mattachine Society in the United States advocated conformity to
the hegemonic dress codes of appropriate male dress, in order to fit in and
be considered a serious cause for change in terms of law reform. Franklin
Kameny, one ofthe leaders of the Washington D.C. branch of the Mattachine
Society argued that “the man in the suit is stitt the overwhelming norm,”
and that “clean-scrubbed demonstrations will get us ahead.” While Kameny
was in some ways here responding to the involvement of “beatnik types”
and their “grubbiness” in appearance,” there is a direct correlation with the

way in which many gay men felt societal pressure to conform and “pass” as
heterosexual in terms of public appearance and behavior in this period; gay
mien frequently “tended to dress down and look like everyone else,’*5 andin so Barbara Gittings and Kay 1
doing tried to “avoid being seen as what we were.”*° Thus they were engaging }
in what the fashion studies scholar Olga Vainshtein has termed “conspicuous
inconspicuousness.’*” This striving for “normality” and invisibility was in part
driven by the legal situations regarding, and social and moral impositions
directed towards, male homosexuality. There is perhaps a temptation to
overemphasize the hostile and difficult world that gay men lived in during

this period but as many of the oral histories and comprehensive explorations
of metropolitan gay life in the middle of the twentieth century have observed
and recorded there were established gay social scenes that were not necessarily
all pushed underground or lived entirely in secret.** The recognized face of
homosexuality in this period was presented by those, arguably braver, gay
men who used effeminacy as a signifying strategy for their homosexuality.
The adoption of female clothing or feminine physical characteristics and
behaviors by gay men has a centuries old history and had led to a conflation
of effeminacy with homosexuality.” For some more discreet gay men the
presence and existence of this overt self-presentation detracted from any
hints of their own sexual orientation as the general populace often did not
recognize homosexuality in those men who did not present such a stereotyped
self image. For others the stereotype was seen as harmful and degrading, as
one anonymous interviewee noted in a 1964 BBC Radio interview: “A lot
of people assume we're bitchy and effeminate . .. cause they’re the obvious
ones which normal people mostly see and assume practically the whole
homosexual world is like that.”’° As such these men were making a stance
in relation to their sexual identity and visible appearance in what Anthony
Freitas et al. identify as an “identity not” principle, where masculinity 1s
defined as not effeminacy.** Kameny’s declarations about dress codes were
to an extent a reaction to these perceived stereotypes and later incarnations
of gay liberation advocated a new approach. In the United Kingdom, Tony
Diaman argued that “the straight world has told us that if we are not masculine
we are homosexual, that to be homosexual means not to be masculine ... one
of the things we must do 1s redefine ourselves as homosexuals.”*? Whilst on
the other side of the Atlantic, the American activist Carl Wittman noted in his
Gay Manifesto of 1969,“a tendency among ‘homophile’ groups to deplore gays
who play visible roles — the queens and the nellies.As liberated gays we must
take a clear stand,’* praising the bravery of his effeminate visible “brothers”
(or sisters).
Presenting an overtly masculine appearance was one of the ways in which
new ideas about self-esteem and reactions to stereotypical misconceptions
about gay people were being countered. Where these Clones differed from
their hegemonically-attired straight masculine predecessors was in the fact
that there was no desire by these men to “pass” as straight; they were gay and

proud and used the stylizing of masculine dress as, what Butler has termed, a
“subversive bodily act.”** Rather than produce a mirror image of heterosexual
masculinity this adoption of masculine-encoded clothing items — plaid shirts,
denim jeans, work boots, bomber jackets, army fatigues — was reconfigured to
produce not only a “real man,” but a real gay man.* The fit of these items was
key; denim jeans were worn tight to emphasize the genitals and shirts and tee-
shirts revealed the results of work at the gym and as such were infused with
“a new meaning of eroticism and overt sexuality.’3° As Peter Burton reflected,
“what interests me about clothes is that when you fancy someone what you
actually fancy is what they're wearing not them at all [and] one of the benefits
of being gay [is that] you can actually emulate the objects of your desire.”>” For
Ray Weller, becoming a Clone meant “looking sexy and dressing for sex . . .
dressing like the men I found sexy in order to pull.”3* Some critics of this
newfound hyper-masculinity felt that through its adherence to the strict rules
of binary gender divisions it was in fact a “new closet”? that locked gay men
into hegemonic presentations and behaviors. However many Clones were
well aware of the ways in which they were using notions of “macho” to
present a new butch image and that such a look was a satirizing of straight
styles and a self-conscious form of“drag.”
Parodying of gender stereotypes also manifested itself in another post-
liberation “queer” style, but rather than playing solely with signifiers of
masculinity the “genderfuck” styles of the radical drag queens intentionally
mixed up the semiotic coding and readings of appearance. Acknowledging
the stereotypes of overt femininity and hyper-masculinity these liberationists
utilized a bricolage approach to creating outfits. Thus they intended to get
away from the hard-edged definitions of gendered dress and “penetrate
to the genitals of the system it calls to account’? in what Richard Ekins
saw as an intentional blurring of visual distinctions of gendered garments
and signifiers.4* For many radical drag queens, combining overtly feminine
garments, such as long flowing or frilly dresses, with the extreme elements
of male dress, as adopted by the Clones, created a sense of confusion in the
audience. Unlike traditional forms of drag, these men were not attempting
to conceal their male bodies or disguise them as female; instead they kept
their facial and body hair and revealed their genital bulge, but used make-up
and dresses. Roger Baker noted the effect extreme forms of drag have on

viewers as “the angry outrage of the person who finds his signals have been
confused.” For Michael Brown genderfuck had a particularly performative
element as he wore his “long beard tied up in plaits with pink ribbons and
lips cut out from bright red acetate” with women’s blouses and men’s tight
trousers to socialize in and also to participate in street-theater forms of gay
rights protests.’
Wearing cheap thrift store dresses and long hair, beards, garish make-
up, and glitter, the San Francisco based group The Cockettes expressed an
explicit androgyny in their appearance that they used in their parodying and
political performances. Rumi Missabu, one of the original members of the
troupe, recalled, “I feel that I was performing gay liberation through my art
at that point.’** Similarly the British group known as “Bloolips” used their
appearance and performances to critique stereotypes so they were “not so
much imitations of women as creatures betwixt and between sexual roles,
free from social rules.’*’ The sociologist Peter Hennen has noted that this
form of drag blends “gendered shades of grey” instead of the “black and
white” elements of masculine and feminine dress that are seen in more
conventional “parodic” drag styles.*° The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an
order of queer nuns who were devoted to community service and promoting
human rights, who combined extravagant versions of traditional nuns’ habits
with outlandish garish make-up, continued this tradition in the wake of the
AIDS pandemic. The author-activist Mark Thompson believes that “keeping
whimsy, mockery and outrage alive was probably the Sister’s most significant
accomplishment.’*” Even today, while there is an ongoing tradition of drag
as direct female impersonation and a revival of interest through television
reality show Rupaul’s Drag Race, there are drag performers, such as Jonny Woo
and Scottie in London, and Taylor Mac and Acid Betty in New York, who
continue to mix up semiotic messages in the spirit of genderfuck*. Both Joe
Harris and Alex Jeftcoat believe that the greater visibility of drag, rather than
reinforcing stereotypes about what gay men look like, has had an effect upon
perceptions of gay people and acceptance. “I feel in a sense it’s definitely
easier to come out when you have drag queens running around you,’ says
Harris. “What it is to be gay has so many definitions now that coming out
as gay doesn’t define you. You get to define yourself with gay as part of your
identity.’*? For Jeffcoat the popularity of Rupaul’s Drag Race has made drag

“a more accepted element of homosexuality and gay culture?’ Guy
Common, who performs in drag, notes the appropriation of drag influences
in nightclubs in London stating “any club you go into, there’s like fifteen
eighteen-year-olds in a wig and lipstick."
Playing with notions of femininity and effeminacy has not been restricted
to drag. There is a long history of gay men adopting the most obvious
signifiers of female mannerisms and dress: plucked eyebrows, rouge, eye
make-up, peroxide blond hair, high-heeled shoes, women’s blouses. And
whilst the more masculine styles that became popular following gay liberation
dominated gay style, there were still gay men who used effeminacy as an
expression of their identity. The emergence of punk in both New York and
London led to what Daniel Wojcik described as “themes of sexual ambiguity
and gender confusion” being explored by “both sexes through their body
adornment,” and as punk morphed into a series of post-punk subcultural
and club-based styles, young gay men used their clothing and appearance as a
means of exploring their burgeoning sexuality. “Clubbing was underground,
it was outcast,’ recalled D. J. Jeffrey Hinton. “My original attraction to it was
because it was trannies, prostitutes, outcasts, freaks.”5? Clubs such as the Blitz,
and Cha Cha’s in London, and the Pyramid in New York were not exclusively
gay, but were filled with young people who dressed to outrage, and expressed
their individual creativity through outfits made from home-sewn ensembles,
thrift store and jumble sale finds, theatrical costumes, and clothes from a range
of new young designers. Many of the new British and European designers
that were emerging in the 1980s, such as David Holah from Bodymap, John
Galliano, and Jean Paul Gaultier, were gay and were looking to the street and
club scenes for inspiration.
This extreme style of dressing was perhaps best encapsulated in London by
Leigh Bowery and his weekly club night, Taboo, where the entry policy was
“dress as though your life depends on it, or don’t bother” and “only fabulous
over-the-top dressers” were allowed past the door.*+ Using the club as a site
for a personal performance, Bowery created new looks each week. One week
he replicated the spotted pattern of his shirt’s fabric on his face, another he
dripped paint mixed with glue over his shaved head and on another covered
a crash helmet in sequins, and distorted his facial features by painting eyes
onto a pair of glasses. Bowery’s dressing up and performing was beyond drag,

“he was experimenting with his body and his sexuality, challenging how
people thought about, reacted to, and perceived this vision in front of them.”*
Although Taboo was short lived it set a tone for London nightclubs and its
most outrageous successor was perhaps Kinky Gerlinky, run by Michael and
Gerlinde Kostiffin the early 1990s. Jeffrey Hinton, who played at both Taboo
and Kinky Gerlinky, recalled that the ethos was essentially the same, that
Kinky Gerlinky “was just a continuation of this clubbing trend basically. The
same thing, the same dressing up but more exaggerated.’”*° Just as the London
Arts Balls of the 1950s, where gay men “could be outrageous, dress in whatever
[they] wanted,’s’ so Kinky Gerlinky offered just such an opportunity for
queer people in the nineties. “It was a carnival,” Jonny Slut recalled. “It was

Taboo club night, London, 1986
© Paul Hartnett
less dark and more fun and it seemed that a lot of people that you’d known
around for years had got on a drag persona, and were doing it exclusively drag
rather than avant garde.”*’ As at Blitz and Taboo, there was a doorman, Tasty
Tim, a long time habitué of London’s gay club scene, and being fabulously
dressed was enough to allow you to be plucked from the back of the queue
and ushered to the front.
In New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s, big discos like Studio 54 and
Xenon had set the benchmark for nightclubbing, but in 1982 Peter Gatien
challenged this model when he opened his Limelight club at a deconsecrated
church on the corner of 6th Avenue and 2oth Street.At the same time a new
group of younger clubbers such as Michael Alig arrived on the club scene.
James St James recalled the horror felt by the established glitterati of the
club world: “he had come out of nowhere and was intent on taking over,
taking over our scene from us.”’? Alig persuaded the owner of the newly
opened Tunnel club to let him take over the basement bar with his clan of
wild-looking teenagers, fashion victims, drag queens, and misfits.
The Club
Kids (as New Yorker magazine named them in March, 1988) had arrived and

Alig was king. Image was all, and like the crowd
at Blitz and Taboo, the Club Kids followed no
rules and dressed more and more outrageously in
outfits created especially for each night. Guests at
the opening night of Alig’s Disco 2000 included
“drag queens and drag kings and freaks of all
kinds. Club kids in their frippery, wearing tiaras
and flowerpots on their heads. Futuristic Geisha
Gangsters [and] a pair of beaded jellyfish.” As
the Club Kids became more famous, Alig’s party
nights developed and spawned a host of outlaw
parties where the Club Kids would gather in
public places like McDonald’s on Times Square or
the New York subway, drinking and taking drugs
in extreme costumes.”
The Club Kid scene was essentially a white
phenomenon which took place in the Lower East
and West sides of Manhattan, but further north in
Harlem, groups of black gay men had developed
their own dressed-up scene — Voguing balls —
which updated an earlier tradition. Masquerade
balls had been common events throughout the
early twentieth century and offered gay men op-
portunities to dress up in a manner for which they could usually be arrested.
During the 1980s black and Latin gay men and transvestites bonded in their
own version of gangs, known as “houses” and instead of fighting the “houses”
would vie with each other for “realness” in “walks.” Dressed in the clothes of
white Wall Street executives, straight black homeboys, or Parisian supermodels,
these black queens competed for the title of most “real.” recreating elements
of life they saw on television, in white America, and around them in the
black, primarily heterosexual, ghettos where they lived. Voguing balls were
introduced to a wider audience in 1990 following the release of Jenny
Livingstone’s documentary film Paris is Burning, named after a 1986 ball
staged by Paris Dupree and her House of Dupree, and Madonna’s single and
accompanying video “Vogue.” The film follows the members of anumber of

houses as they participate at balls and in their everyday lives over a period of
three years. Commenting on the continuing importance of the houses, the
D.J. Andre Collins told Village Voice, “from the onset there has been a need
for gay people to have a unity. Being a homosexual, a lot of these kids have
been ostracised . . . So, if they join a house they can belong somewhere.” This
notion of belonging is raised by Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor as one ofthe three
indices of resistance that they term “collective identity.’ They also identify that
contestation “suggests the . . . symbols, identities, and cultural practices that
subvert rather than maintain dominant relations of power,” and intentionality
that involves “thinking and acting consciously about goals and strategies for
challenging dominant constructions of masculinity [and] femininity.”®
In the early to mid-2000s the London club scene witnessed a revival of
earlier expressions of individuality. Johnny Slut, a stalwart of the London
music and club scene started his club night Nag Nag Nag which played the
new electroclash music and electronica and encouraged creativity in dressing
“out of a sense of boredom ...We were picking up the Baton” of Taboo
and Kinky Gerlinky.°t Writing in Attitude magazine, Sarah Hay observed the
“equally pissed off and inspired individuals [who] are mixing up electro-mosh
and gripe-rock with DIY punk mentality and a great line in redefining ‘the
look’.”*> Like previous club scenes these nights were not exclusively gay, but
the styles were similarly idiosyncratic, fusing individual mixes of clothing and
influences, and in their approach to their appearance, referenced the gender-
bending club and music hero(ines) of the 1980s. Chicken, for example, was
inspired by the singer Pete Burns and described his look as “more glam-rock
white trash ... But I show off enough of my body to make it obvious I am
a man. I shave my eyebrows and wear asymmetric make-up and heels.”
Chicken was one of eight modern dandies (at least half of whom described
themselves as gay) who told Independent Magazine that they were “rebelling
against bland Nineties fashion and music (all that monotonous techno &
anonymous military clothing)” that was predominant on the more commercial
gay scene.” Luke Day, then the Fashion Editor of the British gay magazine
Attitude, observed in 2003, ‘there was this boy with a hat on and a veil, and he
was carrying a woman’s handbag . . I’ve even seen guys wearing feather boas
again — I’ve been quite freaked out by how flamboyant it all suddenly looks.’®*
Two articles that ran around the same time in non-gay publications identified

a new flamboyancy in men’s clothing more generally and that straight men
were dressing in a gay fashion. The “New Gay,’ Arabella Weir noted in the
Guardian in March 2002 “looks gay. He smells gay. He even sounds gay. But
don’t worry . . . he’s straight’ Zoe Williams meanwhile noted that many
men objected to wearing the new flamboyant trend because “it makes me
look gay.” Interestingly, Williams dismisses this objection stating, “Looking
gay takes years... Even if you were to master the wardrobe, the hair the
accessories & the gait of gayness, you'd still have to contend with the fact that
you're not gay, which in itself is a considerable bar to looking like you are.””
Weir and Williams both equate looking gay with being well-groomed or
wearing more flamboyant, less masculine clothing and this would seem to
intimate that there is therefore only one way that gay men dress; whereas 1n
reality there is a multitude of styles and fashions, as Nick Fyhrie maintains:
“there are so many dimensions there’s not just one gay man ... there is a
huge range of how gay men dress and you can’t say that today’s gay man
is subscribing to a certain subculture.”” This leads to a “gay spectrum” of
styles.” There are gay men today who continue the tradition of pushing the
boundaries of what is acceptable for male and female attire. Both Fyhrie and
T. J. Wilson have observed men who combine a mix of feminine and
masculine in New York. “I recently saw a man wearing leggings and doc
martens with socks,” noted Fyhrie, “with a tunic and then a blazer and some
make up.” Through his position in a Fashion P. R. company, Wilson, has
worked with men who “wear women’s clothing, not necessarily a skirt,”
but “high platform boots” and “pieces that are very feminine.” It is “not
cross dressing,” he noted, but rather a “form of self-expression.” Wilson’s
observation echoes Lee Houk’s memory of “wearing a patent leather girls’
jacket that a friend had convinced me to buy. Surely that was an expression
of my newfound fabulousness,’”’ and Joe Harris’s experiments with “putting
some glitter on or putting some rhinestones on my head and the cut of
my clothes.””° David McGovern and Josh Cooper have observed a similar
juxtaposing in London: “There is a gay style that is trying to push the
boundaries with guys wearing full length skirts,” McGovern explains. “It’s
quite avant-garde and a completely fresh style” where young men are “using
their position of being gay to experiment .. . if they're subverting one social
norm and being gay they are possibly subverting another norm in dressing in

another way.’”? Cooper specifically identifies one individual, Daniel Lismore,
whom he sees as “blurring the lines of gender” and “pushing the boundaries”
through androgyny. “He dresses absolutely incredibly in cloaks and you can’t
tell whether he’s a boy or a girl. He has really long hair and a shirt with a
ruffle at the neck and a really nice blazer.’ ”
While each of these men has an open and encouraging response to the
continued gay questioning of gender appropriate clothing and expressions
of overt effeminacy and gender play, this is often not the case. Alex Jeffcoat
notes that “there definitely is more ofa draw to a straight acting gay man and
the flamboyant gay man has been looked down upon.” In his 2008 book
Faeries, Bears and Leathermen, Peter Hennen records how “personal ads placed
by American gay men now routinely include phrases such as ‘straight-acting
and appearing’, ‘nofems’,’*° reflecting what Robert Brannon has termed the
“relentless repudiation of the feminine.”*' Over the last twenty years the growth
in the term “straight-acting” has been observed by gay cultural commentators,
such as Mark Simpson, for whom straight-acting men so desired acceptance
in mainstream society that they copied behaviors and “exaggerat[ed their]
masculinity,’**compensating for the fact that their homosexuality created a
perceived or real distance from the hegemonic masculinity they encounter
in daily life.** Stewart Who? saw “constructing veneers of masculinity
which are based purely on image” as a form of“drag,’** that is, these men
appropriate a costume that creates a character, that of a straight man. They
are attempting in some ways to “pass.” which Steve Fletcher associates with
“the spirit of the closet.” Thus it could be argued that adoption of the self-
description “straight-acting” or “‘straight-appearing” is an anti-identity, and “I
am not effeminate stand.” Nick Fyhrie noted, “so many gay men say ‘I want a
straight-acting man’ and ‘I think it’s just so hot that they are wearing a T-shirt
and jeans and not effeminate, ”** However, just because a gay man appears
conventionally masculine and wears a tee-shirt and jeans does not necessarily
mean he identifies as “‘straight-acting” but it does arguably point towards a
certain conformity. For Joe Harris, “the polo, the jeans, your really white
tennis sneakers, nice cropped hair, perfectly trimmed facial hair, nice tan”
is a form of gay uniform.*? Commenting specifically on New York, Mario
Roman believes that “you have to fit in or assimilate ...You don’t have to be
exactly cookie cutter but there is a lot of conformity.” “ For others it is not so
QUEERLY VISIBLE 7 151

much about a lack of variation so much as compartmentalization. “Gay men
here [in New York] compartmentalize” observed Brian Findlay,“‘so there are a
lot of different types ofstyles happening all at once, and rarely overlapping,’
thus creating the impression of homogeneity.
This attempt to assimilate, conform, and fit with one ofthe “types” —Twinks,
Bears, East Village types, Chelsea Queens, Hell’s Kitchen Queens, Bushwick
Gays, Williamsburg Hipster Gays’? — or into a particular scene, has and con-
tinues to have an impact on how gay men dress when they begin to come to
terms with their sexual orientation or first encounter the gay scene. In 1964
one man told BBC radio that when I “found out about this life . . . 1 let my
hair grow long and I dyed it, shaved my eyebrows off and put eye mascara on
and I went really effeminate.’’' Even though he had always been interested
in clothes since he was young, realizing he was gay and discovering the gay
scene led T. J. Wilson to start “dressing like other gay people . . . my clothes
became a lot tighter . . . I would make sure my jeans were very low and I|
would always show butt cleavage, just a little . . 1 was wanting all this male
attention and that’s why I would show off my body.’ Similarly when Joe
Harris began going out to clubs in Philadelphia during his first year at univer-
sity he began dressing “just a little bit more sluttier” in “tank tops and ripped
jeans.’ For both Erich Goodman and David McGovern, becoming aware of
their sexuality and starting to go out meant that they changed from a sloppy,
comfortable style of sweatpants and tracksuits to McGovern’s “something a
little more formal ... combat trousers [and] a long sleeved tee-shirt with
a short sleeved tee-shirt over that,’* and Goodman recalled “buying a lot
more button downs, [and] vests [and] tees that fit properly,’ which reflected,
as with Wilson, his newfound awareness of his body.?’ Carl Grauer who had
initially dressed as a “preppy conservative” came out as gay when he went
to art school and so “became a little more loose, arty and as it was the nine-
ties, a lot of flannel and oversized jeans with Docs.” Discovering the Bear
scene was a revelation for David White:“I stopped worrying about the size of
my body and trying to wear fashionable clothes and allowed myself to wear
what I felt comfortable in and people found me attractive.”"’ For Ray Weller
and Josh Cooper, changing their clothes and style of dress was, they affirm,
to do with sexual attraction and meeting partners, liking to Brian Findlay’s
“ongoing theory that gay men tend to just strive to make themselves into

the type of man they’re most attracted to.’ For his first visit to a gay club in
London, Weller was wearing the fashionable flared trousers and sports jacket
that he had worn to the gay bar in his hometown of Southampton. Standing
out as different, the next week he returned in his newly purchased “Levi sots,
a red checked shirt, and heavy work boots,” where he fitted in perfectly with
the predominant Clone style.” “You go for the people you want to look like,”
says Cooper;“I know what to wear and I would dress like the boys I want be
with.”’°? Dressing in a style that reflects the kind of men one finds attractive
was also initially a strategy for Mario Roman but he notes that, as he gets
older and “time has gone on, that’s fallen by the wayside a little bit,’ and if
dressing in smart jeans and fashionable knitwear, “ends up attracting people
then that is good.”
Observing the styles and body shapes that both gay and straight society
deem attractive inevitably has an impact upon gay men’s appearance. “Society
sees musclemen as more masculine, so I work out putting in long hours in

the gym pumping iron,’ one man said;““The results make me feel butch."" “es” sive seams
~ é stello Tagliapietra. Photo by
As the well-toned muscular body appeared to present a form of hegemonic pobert Somgardner
masculinity, gay gym use increased to such an extent that the muscular gay
body became the new stereotyped gay body. Brian Pronger contends that
in the move away from effeminacy as an outward sign of homosexuality,
muscularity is not merely a substitute for make-up but differs in the content
of the excess.'3 For Daniel Harris the development of the muscular gay body
was a means of creating a commonality, of inventing “those missing physical
features that enable us to spot imperceptible compatriots, who would remain
unseen and anonymous if they did not prominently display on their own
bodies.”"** Although the body is key on this particular gay scene of circuit
parties, clothing does of course play a role and items are selected to reveal the
worked body beneath. Erich Goodman has observed that, “In Chelsea there
are a lot of people, who dress athletic, they wear a lot of tank tops showing off
their muscles.’!°> Nick Cook, who began going to gay clubs in the late 1980s
recalled how sportswear such as athletic tee-shirts or tank tops and cycling
shorts were “great for showing off your body.’'®’ David McGovern notes that
even today the tank top is a quintessential gay item of clothing that “many
people consider to be the majority of gay style,’"’’ and for Carl Grauer, the
“whole subculture of [muscle] circuit parties ... is a reflection on how gay
men dress when sexual attraction is an influence.”’*
Another group of gay men who are more concerned with body type
in their appearance than the garments that clothe that body 1s the Bears.
Originating in the “girth and mirth” and “chubby and chubby-chaser”
networks among gay men in the early 1970s, Bear subculture strove for a
particular presentation of masculinity that drew on icons of“real” working class
masculinity. As Silverstein and Picano remark, the look was initially “natural,
rural, even woodsy” and that Bears were just “regular guys — only they’re
gay,’'°? something that Peter Hennen notes as the “possibility of subversion”
to divorce effeminacy from same-sex desire and look like regular, that is, not
gay, men."° In “passing” as straight to outside observers, but embracing their
homosexuality, Bears challenge the perception of what a gay man looks like.
Rather than trying to be and look straight, Bear culture operated as a form an
anti-identity in relation to what Les Wright describes as “the young, blond,
smooth-skinned, gym-bufted” type."’ One Bear noted, “It’s not perfect body,

gym-toned, and no facial hair. That’s what society deems as being a normal,
stereotypical gay male.That’s not what I identify with.’"? 29 T12 Initially Bear culture
was an inclusive one which welcomed all shapes and types of men who were
disillusioned with the conformity of commercial gay culture and the popular
stereotypes of contemporary gay male appearance and as such “welcomes
and absorbs all Masculine fantasies, fetishes, identities, and body types," but
increasingly it has become focused upon larger and hairier men. Although
Bear culture initially began in the United States, it has rapidly expanded
across the world to become an international community supported both by
physical Bear bars and clubs in cities across the world and through social
networking sites. “Bear culture is a friendly culture between the larger and
hairier gay men,’ notes Graham Tansey. “I think it is a lot more relaxed and
... the style is very much more relaxed as well, lots of lumberjack style shirts,
tee-shirts, jeans, trainers.”'"™ As described by Tansey, Bear “costume” drew on
the same staples of working-class clothing as that of Clones — jeans, plaid
shirts, work boots — reflecting (and continuing) the desire to appear to be
“real” men. Facial hair and body hair were, and are, important visual signifiers
of the Bear, operating in direct opposition to the seemingly feminine removal
of body hair by the buffed gym queens. David White sees the style as “just
scruffy and comfortable which probably relates to the fact that bigger clothes
are difficult to get in Britain. American Bears do seem to be better dressed. I
think it’s about the availability of clothes for bigger guys there.”"®
While Bear is an intentionally and exclusively gay subcultural formation,
there are other areas of contemporary dressing where gay and straight men
merge, and where sexual orientation is almost incidental to appearance.
One style identified by both American and British gay men interviewed for
this essay was that of the Hipster, which Mark Grief of the New School in
New York identified as emerging in the late 1990s in “the neo-bohemian
neighborhoods, near to the explosion of new wealth in city financial centres”
such as “the Lower East Side and Williamsburg in New York." Joe Harris
observed that in Williamsburg the “straight Hipster guys look very gay and
the gay Hipsters look very straight . . . it was really cool, to fill your closets
with skinny jeans and gingham and plaid, skull hats and lots of chains and lots
of bracelets.’"” Nick Fyhrie agrees: “it is hard to tell the difference between
gay and straight ... I think Hipster culture has blurred it.”"* Writing for

the British newspaper the Guardian in 2011 Anna
Leach noted that in Shoreditch in East London,
“you can at least mooch about in skinny jeans,
hoodies and some form ofsneaker and ... people
will just assume you're a Hipster,’"’ reflecting
the blurring of gay and straight Hipster-inspired
styles that are present in New York. Although
Josh Cooper does not identify as a Hipster, he
does note that the “skinny boy””® look is very
much one that is present on the gay scene in
East London, and he himself wears “always black
skinny jeans ... probably black or brown brogues
and then colorful socks” with “a vest top and a
hoody and then a sleeveless denim jacket over
the top.” Sleeveless, he notes, “is quite an East
End thing . . . and that’s quite a young fashion
conscious gay look.” Describing an outfit he
wore to go out in New York, T. J. Wilson echoes
Cooper’s style: “I wore these skinny black pants
[with] leather detailing on the pockets and the fly
.. with a black zip up sleeveless sweatshirt that
around the hood I added fox fur [and] I wore that with a leather jacket.”
That this skinny look and Hipster style is prevalent amongst young gay
men is reinforced by Alex Jeffcoat, who describes his own “style identity” as
“skinny jeans, regular tee-shirt that had a cool print,” and that he would have
“difficultly saying whether my style had gay influence or not because a lot of
the crowd I hung around was Hipster.”'*
While Jeffcoat notes the Hipster influence he also notes that at high school
many of his friends “were into the punk way of dressing and . . . then after I
came out I guess I started wearing things that were still like punk and gothic but,
because I’m black and the school I was at was predominately white students,
I stood out one way or another whether I dressed as a punk or dressed as
if I was really gay.’’** What Jeftcoat’s experience highlights is the intersection
of subject positions that influences dress choice. For black gay men this has
sometimes meant a difficult decision over which aspect of their life and

identity to forefront. Paul noted that in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s if
you were black and gay you had to decide to fit in on the gay scene and dress
like white gay men or “push that part of your identity down and dress typically
black.’”5 For John Campbell, it was less rigid: “being black means you can get
away with so much more clothes-wise ... 1 wore a pink flying suit which has
detachable sleeves [or] a Brown cord suit with blue insets by Williwear [with]
a white thick arran-style cable poloneck and a full length fake fur coat.””°
Emil Wilbekin echoes Campbell’s sentiment in an article in Out magazine
in 2004, where he states that “black men aren’t afraid to express themselves
through their clothes ... Walking a fine line between masculine and feminine
characteristics’’"7 Writing in the Advocate five years earlier than Wilbekin,
Randall Keenan was less convinced about this ambiguity for black gay men
and echoed Paul’s observation when he stated that “too many queer black
men and women feel forced to choose whether they are black first or queer
first; some even opt to be only one or the other, as best they can.””* Jeffcoat
notes that in Philadelphia, where he lives, he sees “gay black men who dress
extremely flamboyantly, extremely tight jeans [and] women’s shoes” but also
“oay black men still have to look like they are straight sometimes.”"
Patricia Hill Collins has noted that “Representations of‘sissies’ and ‘Negro
faggots’ suggest a deviancy that lies . . . in a seeming emasculation that is
chosen.”*° Thus in the last decade many black men have, Benoit Denizet-
Lewis notes, “settled on a new identity ... Down Low” that rejects “a gay
culture they perceive as white and efteminate.”"" For Alphonso King, D. J. at
Escuelita, a gay club catering to black and Latino men, the adoption of this
identity appears to be a return to the closet (echoing Klinberg’s comments
about the hyper-masculine Clone) and he notes how “I’ve seen the guys who
wear tight tee-shirts and vogue at gay bars suddenly switch to baggy clothing
and become Homothugs.’”"* Hyper-masculinity was at the heart of being
“Down Low,” and stylistically, homothugs drew their influence from hip-
hop culture, wearing low-slung, oversized jeans revealing branded underwear
waistbands, hoody sweatshirts over tight-fitting tank tops and baseball caps,
bandanas, or “doo-rags” covering their hair.'*? Hip-hop-inspired style amongst
black gay men is by no means exclusive to New York, and the global spread
of hip-hop music and its associated dress styles have led to the opening of
specifically black-oriented gay hip-hop clubs in London over the past decade.

As in America the gay version is virtually indistinguishable from straight styles
but as the film-maker Rikki Beadle-Blair observed, “the difference for me is
in the details. It’s a knowingness of how to put together and at those little
camp touches that a straight boy wouldn’t think of?’"*
Beadle-Blair’s noting of the finer detail being the difference between gay
and straight looks is echoed by Taylor Buckle —“‘it is the tiny little details .. .
mannerisms or grooming’ — and Lee Houck who believes it 1s down to “‘a
sensitivity to the look, a thoughtfulness, a just too well put-togetherness.’°
ForJeffcoat, like Buckle, it is not so much the clothes as “the body language”
that identifies a gay man.'? Erich Goodman and Joe Harris develop Jeffcoat’s
notion of body language and body awareness, noting respectively that “‘it’s
about dressing for your body, [so] gay men wear more tight fitting clothes”*
than their straight counterparts, with “shirts too tight, jeans too tight, hair too
perfect, tan too perfect, teeth too bleached, eyebrows too manicured." Even
in men who don’t wear tight-fitting clothes, awareness of the body and its
physicality is important, as is demonstrated in Bear culture. James Gardiner
notes that gay men are “conscious of their sexuality and conscious of their
powers of sexual attractiveness in a way that straight men aren’t.”"*? A desire
to be able to tell a gay from a straight man is not an exclusively current
phenomenon. The British newspaper the Daily Mirror featured a guide on
“How to Spot a Possible Homo” in 1963 that never seemed to reach a real
conclusion. The author identified overt masculinity, hyper-femininity, the
choice of certain garments, posture and mannerisms as all being indicative.
As this essay has demonstrated, there is a vast range of gay styles and
fashions, some of which are about fitting in and blending, others about
standing out and making a statement. Nineteen-year-old Taylor Buckle
believes that ‘ta lot of people, who are my age and gay would dress a certain
way in order to show it or to fit in with the culture, but I am not really
concerned with that” and is happy in his seemingly conservative choice of
Churches brogues, corduroy trousers, buttoned-collar Oxford shirts, cashmere
cable-knit sweater, and Argyle socks. “I don’t really care if it’s considered
dowdy [or] if someone looked at me and went ‘he’s definitely gay’ because
of what I’m wearing.’™' Even at the age of eleven, when he became aware
of fashion and his own feelings of difference, Josh Cooper expressed himself
through clothing. ““Where the other boys probably dressed in tracksuits I was

in skinny jeans from such a young age,” he recalls; “I had a subscription to
Vogue and I think women’s trends have always influenced me maybe more
than male trends, but I would never consider dressing as a woman.’”'#* Mario
Roman also recalls dressing as a teenager in a style at odds with teenage
fashionability:“I was in high school from ’92 to ’96 and that’s grunge era and
I was very much a traitor to my generation because I was endlessly reading
men’s style magazines that no one my age was reading, GQ [and] . . . wore
pressed khakis and button-down shirts and those braided-leather belts that
nobody else was really wearing.” He says that, retrospectively, he can identify
an “obsessive need to differentiate myself from everyone else.’"*’ At the other
end of the gay spectrum to this smart conservatism is a more fashion-forward
extravagant style. Cooper described a typical outfit worn by a fellow Central
Saint Martins College of Art student: “He wears J. W. Anderson and Givenchy.
He wouldn’t think twice about wearing yellow PVC trousers with fur at
the bottom or a bondage leather harness over the top of a black shirt. He
looks very, very chic, but he looks gay.’ Thinking along similar lines, Lee
Houk asks, “would a straight man wear a Marc Jacobs floral-print shirt, white
jeans, and lime green SeaVees [shoes]? Perhaps. But when I wear all that, it’s
definitely a gay look." Joe Harris believes that any gay man can wear a range
ofstyles and it is not obligatory to stick to just one: “it’s just all costume. I can
go out dressed like a jock ... Or I could go out dressed artsy and wear like
eyeliner and mess my hair up, gel it, and wear ripped-up clothes.”"*° Harris's
comment links to another man’s answer to his self-posed question about what
gay men wear outside bars and the gay scene: “Anything. Gay people are
chameleons; we adapt into the scenery by day and like peacocks we come out
with our true colors at night.””"4”
The idea that gay men are chameleons reflects the way in which they
have managed their appearance to articulate expressions oftheir identity over
the past fifty years. As many of the examples in this essay demonstrate, the
acceptance and articulation of sexual orientation has varied between a key
motivator and an incidental component of gay male style and dress. Style can
signify meanings about the multitude of aspects that make up an individual’s
identity. These are not necessarily conscious choices but are influenced by
class, education, upbringing, and other social factors to generate what Pierre
Bourdieu terms “meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions.”

This has been reflected in Steven Seidman’s call for a move away from the
preoccupation with identity and self, towards an understanding of how the self
is embedded in a matrix of institutional and cultural practices."? Of course,
gay men do not operate in a vacuum in terms oftheir dress and style. Attitudes
towards sex and gender and the constructions of the masculine and feminine
have had an impact upon gay dress choice. Historically effeminacy has been
conflated with homosexuality and as Peter Hennen notes, the “historically
constructed effeminacy effect finds a particular type of body and labels it as
not only effeminate but also gay.’ Thus for many gay men an expression of
their homosexuality is through their visible trappings of effeminacy.'° Late
twentieth-century revisions of thinking about homosexuality led many gay
men to articulate expressions of their sexuality through visible manifestations
of masculinity that drew upon the preconceived ideas of hegemonic
masculinity. Striving for a hyper-masculinity could be read as leading to a
new form of constriction on gay dress choice, with a seeming demonization
of effeminacy within the western gay world. What the gay men quoted in
this chapter have indicated is the multitude of ways that they have found to
express their negotiation between conformity and non-conformity, both to
gay and straight regimens, and between visual expressions of masculinity and
femininity.

For the purposes of this essay, fourteen new interviews were con- John Campbell, interview with Shaun Cole, July 31, 1997.
ducted in person and by email with American and British gay men. In his 1982 essay, Andrew Holleran noted how the straight
The nine Americans ranged in age from twenty-six to thirty-seven, boys from outside Manhattan wearing “bomber jackets and
and the British men, from nineteen to forty-six. Three of the men plaidshirts,” and looking like “homosexuals looking for a top
were friends of mine and were selected because of their involve- man.” “The Petrification of Clone Style,’ Christopher Street,
ment in particular gay subcultural groups, or because of their in- vol.69 (1982),p. 16.
terest in appearance, or because they had a career in the fashion Michael Bracewell, “Dress Codes,” Guardian (September 25,
industry. Others were sourced through friends and colleagues and 1993), p- 41.
came from a range ofbackgrounds and occupations: students, artists, Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012.
an architect, a writer, fashion PR, and fashion retailers. They were Alex Jeffcoat, interview with Shaun Cole, October 16, 2012.
selected for their interest in their own appearance and its relation to David McGovern, interview with Shaun Cole, November
their sexual orientation. Comments from interviews that were con- 20, 2012.
ducted in the late 1990s as part of the research for my monograph Nick Fyhrie, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012.
Don We Now Our Gay Apparel (2000) were also used. David McGovern, interview with Shaun Cole, November
20, 2012. These statements are of course just the opinion
I Nick Fyhrie, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012. of gay men reflecting on the relationship between gay and
is) Jamie Gough, “Theories ofSexual Identity and the straight styles and fashions.
The increase in the reporting on
Masculinisation of the Gay Man,” in Coming on Strong: Gay fashion in men’s magazines and the numbers of magazines
Politics and Culture, ed. Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis and websites dedicated to men’s fashion and style in the last
(London, 1989), p. 12. ten years demonstrates straight male interest in fashion.
3 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Erich Goodman, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14,
Identity (London, 1990), p. 25. 2012.
4 Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion (London, 1994), p. 170. Cited in Brian Lowry, “Queer Eye Exposure a Worry for
5 R. J. Lukey, “Homosexuality in Menswear,” Menswear (February some Gays,” Los Angeles Times August 27, 2003). Accessed
1970), p. 73. Interestingly the interviewed designer Bill Miller February 16, 2012. http://articles.latimes.com/2003/aug/27/
identified what was later to become known as the “pink entertainment/et-lowry27.
dollar/pound” noting that the “fashion-conscious homo- 23 Mario Roman, interview with Shaun Cole, November 29,
sexual is generally a single man [who] has all the time and 2012.
money at his disposal to spend on doing the things he wants Cited in Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York, 1994),
to do” (cited in Lukey, “Homosexuality in Menswear,” p. 73). p. 112.
Lukey, “Homosexuality in Menswear,” p. 73. John Hardy, interview with Shaun Cole, June 12, 1995.
Tony Woodcock, interview with Shaun Cole, November 30, Dudley Cave, interview with Shaun Cole, May 21, 1997.
1993- OlgaVainshtein, “The Dandy,” in The Fashion History Reader:

8 Joe Pop, interview with Shaun Cole, May 19, 1997. Global Perspectives, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil
9 Lee Houk, email to Shaun Cole, November 26, 2012. (London, 2010),p. 329.
10 Brian Findley, email to Shaun Cole, December 3, 2012. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture
tr Cited in Richard Barnes, Mods! (London, 1991), p. 10. and the Making of the Gay Male World, i890—1940 (New York,
12. Cited in Terry Rawlings, Mod:A Very British Phenomenon 1994), and Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures
(London, 2000), p. 50. in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (Chicago and London, 2005).
13. Stephen, however, was quick to see that adventurous young 29 See Norton Richter, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay
straight men were looking for a new style of clothes and Subculture in England 1700-1830, (London, 1992), Colin
were not afraid of the associations that accompanied this Spencer, Homosexuality: AHistory (London, 199s), and
more flamboyant style of dressing. See Shaun Cole, Don Randolph Trumbach, “Gender and the Homosexual Role
We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth in Modern Western Culture: The 18th and roth Centuries
Century (Oxford, 2000), and Shaun Cole, “Queers And Mods: Compared,” in Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?, ed.
Social And Sartorial Interaction in London’s Carnaby Street,” Dennis Altman, Carole Vance, Martha Vicinus, and Jeffrey
in The Meanings ofDress third edn, ed. Kimberly A. Miller- Weeks (London, 1989).
Spillman, Andrew Reilly, and Patricia Hunt-Hurst (New BBC Radio program “Male Homosexual.” Broadcast
York, 2012). January 6, 1964.

31 Anthony Frietas et al.,“Appearance Management as Border sO Alex Jeffcoat, interview with Shaun Cole, October 16, 2012.
Construction: Least Favorite Clothing, Group Distancing, SI Guy Conon, cited in Cody Solem, “It’s All Drag:
and Identity Not!” Sociological Inquiry, vol. 67, no. 3 (1997). An Oral History-based Exploration of Drag Queens in
Tony Diaman, “The Search for the Total Man?’ Come Out Contemporary London” (M.A. diss., London College of
(December — January 1970), pp. 22-3. Fashion, 2012).
33 Cited in Mark D. Jordan, “Making the Homophile Daniel Wojcik, Punk and Neo Tiibal Body Art (Jackson, Miss.,
Manifest,” in Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1995), p. 10.
1960s, ed. Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett (Minneapolis, Jeffrey Hinton, interview with Shaun Cole, April 17, 2012.
1999),p. 185. Bowery, cited in Sue Tilley, Leigh Bowery: The Life and Times
34 See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of an Icon (London, 1997),p. 57.
ofIdentity (London, 2006), especialy the chapter “Subversive Nicola Bateman, interview with Shaun Cole, May 14, 2006.
Bodily Acts.” Jeffrey Hinton, interview with Shaun Cole, April 17, 2012.
35 Fred Fejes, “Making a Gay Masculinity,” Critical Studies John Hardy, interview with Shaun Cole, June 12, 1995.
in Media Communication, vol. 17, no. 1 (2000) and Joseph Jonny Slut, interview with Shaun Cole, August 11, 1998.
Bristow, “Being Gay: Politics, Identity, Pleasure,” New James St James, Disco Bloodbath:The Story of Michael Alig —
Formations 9 (1989). King ofthe Club Kids, (London, 1999), p. 48.
36 Gregg Blachford,“Male Dominance and the Gay World,” Ibid., p.57.
in The Making of the Modern Homosexual, ed. Kenneth Michael Alig’s reign ended and the Club Kid scene
Plummer (London, 1981), p. 200. changed in 1996 when the Limelight was closed after a
37 Peter Burton, interview with Shaun Cole, August 21, 1997. drugs bust and Alig went on the run after murdering the
38 Ray Weller, interview with Shaun Cole, June 20, 1997. drug dealer, Angel Melendes.
39 Seymour Kleinberg, “Where Have All the Sissies Gone?” Cited in Tim Lawrence, “A History of Drag Balls, Houses
Christopher Street (March 1978), p. 12. and the Culture of Voguing,” in Voguing and the House
40 Laud Humphries, cited in Carol A. Warren, Identity and Ballroom Scene of New York City 1989-92, ed. Stuart Baker
Community in the Gay World (Oxford, 1974), p. 107. (London, 2011), p. 9.
41 Richard Ekins, Male Femaling: AGrounded Theory Approach Leila J. Rupp and Verta A. Taylor, Drag Queens at the 801
to Cross-Dressing and Sex-Changing (London, 1997). Cabaret (Chicago and London, 2003), pp. 217, 218.
42 Roger Baker, Drag (London, 1994), p. 104. 64 Cited in Dominic Lutyens, “Top of the Fops,” Independent
43 Michael Brown, interview with Shaun Cole, June 24, 2011. Magazine, May 22, 2004, p. 30.
44 Cited in David Weissman and Bill Weber, The Cockettes Sarah Hay, “Club Fantastik,” Attitude (January 2004), p. 51.
(London: Tartan Video, 2007) [video: pvp]. 66 Cited in Lutyens, “Top of the Fops,” p. 28.
45 Sally Banes, Subversive Expectations: Performance
Art and 67 Ibid.
Paratheater in New York, 1976-85 (Michigan, 1998), p. 108. 68 Cited in James Anderton, “Boys Keep Swinging,” i-D,
46 Peter Hennen, Faeries, Bears and Leathermen: Men in February 2003, p. 110.
Community Queering the Masculine (Chicago and London, 69 Arabella Weir, “Not so glad to be gay,’ Guardian (March 23,
2008), p. 89. 2002). Accessed January 12, 2012, http://www.guardian.
47 Mark Thompson, “Children of Paradise: A Brief History co.uk/world/2002/mar/23/gender.weekend7
of Queens,” in Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning, ed. Mark 70 Zoe Williams, “Big Girls’ Blouse: Why Do Women Like
Thompson (New York, 1987), p. 61. Dudes Who Look Like Ladies,’ FHM Collections (Summer
48 More information on each of these performers can be 2002), p. 89.
found on their websites: Nick Fyhrie, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012.
Jonny Woo — Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, 2012.
http://www.jonnywoo.com; Nick Fyhrie, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012.
Seoteee — T. J.Wilson, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012.
htttp://www.scottee.co.uk; Lee Houk, email to Shaun Cole, November 26, 2012.
Taylor Mac — http://taylormac.net; Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, 2012.
Acid Betty - David McGovern, interview with Shaun Cole, November
http://acidbetty.com 2On 2012)
49 Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012. Josh Cooper, interview with Shaun Cole, September 20, 2012.

Alex Jeffcoat, interview with Shaun Cole, October 16, 2012. 108 Carl Grauer, email to Shaun Cole, December 12, 2012.
Hennen, Faeries, Bears and Leathermen, p. 10. 109 C. Silverstein and Felice Picano, The New Joy of Gay Sex
Robert Brannon, “The Male Sex Role: Our Culture’s (New York, 1992), pp. 128-30.
Blueprint of Manhood, and what it’s Done for us Lately,” 110 Hennen, Faeries, Bears and Leathermen, p. 130.
in The Forty-nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role, Ill Les Wright, The Bear Book: Readings in the History and
ed. Deborah S. David and Robert Brannon (Reading, Evolution of aGay Male Subculture (New York, 1997), p. 2-
Mass., 1976). 112 Cited in Peter Moskowitz, “The Brotherhood ofBears,”
ioe}to Mark Simpson, “Male Impersonators,” Gay Times (August New York Times Lens (August 27 2012). Accessed August
1992), p. $2. 28, 2012, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/the-
Coobe R.W. Connell,“A Very Straight Gay: Masculinity, brotherhood-of-the-bears/
Homosexual Experience, and the Dynamics of Gender,” 113 Ron Suresha, Bears on Bears: Interviews and Discussions (Los
American Sociological Review, vol. 57, no. 6 (1992). Angeles, 2002), p. 80.
Stewart Who? “So You Think You're a Man,” Gay Times II4 Graham Tansey, email to Shaun Cole, January 28, 2012.
(March 2005), p. 40. 115 David White, email to Shaun Cole, January 21, 2013.
Steve Fletcher “Caught in the Act,” Attitude, no. 95 (March 116 Mark Greif, “What Was the Hipster?” New York Magazine
2002), p. 32. (October 24, 2010). Accessed September 3, 2012, http://
Nick Fyhrie, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012. nymag.com/print/?/news/features/69129/
Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, 2012. 117 Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, 2012.
Mario Roman, interview with Shaun Cole, November 29, 118 Nick Fyhrie, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012.
2012. 119 Anna Leach, “Hipsters are Agents of Social Change,”
Brian Findley, email to Shaun Cole, November 26, 2012. Guardian (January, 21, 2011). Accessed November 25, 2012,
Lee Houk, email to Shaun Cole, November 26, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/21/
Quoted in the BBC Radio programme, “Male hipsters-gay-people
Homosexual,” broadcast January 6, 1964. 120 This is not to say that this “skinny” look was derived entirely
T. J.Wilson, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012. from hipster trends, it can be linked to a certain narrow
Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, 2012. close-fitting Scandinavian aesthetic, associated with brands
David McGovern, interview with Shaun Cole, November such as Filippa K., Johan Lideberg, and Acne Jeans, and
20, 2012. traced back to Hedi Slimane’s narrow silhouette for Dior
Erich Goodman, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, Homme in the mid 2000s and which in turn was informed
2012. by the close-fitting Mod styles of the 1960s and its late
Carl Grauer, email to Shaun Cole, December 12, 2012. seventies revival.
David White, email to Shaun Cole, January 21, 2013. I21 Josh Cooper, interview with Shaun Cole, September 20,
Brian Findley, email to Shaun Cole, November 26, 2012. 2012.
Ray Weller, interview with Shaun Cole, June 26, 1997. T. J.Wilson, interview with Shaun Cole, October 13, 2012.
Josh Cooper, interview with Shaun Cole, September 20, Alex Jeffcoat, interview with Shaun Cole, October 16, 2012.
2012. Ibid.
IOI Mario Roman, interview with Shaun Cole, November 29, Paul, interview with Shaun Cole, March 14, 1994.
Zola John Campbell, interview with Shaun Cole, July 31, 1997.
Martin P. Levine, Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Emil Wilbekin, “Brothers in Style?” OUT (March, 2004),
Homosexual Clone (New York and London, 1998), p. 59. p- 93.
Brian Pronger, “Physical Culture,” in Gay Histories and Randall Keenan, “Identity: A Tricky Animal,” Advocate
Cultures:An Encyclopaedia, ed. George E. Haggerty (New (February 16, 1999), p. 9.
York, 2000), passim. Alex Jeffcoat, interview with Shaun Cole, October 16, 2012.
Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (New York, Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics (New York, 2005),
1997), p- 35. pari

Erich Goodman, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “Double Lives on the Down Low,’
2012. New York Times Magazine (August 3, 2003), p. 30.
106 Nick Cook, interview with Shaun Cole, August 27, 1997. Cited in Matthew Philip, “Homothugs: Hip-hop’s Secret
107 David McGovern, interview with Shaun Cole, November Homo Underside,” The Guide (March, 2005). Accessed
20, 2012. January 21, 2012, http://www.guidemag.com

133 Ibid. Mario Roman, interview with Shaun Cole, November 29,
134 Rikki Beadle-Blair, interview with Shaun Cole, January 20, 2012.
2005. 144 Josh Cooper, interview with Shaun Cole, September 20,
135 Taylor Buckle, interview with Shaun Cole, November 1 2012.
2012. 145 Lee Houk, email to Shaun Cole, November 26, 2012.
136 Lee Houk, email to Shaun Cole, November 26, 2012. 146 Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, 2012.
137 Alex Jeffcoat, interview with Shaun Cole, October 16, 2012. 147 Cited in Wayne H. Brekhus, Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs:
138 Erich Goodman, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity (Chicago and
2012. London, 2003), p. 65.
139 Joe Harris, interview with Shaun Cole, October 14, 2012. 148 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of
140 James Gardiner, interview with the Shaun Cole, August Taste (London, 1984), p. 170.
IG 149 Steven Seidman, “Identity and Politics in a ‘Postmodern’ Gay
I4I Taylor Buckle, interview with Shaun Cole November 13, Culture: Some Histories and Conceptual Notes,” in Fear of a
2012. Queer Planet, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis, 1993), p. 137.
142 Josh Cooper, interview with Shaun Cole, September 20, Hennen, Faeries, Bears and Leathermen, p. 131.
2012.

ELIZABETH WILSON
WHAT DOES A LESBIAN LOOK LIKE?
Until the last decade or three “lesbian style” might have been laughed out of
court as an obvious oxymoron. The popular idea of the lesbian was precisely
that of a woman with no style. For sure, the lesbian had an image — a gruff
person in hairy tweeds and maybe a few whiskers on her chin — but that was
a stereotype, not a style.
In any case it seems that more often than not lesbians were cloaked in
invisibility. Historically there has been little certainty about just what a lesbian
is or if she even exists. Terry Castle has described the way in which both today
and in the past lesbianism is wished away and denied as the “ghosting” of the
lesbian. Writing soon after the death of Greta Garbo, in 1993, she noted that
“virtually every distinguished woman suspected of homosexuality has had
her biography sanitised.” This has certainly been true of Garbo. Castle men-
tions a number of other stars, directors, and writers in 1930s Hollywood who
Radclyffe Halland Were known to have erotic relationships with women. Paradoxically, Marlene
aay Photo
na Troubriege, 197
by Fox Photos
Dietrich, who had many affairs with men as well as some with women, is
Getty images. celebrated in the Berlin Museum of Cinema as a totally lesbian icon (or was
WHAT DOES A LESBIAN LOOK LIKE? / 167

when I visited it in 2007), but that is unusual. Castle cites many examples of
how literary descriptions of lesbians have deployed an imagery of ghosts and
haunting and suggests that, actually, lesbianism “haunts” our culture.’ A les-
bian was — and perhaps still is — the apparitional “other” of the heterosexual.
Castle further argues that this effacement and denial ofa lesbian reality 1s
found not only in mainstream literature and culture, but also among the very
writers and critics who have aimed to defend the lesbian’s right to existence.
She cites Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men, published in 1981, as
exemplifying such a view. It purports to defend “love between women.” yet
paradoxically belittles it or at least plays down its sexual dimension. Faderman
argued that the labeling and negative categorization of women who loved
other women began only with the work of nineteenth-century sexologists
such as Richard von Krafft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, and Sigmund Freud. It is
true that these medical men invented new words for the experience of same
sex love: “homosexual” and “lesbian” came to be used only in the nineteenth
century and as specifically scientific terms. However, it does not follow that
in earlier times women and men had not desired members of their own sex.
Castle suggests, however, that Faderman’s influential views were typical of
the way in which forms of passionate friendship between women have been
routinely de-eroticized.
Surpassing the Love ofMen appeared at a time of tremendous tension within
the women’s movement,
when for some feminists, not to be a lesbian was to fail
to prioritize women in your life. One retrospective political interpretation of
Surpassing the Love of Men could be that it provided a route whereby feminists
who were not erotically attracted to other women — sometimes referred to
ambivalently as political lesbians — were enabled to imagine and indeed to live
a form of intense friendship as a feminist practice while avoiding or playing
down its sexual expression.
Castle equally takes issue with deconstructionist queer theorists who
challenged the very meaning of the word “lesbian” or of “coming out” as
a practice. Their linguistic contortions, she suggests, was another variant of
denial and obliteration. To illustrate her point she quotes a particularly self-
parodic utterance by Judith Butler, who asked:
What remains permanently concealed by the very linguistic act that offers
up the promise of a transparent revelation of sexuality? Can sexuality even

remain sexuality once it submits to a criterion of transparency? ... For it
is always finally unclear what is meant by invoking the lesbian-signifier .. .
because its specificity can only be demarcated by exclusions that return to
disrupt its claim to coherence.’
Rejecting the equivocation of Butler, Castle also questions whether, as

Faderman seemed to suggest, before the nineteenth century lesbianism was
not a recognized practice — as if it could not exist because it had not been
named.
Not only does Castle demonstrate that in pre-industrial times there were
all manner of familiar slang and other words for lesbians and lesbianism, but
that there is plenty of literary evidence for their existence. The seventeenth-
century poet Katherine Philips, for example, has been hailed as a poet ofles-
bianism on account ofher ardent verses to women friends. On the other hand
we cannot ever quite know how individuals conceptualized their feelings and
relationships in earlier times. Not only was Philips married (certainly no indi-
cation of anything other than social convention and economic necessity), but
she appears, along with her husband, to have belonged to a group of friends
who practiced and advocated Platonic love between and among friends. She
herself wrote that platonic love was higher than carnal love. In the twenty-
first century it may be difficult to understand that that was a widespread view,
for Freud has thoroughly accustomed us to the idea that sexual fulfilment is
a touchstone and criterion of a fulfilling life. To us it is so, and we therefore
do not easily enter into a culture that viewed eros as a lesser or even degraded
form of love by comparison with the more spiritualized and selfless agape.
The ambiguity of Philips and her relationships with women is perhaps an
aspect of the “apparitional,” ghostly nature oflesbian love as it has been per-
ceived and imagined. So dominant has been the association ofactive sexuality
with men and with the male genitals, that the imagining of eroticism be-
tween women has been dismissed as impossible. It is therefore not surprising
if women who were attracted to other women sought to express their active
sexuality in masculine garb. What they wore was meaningful in terms of who
they were and how they understood their desires.
Whatever Philips’s feelings for her women friends, there can be little
doubt that by the end of the eighteenth century, women’s love relationships
were edging into the public domain. The two Anglo-Irish aristocrats Lady

Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, known
as the Ladies of Llandgolen, who “eloped”
6“
together since they did not want to marry,

became celebrities in their own day, visited
by many famous individuals from Lord Byron
to the Duke of Wellington. The Romantic
poets Robert Southey and William Wordsworth
made the pilgrimage to their cottage and they
were so famous that china ornaments repre-
senting them were even produced.
Eleanor Butler kept a diary full of loving
references to her friend and lifelong compan-
ion, but as there is no evidence of a sexual rela-
tionship, commentators have tended to assume
there was none — another example, for Castle,
of the persistent tendency to denial. On the
other hand, many of their visitors at the time
did at least hint of a relationship that was “too
intense.’ That Eleanor did not write about sex-
ual acts neither proves nor disproves that they
took place, nor does the fact that they them-
selves presented their union as one of celibate devotion prove that it was so _ Sarah Ponsonby (left) and
=) e “ . : Weal 11: idy Eleanor Butler, known as the
— the very fact that they felt constrained to do so implies a different possibility. adies of
eseLlangollen.
cieo——
Lithograph
Their masculine style of clothing certainly aroused comment and curios- by 4.H. Lynch, after Mary Parker
(later Lady Leighton], 1828
ity at the time. They routinely dressed in riding habits. The essayist Joseph — jnace courtesy Welleome Library
Addison disapproved, feeling that it was “absolutely necessary to keep the = ‘ondo
partition between the two sexes.” However, Elizabeth Mavor points out that
to wear a habit as ordinary day-wear was a common practice among women
living in the country, especially in Ireland, from where the Ladies originally
came.? Yet their appearance was decidedly masculine, as described by an actor,
Charles Mathews, in 1820.“There is not one point to distinguish them from
men ...the dressing and powdering of the hair, their well-starched neck-
cloths, the upper part of their habits . .. made precisely like men’s coats, and
regular black beaver men’s hats.’”’* By 1820, powdering the hair and having it
cut in the (Roman) “Titus” crop of the 1790s was very old fashioned, adding
to the eccentricity of their appearance.

At a slightly later period, Anne Lister, a
wealthy spinster living in Yorkshire (who,
when she visited the Ladies, then in their
sixties, sensed a “je ne sais quoi’ that convinced
her they were lesbians), was quite clear where
her desires lay. Extracts from her encrypted
diaries were published in the 1990s and when
I first read these I was convinced they had to
be a hoax, so modern did they seem (Castle
admitted that at first she too doubted they
were genuine). But it seems that they are
authentic and had first been discovered over
twenty years earlier by a researcher who read,
but chose to gloss over, the explicit nature of
some of the entries.
Lister dressed in a definitely masculine way
and her mannish appearance was noted by
observers. In her portrait she wears black with
what appears to be a black cravat and the frill
of a white shirt above it, although she hoped
that her appearance was “not all masculine,
Joshua Horner, Anne Lister of but rather softly gentleman like.”>We do not know how her partners dressed,
but she mentions meeting other “mannish women.” These were not erotic
ie objects for her, but fellow adventurers in their pursuit of women.
3 Because she was financially independent and a significant local figure, she
was able to live as she pleased and her “eccentricity” appears to have been
tolerated by her family, neighbors, and friends. This social freedom, in fact —
the opportunity to disregard the conventions — may have been more unusual
than her sexual tastes themselves; although it is also the case that the women
with whom she had erotic relationships were mostly in a much more depen-
dent position (some were married), yet they still expressed their desires. Her
diaries chronicle numerous affairs and in 1832 she began a relationship with
another rich heiress, Ann Walker, with whom she lived and traveled for the
rest of her not very long life — she died in 1842 at the age of forty-nine.
Castle believes that Lister was influenced in her self-presentation by Byron.
As a poet of Romantic doom he could appeal to the idea of lesbianism as a

form of forbidden yet compulsive erotic love, while as a notorious womanizer
he could act as role model for the masculine rake that Lister sometimes seems
to consider herself to have been.° Lister’s style of dress, however, seems more
directly modeled on the new dandyism promoted by Beau Brummell, the
inventor of the modern gentleman’s suit.
In any case, women’s fashions from time to time borrowed and/or parodied
masculine fashions. Fashion is always a kind of bricolage with magpie thefts
from history, from other cultures, from other sexes. So the interpretation of
lesbian style must always take into account the proposals offashion itself. Thus
we cannot explore nineteenth-century lesbian style (insofar as it can be said
to have existed) outside the context of the upheavals in fashion itself at the
end of the eighteenth century. Beau Brummell did not just invent a new style;
his strict tailoring, neutral palette, and emphasized masculinity announced a
rejection of the effeminacy of court fashions for men. Gone were the lace,
high heels, embroidery, bright colors, powder, wigs, and cosmetics, in favor
of the plainly polished leather boots, sober dark coats and jackets, and plain,
scrupulously clean white linen of the new dandies. This was a reinforcement
of a certain conception of the masculine, in contrast with the Regency or, in
France, Directoire, fashions for women. These, also based on a neo-classical
aesthetic of simplicity, featured pale muslin with an emphasis on the natural
female form, and suggested a certain fragility. With these fashions the contrast
between masculine and feminine became more emphatic. So, as fashion
differentiated the sexes more rigidly, it could the more readily be deployed to
suggest sexual identities.
There were also many women from the poorer ranks of society who are
known to have cross-dressed, sometimes in order to join the armed forces or
to become pirates. In some cases the reasons for the adoption of male dress
may have been purely practical — the desire to earn a better wage — and, as was
the case with the French novelist Georges Sand in the nineteenth century,
dressing as a man gave a woman freedom to roam the streets in a manner
that was otherwise impossible or at least difficult. Nevertheless some of these
women had relations with women. Some even “married” other women.
Sand had many male lovers and her reasons for sometimes adopting men’s
dress were practical. So too were those of many women who pioneered dress

reform. In utopian communities it could signify equality between the sexes
and incorporated a critique of the ways in which fashions for women im-
peded their movement and (in the case of corsets, for example) could actually
damage their health.
The adoption of masculine dress in the nineteenth century could not
therefore be seen automatically as a sign of lesbianism. For a woman to dress
like a man was to invoke several different associations, all of which alarmed the
dominant forces in society: feminism, socialism, sexual inversion were each
controversial. And although these were divergent, they all represented one
thing: a rejection of male domination, male authority, and “patriarchy.” Women
in trousers challenged the male power that ruled society and this exposed
them and made them vulnerable. Throughout the nineteenth century they
were routinely mocked in the pages of the satirical British magazine Punch,
were denounced from pulpits, and even at the turn of the twentieth century,
were excluded from public spaces such as hotels. In Britain, female pioneers
of bicycling plus-fours found themselves ridiculed and hounded. The French
writer Colette claims that women in trousers were forbidden by law from
appearing in public (although images from the period do show women in
“bifurcated garb” bicycling through the Paris streets). Indeed, research into
attitudes in the north of England in the 1930s suggests that negative attitudes
towards females in trousers persisted even then, the wearing of trousers being
seen as immodest and/or a rejection of male authority.’ The wearing of
trousers by women therefore merged and confused the reasons for doing
so, leading, among other things, to the persistent equation of feminism with
lesbianism. But what “mannish dress” signifies is a more general demand for
the right to power and authority. The demand for sexual autonomy implied
by lesbianism was part, but not the whole of this.
At the beginning of the twentieth century changes in women’s lives — the
development of girls’ schools in which sport had an important place, and
debates about feminism, the vote, and women’s role — were accompanied by
changes in women’s fashions.* Lesbian style cannot be divorced from these
wider changes.
Well before World War I groups of independent women were engaged
in forging a new lifestyle. Bohemian circles were inclusive; they welcomed

(if ambivalently) unmarried women, lesbian or not. An unconventional way
of life was possible, although still largely restricted to women who were
financially independent. One of the best known was the group that met at
the Paris salon of Natalie Clifford Barney, a rich American heiress. She was
also a poet and her home in the rue Jacob was a meeting place for literary
women. It was an intellectual as well as a social centre. Barney herself was
openly lesbian as were some, though not all, of her salon habituées. She was
known as the “Amazone” from her appearances on horseback in the Bois de
Boulogne, dressed in the formal riding gear of bowler hat, black jacket, bow
tie, and white shirt; but she appears very feminine as Valerie Seymour in the
novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyfte Hall:
She was not beautiful nor was she imposing, but her limbs were perfectly
proportioned, which gave her a .. . look of tallness. She moved well, with
the quiet and unconscious grace that sprang from those perfect propor-
tions. Her face was humorous, placid and worldly; her eyes very kind, very
blue, very lustrous. She was dressed all in white, and a large white fox skin
was clasped round her slender and shapely shoulders . . . she had masses of
thick, fair hair, which was busily ridding itself ofits hairpins.’
For lesbianism could, after all, announce itself as a celebration of femininity

and womanliness as much as an assertion of the independence convention-
ally associated with the masculine. What was more troubling was the absence
of any possibility of escaping the opposed alternatives: masculine/feminine.
That did not appear to concern Barney, nor Renée Vivien, her lover before
World War I. She, too, was a poet, an adventurer, and a traveler, addicted to
drugs, and anorexic; she died at the age of thirty. In a photograph she poses in
knee breeches, a velvet jacket, striped waistcoat, and lace jabot. Whether worn
specifically for a photograph or in daily life, such an ensemble gestured to a
kind of dandyism and theatricality that was increasingly to lift lesbian dress to
a sophisticated level of what was not exactly parody, nor was it transvestism,
but an ironic use of fashion to express a different sexuality.
In the aftermath of the 1914-18 War, cultural life expanded, cultural
customs changed, and women took the public stage more dramatically than
ever before. Social historians have often interpreted short skirts, short hair, the
obvious use of cosmetics, and changed norms ofbehavior in public (smoking,

for example) as signifiers of women’s emancipation. The reality was more
complex. Short hair might be daring and even controversial. On the other
hand women now needed to visit beauty salons and hairdressers; they needed
to diet to attain the new slim figure. The fashions of modernity called for
a generally more demanding standard of beauty and grooming. It was hard
work to be beautiful, feminine, and fashionable. Femininity was, more than
ever, a masquerade."°
Nor did the “garonne” fashions — the new boyishness — necessarily sug-
gest a greater tolerance for different sexualities. Certainly, though, there were
now groups of artistic and intellectual women who created a privileged —
although often complicated and fraught — way oflife as women who loved
other women.
One of the most famous of these women, Radclyffe Hall, wrote what was
virtually a manifesto for a certain kind of lesbian “mannishness” in The Well
of Loneliness, a fictionalized autobiography that was banned on publication in
1928. For the protagonist ofthe novel, it is clothing rather than surgical modi-
fication that plays a pivotal role in the creation of a lesbian identity. There are
loving descriptions of her rows of folded shirts, her cuff links, her well-cut
masculine suits.
Her lover, Mary, is vouchsafed less in the way of fashionable description
and plays a rather pallid role in the novel, her femininity something of a
blank. The novel ends tragically in the sense that Mary eventually leaves the
“hero.” Stephen, for a “real” man. Radclyffe Hall, on the other hand, lived for
many years with Una Vincenzo Lady Troubridge, who had done precisely the
opposite: leaving her husband in order to be with Radcylffe Hall. As Katrina
Rolley has pointed out, the couple is crucial to the construction of this kind
of lesbian identity: the presence of the feminine partner at the side of the
mannish lesbian fixes her as also lesbian."
The Well of Loneliness defines lesbianism as tragic and, I have to say, humor-
less, but the photograph of the pair in evening dress can be read as camp
and almost mocking. By mockery I mean not self-mockery, but something
closer to a triumphant sense of challenge as Lady Troubridge and Radclyffe
stare defiantly at the spectator. The appearance of each of the women in the
photograph, which is itself very stylized, the dual pose carefully arranged, is
intentionally glamorous and mannered. It is also deeply fashionable. Radcylffe

Hall does not just look “mannish”; the kiss curl lacquered to her cheek, the
languid pose, the dinner jacket are artificial and, above all, of the moment. Her
partner's languorous pose borrows from Hollywood.
Yet Lady Troubridge, photographed with her lover wearing a slinky eve-
ning dress, while Radcylffe Hall stands behind her in dinner jacket and satin
skirt, cigarette in hand, was also portrayed by Romaine Brooks in an outfit
as masculine as any worn by her partner. And after Radclyffe Hall’s death
Troubridge took to wearing the novelist’s masculine wardrobe. (As a child |
once caught sight of her in the London department store, Harrods. Very slight
and slender, she cut a curiously archaic and almost ghostly appearance in the
flashy late 1950s, complete with monocle and striped waistcoat — an appari-
tional lesbian it seemed, yet at the same time, startlingly noticeable.)
This oscillation between feminine and masculine suggests the element of
masquerade in lesbian dress. The 1920s loved theatricality and dressing up.
Newspaper gossip writers filled their columns with reports of the fancy-dress
parties of the upper class and again, dressing in a masculine fashion should
be seen in this context. And in any case, women’s fashions of the time were
generally boyish — a dinner jacket worn by a woman was not so unusual.
What was effectively an international coterie of creative women, involved
in different ways with the arts, used costume and masquerade to express their
originality of which their sexuality was a part. Mercedes de Acosta was one
of the most flamboyant of these. Socially well-connected, she mixed in New
York society and a world of artists, the theatre, and celebrity. She is best
known for her time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where she became the
lover first of Garbo and then of Marlene Dietrich (who apparently called
Mercedes “mon grand amour,’ although simultaneously conducted an affair
with the British tennis star Fred Perry).
The Museum of Cinema in Berlin has archive footage of Mercedes run-
ning down the beach in California. She is dressed in the sort of one-piece
bathing costume worn by men at that period: a vest attached to very short
shorts in a contrasting color. As she goes she is combing back her hair with
butch elan. But when not on the beach she had devised a kind of uniform
for herself.'* This consisted of a black Directoire redingote, that is, a long
coat with exaggerated lapels, nipped-in waist, and wide skirt. In a paparazzo
photograph in which she is walking down the street with Garbo, she carries

white gloves and wears a white scull cap. One less than admiring observer
thought she looked like Dracula.
Such theatrical costuming could be interpreted as a visible expression of
the “third sex’? Magnus Hirschfeld, the German sexologist, whose institute
and papers were burnt by the Nazis in 1933, had developed the concept of the
third sex as a route to liberation from the constraints of gender. By the 1970s
this had been rejected as both too biological and biologically nonsensical and

damned as “essentialist” (that is, assuming innate qualities that differentiate
men and women). However, a woman who had moved in bohemian circles in
London in the 1930s assured me that the idea ofthe third sex had been very
popular with gay men and lesbians before World War II. It was wonderful, she
insisted, because it removed you completely from heterosexual norms. She
expressed dismay (this conversation took place in the mid 1980s) that lesbians
were now having babies (“we wanted to get away from all that”). What seems
reactionary and out-dated at one time may have functioned as liberating at
another.
Whether or not membership of a mythical third sex made it easier for
lesbians to escape the dual codes of masculine and feminine, there were many
lesbians who devised imaginative ways of dressing. We do not know how
seriously Mercedes de Acosta or her contemporaries took Hirschfeld’s ideas
or were even familiar with them. They certainly dressed in an original way
and it may be that lesbianism was to them as much a way ofbeing original as
of rejecting women’s secondary place in society.
Travesty could play out ironically. One of the most famous and popular
of the many images of Marlene Dietrich is that taken from the film Morocco.
Dressed in top hat and tails she flirts with and kisses the female singer in a
nightclub. The thrill is in the ambiguity, for this sort of travesty always suggests
something beyond mere male and female. It is an appeal to the imagination
and as such must always be more seductive than mere depiction or reinforce-
ment ofthe obvious. The image is, of course, doubly ironic in its playful refer-
ence to Dietrich’s own bisexuality, for those in the know."
The women who frequented Natalie Barney’s salon in the 1920s and
1930s may have found boyishness attractive and been drawn to androgyny,
but they also wore startling hats and original outfits and accessories that
signaled that they were fashionable. Janet Flanner, a successful journalist, and
her partner, Solita Solano, with whom she lived in Paris for many years (they
had an open relationship and took other lovers) were, said the photographer,
Berenice Abbott, “always looking smart and elegant, never careless or dowdy;
they knew that a woman had to dress well.” Flanner was often described as
wearing a huge seal coat trimmed with black skunk, stockings with a gold
stripe, and a black cloche hat. When relaxing at home she wore rose flannel
Oxford bags made by her tailor. She was photographed by Abbott in a top

hat, black velvet jacket, and striped trousers. An admiring younger woman — 5rassa\, Fat Claude
in the ex-patriate American circles of the time remembered Flanner, Solano,
and Nancy Cunard seated at the Café Flore dressed in black-tailored suits and ¢*" ne, Centre
Paris, France
white gloves, sipping martinis at the cocktail hour." eee
This circle of women took to its highest point a lesbian way of dressing
that was daring, aesthetically exciting, and which spoke their sexuality in a OF
sophisticated yet usually discreet way. Each woman had her own style. Evelyn
Wyld, for example, who worked with Eileen Grey the designer, “always set
her own style, dressing in beautifully cut trousers, Byronic silk shirts and wide
embroidered belts.”
These women had important and successful careers as creative individuals.
They certainly did not devote their whole lives to their appearance. They
were professionals, whose first allegiance was to their work. But the special
and outstanding originality and elegance of these lesbians between the two
World Wars was undoubtedly connected to the fact that they either had
independent means or the contacts and professional success that allowed them
to mix in exceptional circles. Afterwards, lesbian elegance would never be
quite the same again.
They were — or so we tend to assume — living in a different world from
the lesbians photographed by Georges Brassai in the famous lesbian nightclub,
Le Monocle, in Paris. Brassai’s images show them as invariably either strongly
butch or femme, but we know little or nothing of how they experienced
this difference or what it meant to them. Many of Brassai’s images invoke the
underworld of prostitutes and working-class life more generally, but we also
do not know where the habituées of Le Monocle came from, whether they
were working class or included well-off women, possibly “slumming.”
Fashion has long been — always — considered trivial and that is still the
case today, despite — or perhaps because of— its greater visibility in the popu-
lar press and the attention devoted to it in the context of celebrity culture.
What this easy dismissal forgets is the crucial role it has played in modernity
and modernism. Both modernity and modernism explore a world that is
uncoupled from the natural. Whether in abstract, non-representational art
or in the exploration of an urban world of machines and industrial and
scientific invention, modernist art makes strange the world of modernity
it observes.

Charles Baudelaire, an early poet of nineteenth-century modernity, dis-
dained the natural. For him artifice was the hallmark of civilization. He wrote
of the dandy as not only a dissident, whose pose was “an expression of out-
law and revolt.’ but as an individual who has made of himself a work of
art.'° Dandyism was the highest form of masquerade and recognized its own
artificiality. It is therefore not surprising that dandyism appealed to queers
of all descriptions. Sex has often been positioned as the last refuge of the
natural, hence the hostility to which those who love their own sex have
often been subjected.Yet paradoxically they are the standard bearers of the
knowledge that nothing in civilization is “natural.” and certainly not sex and
sexual behavior.
Fashion, even more than the other arts, is the handmaid of the artificial,
so it should be no surprise that its world should have provided gay men and
lesbians with a sphere of influence, one in which love of artifice was an asset.
Two women, lovers, were more or less the creators of British Vogue in the
1920s: Madge Garland and Dorothy Todd. Garland, a refugee from a wealthy
but oppressive father who was a textile manufacturer and clothing importer,
had little education and no training, but somehow she managed to establish
herself as a paid journalist on the staff of the then fledgling British edition
of Condé Nast’s Vogue. This then contained little original material, although
Oscar Wilde’s niece Dorothy Wilde, also a lesbian, was working on the maga-
zine, as was the writer Aldous Huxley.
In 1923 Dorothy Todd became Vogue editor in London and together the
two women — at home in Bloomsbury group circles, with contacts in New
York and Paris — transformed the magazine for a few years into a significant
cultural enterprise. Under their direction it flourished with a combination
of “high fashion, high art and journalism.”"’ Virginia Woolf and Edith Sitwell
contributed; Cocteau and Le Corbusier featured in its pages.
Todd and Garland were obviously a couple. Todd had “a shimmer of dash
and ‘chic’ even.” wrote Woolf, “she stands on her own two feet, as she ex-
presses it.’ Garland’s biographer, Linda Cohen, describes her as “small and
heavy.” She had dark hair in an Eton crop and wore “a uniform of a suit — the
jacket with a velvet collar, the skirt a fashionable length — moved in an aura
of expensive perfume and had a commanding, pleasing voice and a plummy

accent.’ Madge was simply, brilliantly fash-
ionable. All her friends and other commenta-
tors throughout her life mentioned her beau-
tiful clothes and how well she carried them off
on her slim figure.
In 1926 the Condé Nast establishment had
had enough of the intellectual magazine that
Vogue in Britain had become, and also were
worried by the dubious reputation of the
women who ran it. They were sacked. Todd
went rapidly downhill and the couple were in
a desperate state when two years later Woolf
described them: “The Todd ménage is incred-
ibly louche. Todd in spongebag [check] trou-
sers, Garland in pearls and silk; both rather
raddled and on their beam ends.”*° Eventually
the couple separated. Todd sank into alcohol-
ism. Garland on the other hand, after a period
of poverty in Paris and the south of France,
was able to resume her career as a fashion jour-
nalist. In 1934 she was even invited to return
to Vogue. During the war she worked for the
department store Bourne and Hollingsworth
and assisted the Board of Trade with its Utility
programme (the production of well-designed
clothes that conformed to clothes rationing and the scarcity of textiles). She
became an influential figure in the British commercial fashion scene and in
ns 1948 she became Professor of Fashion and principal of the school of Fashion
at the Royal College of Art founded in that year. For the next thirty years she
was one of the most important individuals in the fashion world.
Madge Garland was just one woman in the international circle of indepen-
dent, artistic, and creative women, many of whom were lesbians, in the inter-
war period. She is of particular interest in the context of lesbian style precisely
because she was equally at the heart of the “straight” fashion world, that is to

say, she recognized and promoted the idea of dress and fashion, and the art of
creating a perfect appearance: the very masquerade that might be said to be at
the heart of presentation ofself, and which is so especially important to the
individual in search of a deviant or “queer” style.
After World War II the rarefied fashion world that had existed between
the wars disappeared. In the 1920s and 1930s, as Garland pointed out, being
a fashionable woman was a full-time job. After 1945 there were few women
who were either able or willing to devote their whole life to making a fash-
ionable appearance.
The “second wave” feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s made lesbians
and lesbianism highly visible after a period in which gay men especially, but
also lesbians, had experienced a difficult time. The conservative atmosphere
of the early postwar period, on both sides of the Atlantic, delegitimized
same-sex love. A conservative interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis
defined heterosexual marriage as the only mature form of love and eroticism.
Homosexuality was now less likely to be seen as a sin; but it was medicalized
and became an illness for which draconian treatments were the remedy. Since
in most countries lesbianism was not actually illegal (unlike sex between men)
lesbians could theoretically avoid the interference of the state and psychiatry.
In practice, however, the stifling conformity of the period made lesbianism
almost as socially disastrous as male homosexuality.
The film of Lillian Hellmann’s play, The Children’s Hour, well illustrates the
most progressive attitude available to women who loved each other. The lives
of the protagonists, two women teachers, are destroyed by the malice of one
of their pupils. One teacher is a lesbian; she is in love with the other, who
is not. The clear message of the film is therefore that, at best, lesbian love
is tragic and impossible to fulfil; secondly it leads to disgrace and suicide
(the lesbian kills herself). Lesbianism is doomed and deathly. It is the “most
progressive attitude available” only in the sense that the audience is invited
to pity rather than condemn as monstrous the tragic, blighted lives of the
women portrayed.
In spite of this cultural conservatism, some lesbians in the early postwar
period proclaimed their sexuality in a style that signified their sexual pref
erence. This time has retrospectively been characterized as the heyday of
“butch” and “femme” dressing, the decades when women who preferred other

women were becoming defiantly visible. Public, even if covert,spaces developed,
typically bars and clubs, where they could meet. They were no longer con-
fined to private salons — and anyway the salon had normally been a space
known only to relatively privileged women.
A class divide remained. A study oflesbian life in Buffalo, New York, in
the 1940s and 1950s by Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy,”!
describes how the butch/ femme code of dress and the roles associated with
it “created an authentic lesbian sexuality appropriate to the flourishing of an
independent lesbian culture.’ In addition it signified that “lesbians actively
pursued rich and fulfilling sexual lives at a time when sexual subjectivity was
not the norm for women.’ These women challenged the still prevalent view
of women as sexually passive.
The majority of the butch women were working class — as in fact were
their femme partners. Middle-class women then and later preferred a less
rigid, more androgynous style. This may largely have reflected the different
types of work undertaken by women at different levels of society. A butch
woman could get work in institutions where a uniform with trousers was
worn — as a bus driver or, more likely in the 1gsos, bus conductress, for
example, or in a factory as a janitor. Middle-class lesbians, also earned their
own living, but usually in white-collar jobs, as school teachers, in the public
sector as administrators and secretaries and, less often, in the professions. Skirts
were normally de rigueur. Women lawyers in Britain, for example, were not
permitted to appear in court in trousers until the 1980s. In the 1950s a well
known British lesbian journalist, Nancy Spain, wrote an article about how
she managed to get herself smuggled into the dining room of the Ritz in
trousers. This was presented as a piece of madcap daring — Spain was not quite
“out” — but until the 1970s or later, trousered women were taboo in many
public situations.Asone woman wrote in the 1960s, in the pioneering British
lesbian magazine Arena Three:
For my money the lesbian who errs a trifle on the conservative side looks
a whole lot better than the one who goes about looking like a send-up of
a male impersonator ... Better look female than funny ...What to wear in
working hours depends enormously, of course, on what you do. A profes-
sional or executive job, or one involving a lot of contact with the public,
demands some concessions to convention. The good plain suit, the classic

overcoat — these may be expensive, but they are always right and never let
you down.”
For the majority of lesbians the watchword had to be discretion. The clothes
they wore did not necessarily provide a means for the covert expression of
their sexuality. Although, therefore the butch—femme modes of the lesbian
fifties were important, their significance may have been retrospectively exag-
gerated insofar as the style du jour for most lesbians then would have been the
wardrobe, the closet, itself; in other words, discretion, and invisibility.
By the late 1960s fashions and social behavior had been transformed. In
fashion, androgyny became the norm. This was the period of “unisex” when
men grew their hair and women cut theirs off in order to look like the
famous fashion model Twiggy, whose appearance was that of a boyish waif.
The stick thin rock star Mick Jagger was the masculine ideal. The feminist
writer Carolyn Heilbrun advocated “androgyny” in a wider socio-psycholog-
ical sense. She called for the rejection of the cultural stereotypes that associ-
ated “compassion.” “caring.” and other emotional qualities exclusively with
women and called for a reassessment of what it meant to be masculine or
feminine.”
Yet within a few short years feminists, activists, and researchers rediscovered
the “butch” and “femme” modes of dressing and the lesbian bar culture of the
1950s, along with the pulp novels of the period that had described this culture.
Feminist androgyny fell out of fashion, felt by some to be sexless and part of the
downplaying of sex within relations between women. The American writer
Joan Nestle, led the charge with her passionate defence of butch and femme
as an authentic expression of sexuality between women and not a reiteration
of stereotypes. A butch woman was completely different from a man, but
her style of dressing signaled her ability to “take sexual responsibility.’ while
the femme, because she was dressing to attract a woman rather than a man
was also freed from oppressive stereotypes and was actively seeking her own
sexual pleasure rather than submitting to that of aman.** Butch—femme was
also revalidated as an expression of working-class culture and, in the United
States, was rediscovered as part of lesbian Afro-American culture.
Well into the 1980s the assumption of the lesbian and gay community —
extending now into transgender — or at least of activists within it, was that their
position was inherently a radical and oppositional one. From this developed

the term “queer” to encompass different deviancies and oppositional positions.
Queer theory was a critique of earlier ways in which lesbians and gay men
had asserted and defended their sexuality. It was not surprising that in the
1960s and 1970s many gay activists felt it was essential to “come out.’ to
assert your “true.” gay/lesbian self. However a later generation of activists
argued that simply to be affirmative — to shout that “gay is good” — was not
enough, was not even radical. On the contrary, it amounted to a demand to be
perceived as “normal.” It did not question the binary divide between normal/
homosexual, but merely moved it to a slightly different place. Queer theory,
by contrast, challenged the conventions of “heteronormativity.” that is, the
psycho-social assumption that heterosexual desire is the standard from which
other desires are a deviation.
Against the belief of some homosexuals that they had been “born gay”
feminists argued masculinity and femininity are social constructions. This
view proposed that on the basis ofbiological difference an ideology of gender
was built up over centuries and paradoxically hardened in consumer society
even as the customs and rules surrounding sexual behavior were relaxed.
Queer theory positioned itself as even more radical and took yet further
the idea of gender as a construction. Its radicalism was transgressive. It was
deeply indebted to the very influential work of Judith Butler. She developed
the concept of “performativity”: the individual performs a culturally scripted
identity, which is created and reinforced by repetition.To put it crudely, gender
identity is a performance.* Although Butler has defended herself against the
view that her theory denies any basis in biological or physiological reality,
it is open to such an interpretation, and, as can happen with theories that
find their moment, an idea with possibilities was taken up indiscriminately.
Some critics, mostly within philosophy, have exposed its shortcomings, but
it appears to have become a standard starting point for many researchers in
dress and identity.
The idea that gender is a performance is not in fact new. Simone de
Beauvoir wrote as far back as 1949 that “one is not born, but rather becomes a
woman.” On the other hand, is it actually true (if one accepts that some things
are truer than others, which extreme relativists may not)? Are performances
limited only by cultural norms? If that is the case it is difficult to understand
why persons of any gender carry on performing the same old scripts, why

it has been more or less impossible to escape the masculine/feminine binary.
(Perhaps the “third sex” was an attempt to do so). It 1s equally hard to
understand why an individual bent on cultural subversion does not manage
something really radical — for example, deciding to become six feet tall instead
of five foot three, or twenty-five years old instead of sixty. And at its most
reductive, the idea of performativity can merely collapse into the American
cliché that “you can be anything you want to.”
“Queer” came about as an embodiment in practice of transgression and
subversion. Queer 1s attractive in its inclusiveness — it can go beyond gender
and sex — and in its simple statement of being against the norm in whatever
way the performer proposes. In a way,““queer” does not pretend to be anything
more than a one-off performance, a pop-up shop ofidentity. It is ironic and
playful. It acknowledges the transience of pose and takes itself less seriously
perhaps than the more pretentious moments of “performativity.”
But lesbians may object that Queer erects an umbrella under which all
subversives can shelter, yet which denies each transgression its specificity. In
this respect it rather resembles the old idea of “bohemianism”: the bohemian
subcultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth century included gays,
lesbians, individuals of different ethnicity, and cranks and eccentrics of all
kinds within its inclustve embrace.*° Like performativity, Queer is therefore
not as original or new as it appears.
Transgression and subversion, too, appear radical, but may amount to little
more than momentary defiance, the throwing down of a gauntlet to the
establishment without proposing a genuine alternative. Michel Foucault
pointed out that transgression is a spiral that has continually to overstep
itself.*7 It involves the idea of aboundary that has to be crossed — a (forbidden)
boundary as previous notions oftransgression become normalized and ceased
to be seen as challenging. So it can end in aporia or a cul de sac. (What more
does the would be transgressor have to do — kill someone? Cut off his own
foot?)
The beliefin Queer as a transgressive identity has become hard to sustain as
lesbians, like gay men, have been increasingly visible and, superficially at least,
increasingly accepted. That this should have continued in an ever more con-
servative economic climate — the triumph of neo-liberal economics — seems
unexpected and might lead us to ask just how transgressive it 1s to be queer.

This apparent acceptance may largely result from the extension ofindividual-
ism and the defeat of social solidarity. Queer could even be interpreted as an
expression of the essential amorality of capitalism. Twentieth-century capital-
ists realized that they did not need to enforce strict forms of morality in order
to extend growth and profit; on the contrary, the more individuals wanted
to express their individuality, in no matter how bizarre a way, the more they
were likely to spend. The gay/lesbian identity itself came to be seen as more
ofa lifestyle choice than a permanently fixed orientation. The 1990s “lipstick
lesbian” proved you could be feminine and be a lesbian. Celebrities and the
media took up the idea: Madonna flirted with it; k. d. lang flirted with Cindy
Crawford in a cover spread for Vanity Fair.
In 2012 a group of media celebrities organized a celebrity lesbian ball
in London. The outfits of the guests and organizers for the most part more
resembled a popular idea of celebrity dressing than anything specifically
“lesbian.” Some women dressed “mannishly” that is, in men’s evening dress,
but that long ago became a fashionable look, first promoted by Yves St Laurent
and later by Helmut Newton’s photographs. In any case the dominant trend
of the evening was the glamorous, glittery, brightly colored evening gown in a
luxury material, suggesting, possibly, that once the lesbian has become finally,
highly visible, she no longer has any need to dress in a specifically “lesbian”
style.
On the other hand, the search for transgression has also led some in the
opposite direction: towards the adoption of a transsexual identity and the
chemical and surgical alteration of the body. The woman who loves her
own sex no longer aspires to be a““mannish woman”; she has decided to be an
actual man. This may be in keeping with the cultural idea of the cyborg and
the idea of the “post human” body. It conforms with the advances of medical
science and, for good or ill, the general medicalization of human experience.
It also, of course, is in complete contradiction to Judith Butler’s emphasis
on mind over matter and to the belief that “queer” destabilizes everything.
Transgender persons, though, might argue that the reconstruction of the body
moves us even further away from “nature.”
In the twenty-first century the lesbian may find it difficult to keep her
footing in the slippery, liquid flux and flow of pop-up identities, and virtual
reality. In a world of self-revelation there may cease to be a need for covert

sartorial signals denoting sexual preference. There may even be no need for
a lesbian identity or lesbian style.To be queer — in 1950s Britain a damning
and dangerous epithet — is today quite joyous, implying a flaunting thrill in
originality and sheer perversity. That is cause for celebration. Yet perennial
vigilance is as important as ever and our knowledge of the many places in the
world where the sexually different go in fear of their lives, persecuted by a
variety of religious fundamentalists, should give us pause and remind us that
it would be foolish to assume gaily that minorities and non-conformists can
never be returned to the underground.
Counter intuitively, perhaps, it seems appropriate to conclude with Madge
Garland. Here was a woman who devoted her working and private life to
an aesthetic of fashion that linked it to the arts. She was ambivalent, because
fashion was considered trivial, yet fiercely devoted. She was a lesbian who
dressed like a fashion plate, which could itself be interpreted as a form of
disavowal. Ambivalence and disavowal have haunted lesbians, just as much as
they have haunted culture. Fashion, however, is the medium whereby modern
subjects define, construct, and live out a way of being in the world. That such
an iconic fashion leader should have been a lesbian paradoxically suggests
how very queer it can be to seem straight, and that for a transgressive woman
extreme elegance could be the queerest thing of all.

Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality (se) Disappointingly, the end of the film has her trudging off into
and Modern Culture (New York, 1993), pp. 1-21. the desert as camp follower to the uncaring Gary Cooper.
Ibid., p. 14, quoting Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Brenda Wineapple, Genét:A Biography ofJanet Flanner (New
Insubordination,’ in Diana Fuss (ed.), Inside Out: Lesbian York, 1989), p. 82.
Theories, Gay Theories (New York, 1991), p. 15. Cohen, All We Know, p. 282.
Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies ofLlangollen (Harmondsworth, Charles Baudelaire,“Le Dandy,” Ecrits sur L’Art, 2 (Paris,
1971), p. 198; Mavor quoting Joseph Addison, Spectator, 1819, 1971),
pp. I71-S.
vol. VI,p.230. Cohen, All We Know, p. 247.
Ibid., quoting Mrs Mathews, The Life and Correspondence Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3: 1925-1930
of Charles Mathews, the Elder, Comedian, ed., Edmund Yates (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 176.
(London and New York, 1860) p. 231. Cohen, All We Know, p. 242.
Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, p. 97. Ibid., p. 269.
Ibid., p. 103. Martin Baum Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George
K. Bill, “Attitudes towards Women’s Trousers: Britain in the Chauncey Jr. (eds.), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay
1930s,” Journal of Design History, vol. 6, no. t (1993), pp. 45-54. and Lesbian Past (Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 432.
K. McCrone, Sport and the Physical Emancipation ofEnglish Rebecca Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls: A Lesbian
Women, 1870-1914 (London, 1988). History of Postwar Britain, 1945-1971 (Manchester, 2007), p. $7,
Radclyfte Hall, The Well of Loneliness [1928] (London, 1981), quoting Arena Three, 1: 6, June 1964, p. 3.
p. 246. Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards a Recognition ofAndrogyny: Aspects
10 “Womanliness as Masquerade” is the title of afamous of Male and Female in Literature (London, 1973).
article by the psychoanalyst Joan Riviére, written in 1931, in See these arguments elaborated in various works by Joan
which she argues just that. She does not draw the obvious Nestle, including A Restricted Country of 1988.
conclusion that masculinity in heterosexual men is also a Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
masquerade or an act, but her article opens the way to the Identity (London, 1999).
recognition that all our self-presentations have aspects that Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts
are willed. She thus foreshadows Judith Butler’s concept of (London, 2000), passim.
performativity. Michel Foucault,“A Preface to Transgressioin,” in Michel
It Katrina Rolley, “Cutting a Dash: The Dress of Radclyffe Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays
Hall and Una Troubridge,” Feminist Review, no. 35, Summer and Interviews, ed. Donald FE Bouchard (Ithaca, 1997),
1990, pp 54-66. Pp. 29-S2.
12 Linda Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (New York, 2012),
p. 166.

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VICK] KARAMINAS
BORN THIS WAY:' LESBIAN STYLE SINCE THE EIGHTIES
YOU CAN ANALYSE ME TO DEATH, BUT IT IS JUST THAT | GREW UP AS A TOMBOY

AND | PREFER MY HAIR SHORT AND | LOVE NUDIE SUITS. YEAH SURE, THE
BOYS CAN BE ATTRACTED TO ME, THE GIRLS CAN BE ATTRACTED TO ME, YOUR
MOTHER... YOUR UNCLE, SURE. IT DOESN'T REALLY MATTER TO ME.
Country-western singer k.d. lang
Look from Justine Taylor's -In September 2011, Lady Gaga appeared at the 28th Annual MTV Music
ae ee ite Video Awards dressed in drag as the cursing, chain-smoking, and lovesick
wc J° Calderone. Wearing black Brook Brother’s pants, white tee-shirt and hair
hem, and futuristic styled in a slicked-back “duck’s arse.”Jo Calderone embodied a look that was
Photog
popular amongst working-class white American lesbian butches in the 1950s.
Modeled on the actors James Dean and Marlon Brando as well as musicians
Sirevesonaiiou of the emerging rock and roll scene, such as Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly,
BORN THIS WAY / 193

the slicked-back hair, pouted lips, and smouldering eyes all became models of
style for aspiration. It was a look that was tough, erotically enticing, careless,
and intense. Staying in character the whole night, Jo Calderone spoke at
length about performing, hanging out in the crowd, and on being Lady
Gaga’s boyfriend. He accepted an award on behalf of Gaga and flirted boyishly
with Britney Spears, even attempting to kiss the pop icon re-enacting the
controversial kiss between Madonna and Spears a decade earlier at the MTV
2oth Annual Music Video Awards. Whilst the audience was generally aware
in both instances that the display of the “queer/lesbian kiss” was an act of
performance orchestrated by Gaga/Britney/Madonna as a media ploy, the
kisses also pose a challenge to the heterosexual/homosexual, man/woman
dichotomy and raise questions about gender ambiguity and sexuality.
In many ways, the “kiss” and Lady Gaga’s performance as Jo Calderone
sought to reject fixed notions of sexual desire, and challenged gender categories
embedded in the phrases “lesbian” and “queer” by using the body, dress,
movement, and gesture to transgress gender ideals. Lady Gaga’s cross-dressing
performance is not particularly ground breaking, indeed it is reminiscent of
the lesbian country-western singer k. d. lang who appeared in 1992 on an
American late-night talk show hosted by Arsenio Hall wearing a long, lacy
gown (and barefoot) to sing the song*Miss Chatelaine.” Lang, who was known
at this point in her career as an “out” lesbian, shocked both Hall and television
audiences who expected her to appear and perform in butch attire. Lang’s
‘‘femme-ness” was a conscious political strategy of self-representation that
was deployed by lang to debunk cultural stereotypes about lesbians, the way
they look, behave, and dress. Whilst k. d. lang is a lesbian and Lady Gaga is not,
although Kayne West reported that before agreeing to participate in a show
with him, Gaga stated that, “I’m gay. My music is gay. My show is gay. And
I love that it’s gay,*? Gaga’s performance raises questions about transgressive
queer subjectivities and lesbian desire, what Halberstam calls “an erotics of
the surface and an erotics of flaws and flows.”* Furthermore, in calling on
her drag persona, Jo Calderone, Gaga was acting out a lesbian tradition of
drag king performances popular in the lesbian club scene in the nineties. In
short, Gaga’s innovative deployment of subversive acts, via dress codes and
appearance unsettles ideas about the presumed naturalness of gender and
desire and calls into question fixed notions of what constitutes sexual identity.

As a quintessential fashion and gay icon, Gaga traverses the space between the
sexual mainstream and the sexual fringes ofculture. Consciously referencing
gay and lesbian discourses in her lyrics and performances, Gaga signifies an
affirmation of lesbian (and gay) culture as well as contributing to the politics
of queer identity, gender, and sex.
Whilst there have been some writings on gay male dress,5 little attention
has been paid to the dynamics and symbolism oflesbian dress in constructing
identities and style.° This is partly because lesbian histories have been margin-
alized and persecuted by mainstream culture and so the paper trail for lesbian
experiences is missing or lost. Having said that, this chapter is a form of re-
trieval, a queer/lesbian (re)reading of popular culture, constructing a lesbian
taxonomy of dress styles. From the androgynous dress codes of the 1980s, the
“lipstick lesbians,” and the stylized “drag kings” of the nineties to the lipstick
lesbian of the twenty-first century.
THE LESBIAN SEX WARS
What makes the study offashion, dress, and style so important to lesbian iden-
tity is the role of clothing in constructing material identity, and its shaping of
personal and social space. Until the 1980s, fashion was one the most important
signifiers of lesbian sexuality and consisted of clear definitions of identities
such as femme and butch. Roles were central to lesbian culture until (white,
middle-class) feminists argued that they were vestiges ofa patriarchal system.
In the pre-feminist incarnation butch-femme roles were linked to sexuality
and appearance, and were perceived as oppressive and mimicking masculine
and feminine roles. Inge Blackman and Kathryn Perry argue that feminists
adopted a style that was intended to reveal the “real” woman beneath the
cultural construct of femininity:
With flat shoes, baggy trousers, unshaven legs and faces bare of make-up,
their style combines practicality with a strong statement about not dressing
for men.’
Dress codes of butch women, for example, signaled a range of sexual pos-
sibilities including the willingness to take erotic responsibility for potential
BORN THIS WAY / 195

partners. Being butch was not simply about wearing masculine clothes, it was
also about appearance and attitude. These are not only attributes, write Inness
and Lloyd, but also sign signifiers for other lesbians:
Being butch is thus a way to announce to the world,“I am a lesbian.” Since

lesbians are, for the most part, invisible as a group, the ability to recognize
and be recognized by other members of the lesbian subculture is vital to
creating a sense of belonging, not only for the butch, but also for all lesbi-
ans who see and recognise her."
Within this idea of roles was a great deal of permanence and consistency.
“One’s identity as a butch or femme was an essential part of ones being,”
writes Arlene Stein:?
By imposing rules and placing limits on self-expression, roles eroticized dif-

ference, providing security and regularity in a tenuous, secretive world. They
were often proud statements of lesbian resistance, but they were also the
expression ofan oppressed minority faced with a paucity of alternatives. 10
In the American West, butch and femme roles continued to be prominent

throughout the 1980s as a form of principle and style. “The country-and-
western bar was one of the only welcoming sites outside the womyn’s [sic]
community,’ writes Rich:
It was there, to those honky-tonk joints that women could always go in

flannel shirts and jeans and no make-up, raise no eyebrows, even dance
with a girlfriend along side all the straight gals doing the same."
In the early 1980s feminists became involved in a series of heated debates

over the role ofsexuality and sexual expression within feminist consciousness
that divided the movement. Known as the “lesbian sex wars” or the “porn
wars.” feminists became engaged in issues relating to pornography, prostitu-
tion, and other forms of representation, as well as lesbian sexual practices such
as butch and femme identities, transexualism, and sadomasochism (BDSM).
Feminists argued that gender-based oppression was expressed through male
sexuality and the objectification of women. This oppression was identified
in acts such as promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography, and women who
found these acts appealing were denounced as male-identified or coerced

by patriarchal thinking, arguing that all sexuality must be between partners
with equal power. Feminists targeted sadomasochism and butch/femme roles
as acts of violence against women because of their explicit eroticization of
power. Sadomasochists rejected this claim, stating that the mutual exchange of
power and pain was consensual and erotically fulfilling. Women’s engagement
with BDSM and other non-normative sexual practices is concerned with
subverting gender hierarchies through sexual play. Rather than submitting to
patriarchal thinking, women argued that such acts were a form of subversive
resistance.
The “sex wars” were an important turning point, because out of these
debates the discourse of desire began to challenge critiques of sexual politics.
It marked the end of second-wave feminism and gave rise to third-wave
feminism and queer theory which argues that sex and gender are socially
constructed rather than a naturally given or an essential category. Dress no
longer defined strictly demarcated roles, but instead clothes had become
transient and interchangeable. “Different communities have their own styles,”
Joan Nestle writes, “but on a good bar night the variety of self-presentation
runs the whole gamut from lesbian separatist drag, to full femme regalia, to
leather and chains.”
For lesbians who were part of the sadomasochistic club scene, dress was a
code that made a distinction between the different rules that characterized
the two oppositional roles of “top” and “bottom.” Sadistic dress codes were
(and still are) depicted as rigid and organizational, apparatuses ofinstitutional
control such as the military and police uniform, the executioner and master/
mustress, whilst masochistic dress codes reflected fantasies of consent and
subservience. The butch “top,” often referred to as “daddy.” reveals her body
from the waist up, wearing vests, braces, or no clothes at all on the upper
torso. She often wears leather chaps or pants with military boots, peaked cap,
studded belt and wristband to indicate her role as a dominatrix, whilst the
femme “top,” or mistress wears a leather corset, lingerie, and high heels, and
often carries a whip or crop. “Bottom” lesbians often wear a dog collar and a
leather harness to signal their role as a subservient or “slave.”
There is an assortment of garments, accessories, and accoutrements that are
part of the BDSM culture and serve an important role in the identification of
the dominatrix (dominant top) and submissive (subordinate bottom) — items
BORN THIS WAY / 197

that constrict the body in sensory deprivation such as corsets, bondage straps,
gimp masks, harnesses, and collars, clinging tightly to the skin to create a
heightened awareness of the body as an erotic field. Other accessories include
military hats and caps, gloves (either leather or rubber), stiletto heeled shoes,
and the black leather engineer or military combat boot popular amongst
lesbian “tops.” Valerie Steele notes that, “the ‘leather dyke’ 1s as familiar today
as the lipstick lesbian. Lesbians did not merely copy the leatherman look, they
combined it with elements from punk street fashion to create a powerful new
style.” Whilst lesbian style is constantly changing and influenced by popular
culture, BDSM styles remain constant with its visual codes of subservience
and domination, where appearance is power and style the currency.
As lesbian identities proliferated, lesbians increasingly used appearance
and style as a visual means of communicating their sexual identity to each
other and the wider community. Young lesbians began to reconceptualize
role-playing and the stylistic cues that accompany gender identities, and en-
visioned these roles as challenging dominant culture. The resurgence of the
butch-femme binary was marked primarily by a playful reassertion of sexual
freedom through gender-switching, cross-dressing, and gendered role-play-
ing. The blurring of gender and sexual boundaries had become prevalent
across a range of entertainment media, from fashion catwalks to pop music,
especially the so-called “New Romantics.” Bands that are referred to under
this banner include Ultravox, Visage, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, ABC, and
Adam and the Ants. In terms of style, the New Romantics often dressed in
counter-sexual or androgynous clothing and wore cosmetics such as eyeliner
and lipstick. This “gender-bending” was particularly evident amongst musi-
cians such as Boy George of Culture Club, and Marilyn (Peter Robinson).
Lesbians translated this look into street style with belted high-waisted
stonewash jeans, white tee-shirts with rolled up sleeves and black Doc Martin
boots, suggesting a tough “bad girl” image. New wave music had also influ-
enced hairstyles and the “mullet” or “sho-lo” became a popular cut for many
butch lesbians, with the top of the head and sides cropped or buzzed short,
while the hair on the back of the head remained long. “The rebel look of
the cut with its top spikes and long tresses,’ write Schorb and Hammidi, “had
distinct appeal [to lesbians] in an age dominated by feathered do’s and curling
wands.”'* Hairstyles have always been an important aspect of lesbian subjec-

Lesbian M
1995 Private collect
tivity because they indicate sexual preference and gender identity. Historically,
short, cropped hair has always been considered an indicator oflesbian sexual-
ity and acts as a symbol of recognition amongst lesbians regardless of cut and
style.
“FEELING LIKE A WOMAN LOOKING LIKE A MAN": ANDROGYNY AND STYLE”
Androgyny, with its obsession to details, grooming, gestures, accessories, and

cosmetics, became a major stylistic influence in lesbian culture. Androgyny
had been fashionable many times in the history of women’s fashion, but it
was not until the 1980s that lesbian women embraced androgynous style as a
political force. This look, with masculine signifiers, was influenced by main-
stream fashion and celebrated the triangular wedge with its broad shoulders
and narrow waistline enhanced by various sized shoulder pads. The seventies
A-line silhouette had been inverted and the wedge shape dominated fashion.
BORN THIS WAY / 199

Known as “power dressing,” its box shouldered jackets and narrow pencil
skirts turned office dress into a statement of equality and feminine control.
Celebrities such as Grace Jones, the quintessential fashion icon, embodied this
androgynous aesthetic with her tight-legged dropped-crotch dhoti trousers,
cropped double-breasted lamé tailored jacket and a bleached “flat top” or
“buzz cut” hairstyle also popular with African American men and hip hop
culture. With its appeal to urban disenfranchised youth, hip-hop also found
expression amongst androgynous lesbians with the adaptation of the hi-top
fade, a style of haircut where hair on the sides of the head is shaved or kept
very short and hair on the top is long. Jones’s austere flat-chested, androgy-
nous look appealed to a generation oflesbians who were experimenting with
dress codes and sexual ambiguity.
A good deal of work has been done on the relationship between fashion,
music and subcultures since Dick Hebdige’s landmark Subculture: The Meaning
of Style (1979) situated style as a viable social and aesthetic category. In
this seminal text, Hebdige argues that dominant forces of mass media and
commerce work to incorporate, regulate, and negotiate subcultural fashion
or “style” According to Hebdige, authenticity of subcultures is to be found at
the level of fashion and style. Style consists of dress, music, argot, and rituals,
which create the meaning, form the identity, and express the values of a
subculture. As Patrizia Calefato has argued elsewhere, fashion and music are
two intimately connected forms of worldliness, two social practices that go
hand in hand, sustaining one another in the medium of mass communication
and drawing on a common sensibility which translates into “taste.”"°
The music celebrity Madonna has constantly reinvented herself with codes
and signifiers of lesbian style and identity in her performances. Her music clips
and onstage productions are explicitly homoerotic, pastiching Hollywood
lesbian icons such as Mae West, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich, who
often wore masculine three piece suits to create a distinctly androgynous
look. Madonna embraces a look that is sexually autonomous and confident.
When she first emerged in the 1980s she was dressed in leather and wore lace
tops and skirts over fishnet stockings or capri pants, and accessorized with
bows, bracelets, and effigies around her neck. Madonna’s sexual assertiveness
appealed to a generation of lesbians, but it was not until the 1990s, with the

release of the single “Justify My Love” that lesbians began to see Madonna as
glamorously seductive.
Recorded by Sire Records in 1990, “Justify My Love” was explicitly
homoerotic. Set in a hotel populated by a cast of actors playing lesbian roles,
rent boys, and sex workers, the music clip is a celebration of euphoric poly-
morphous and trangressive sexuality. “Made up of a series of camp tableaux,”
notes Andermaher, “its androgynous, sexually and racially varied figures al-
most float through the scene, coming together to touch, kiss, flirt and move
gracefully apart.’”” In the stage performance of the song, which was part of
the television programme The Girlie Show (1993), Madonna appeared dressed
as a Victorian dandy complete with attention to details such as an opera top
hat, gloves, lace-cufted shirt, monocle, silk cape, cravat, and waistcoat. Partially
cross-dressed in a black satin-tiered skirt and leather lace-up boots, Madonna
evokes an image of a mythological half-man, half-woman demi-god whilst
simultaneously alluding to the power invested in the phallic woman. Olga
Vainshtein notes that “in the early nineteenth century, the mannered acces-
sory was central to a gentleman’s appearance. The survival of the monocle
into the twentieth century,’ she writes, “was noted for upper-class gentlemen
as well as Sapphic ladies and women of great style””** In the music clip for
“Express Yourself” Madonna 1s dressed in a 1930s-style pinstriped men’s suit
and monocle, performing a version of aristocratic masculinity. Visible beneath
the suit is a pink satin basque with embellished cups for her breasts, and sus-
pender hooks dangling down the sides of her trousers, which demonstrate
the constructed nature of gender and problematize it through vestimentary
codes. “Madonna became meaningful in the nineties with the lesbian chic
thing,’ writes Louise Carolin, the editor of the British lesbian lifestyle maga-
zine Diva:
At that point lesbian culture was really changing. We were coming out of
the eighties, which had been a vehemently political and anti-commercial
time ... Lesbians started to be seen as glamorous and playful, Madonna
caught that wave very effectively.”
Madonna’ popularity as a lesbian icon was further endorsed by her appear-

ances with the comedian Sarah Bernhard at lesbian venues like the Cubby
BORN THIS WAY / 201

Hole in New York, and on The Late Show with David Letterman, when they _ «.d. lang at the Meridien Hotel,
Photograph by Jill
arrived dressed in identical butch outfits. Madonna’s construction of her - |
public image as a sexually confident (if not aggressive) androgynous queer
performer coincided with the public “coming out” of a series high-profile
celebrities including Melissa Etheridge, who began performing in lesbian bars
in Los Angeles in the 1980s, the tennis star Martina Navratilova, the comedian
Ellen DeGeneres, and the singer k. d. lang.
In 1990, lang appeared 1n the advertisement campaign for Gap, “Individuals
of Style.’ Herb Ritts photographed her wearing Gap stonewashed denim
jeans and jacket, and cowboy boots, and looking out dreamily to the distance.
Lang’s image spoke to a generation of lesbians about popular fashion and
style. She relied on fashionable garments and accessories to represent visu-
ally and articulate a lesbian identity, often appearing onstage crossed-dressed
in masculine attire, whilst her performative style was inscribed with lesbian
meaning. Lang’s dress style was either country casual with white button-
down or Levi's western shirts, and jeans accessorized with a kerchief— the
look of the quintessential cowboy — or dressed as a dapper in a textured and
brightly colored slim-cut men’s suit, and tie.
Arlene Stein wrote that lang was “probably the butchest woman enter-
tainer since Gladys Bentley,’*® 9920 and Leslie Bennetts, a journalist for Vanity Fair,
described her in the following way:
This was a woman who was clearly born to perform. Not that you'd neces-
sarily know she’s a woman at first sight. Tall and broad shouldered, wearing
a black cutaway coat flecked with gold, black pants, her favourite steeled-
toed black rubber shit-kicker work boots, she looks more like a cowboy.*'
Lang’s 1993 appearance with Cindy Crawford on the cover of the August
issue of Vanity Fair magazine, also photographed by Herb Ritts, is another
example of lang’s “camping on her butchness.”** Dressed in a three-piece
pinstriped suit, tie, and brogues, lang sits on a traditional barber’s chair whilst
being shaved by the supermodel (and “straight”) Crawford, who is dressed in
a maillot. The Vanity Fair cover spread was the result of a growing trend in
popular culture: lesbianism had now become fashionable. “She was a thrilling
creature, rangy and stunning and suave,” wrote Ariel Levy,

BORN THIS WAY / 203
a mink ina men’s suit... she was handsome. She was
butch. Never before had Americans seen female mas-
culinity so overtly and unapologetically on display,
and we couldn't take our eyes off it.*8
By the mid 1990s there was a shift in the represen-

tation of lesbians in the North American mainstream
media. This occurred on two levels: the framing ofles-
bian subjectivity as “chic,” and the marked increase in
lesbian visibility on television sit-coms and dramas. In
the September 8, 1995 issue of Entertainment Weekly in a
“special report” on the “Gay Qos,” Jess Cagle writes:
It’s never been easy to trace the roots of a revolu-

tion, especially something quicksilver and ephemeral
as pop culture. But however it began, look at where
it’s led ... Moviemakers, TV producers, media people,
and rock stars have turned entertainment on its head
by freely mining gay culture for its sarcasm and style,
its glitter and grit, its secrets and celebrations. In 1995
the gay stream flows freely into the mainstream.*4
Cagle’s argument is “that homosexuals [comprise] a desirable demograph- es and Portia de

h Annual Elton
ic, not the largest demographic, but one with a handful of disposable in- IDS Foundation Oscar
come.”* The belief that homosexuals are a powerful economic market
force — possessors of “the pink dollar” — is also examined by Danae Clark
in the article “Commodity Lesbianism,” arguing that representations of
gays and lesbians are produced by mainstream media to appeal to a wider
heteronormative market rather than a queer one. Clark admits that lesbians
are “not the primary audience for mainstream advertising” and that androgy-
ny 1s “a commodity sold to a largely heterosexual market.’””°
In April 1997, in what is considered to be an historic moment in televi-
sion (and queer) history, Ellen DeGeneres and her character Ellen Morgan
“came out” as a lesbian to a public audience. Ellen was the first television
series to feature an openly proud lesbian, as well as being the only program in
which a lesbian was the main character.A year later, broadcasting of the show

was stopped due to poor ratings. “Ellen DeGeneres was celebrated. She was
chastised.And then she was cancelled,’ writes Jamie Skerski:
Ironically in the aftermath of Ellen’s demise we witnessed a profound in-

crease in queer characters, themes and programming ... celebrity coming-
out declarations have become ordinary, rather than extraordinary, compo-
nents of entertainment news.’7
The cultural shift that took place post-Ellen in lesbian visibility 1s impossible
to measure, but by 2003 when The Ellen DeGeneres Show premiered on NBC
television, Ellen had become a style icon with a cult following amongst lesbi-
ans. Dressed in classic tailoring with a laid-back, preppy style, Oxford brogues
or tennis shoes, Ellen was the embodiment of “tomboy chic,” a look that
combined masculine style garments such as the blazer and tie with feminine
accessories to “make the androgynous stuffa little girlier.” 28
The fashion blogger Asia writes that,
More than ever women are rocking the tomboy chic look. This fashion
statement has influenced pop culture for quite some time, (it all started in
the 90s with TLC and Aaliyah) raising its head in the form of the boyfriend
jeans, boyfriend sweaters, graphic tees, sneakers, and the fitted caps.”
Rather than recognizing it as a mode ofresistance, discourses on tomboy chic

place women in restrictive categories of normative femininity, despite the
pronouncement of gender rebellion. The figure of the tomboy, writes Jamie
Skerzi, “enjoys increasing visibility, acceptance and even celebration in popu-
lar culture. However, her new visibility is produced within the constraints of
recuperation narratives and marketed as personal style, rather than recognized
as resistance to prevailing gender norms.”*°
Performers such as Grace Jones, Madonna, k. d. lang, and Ellen DeGeneres,
with their androgynous style and deployment of drag, became poster girls for
a generation of lesbian women who were challenging the socially constructed
nature of sexual acts and identities.
BORN THIS WAY / 205

CROSS-DRESSING AND DRAG: DECONSTRUCTING GENDER THROUGH VESTIMENTARY CODES
Cross-dressing and drag have been a recurrent theme in lesbian culture.

However, up until the 1990s it was closely aligned to sexual disorder or per-
version and was bound to marginal underground identities rather than being
deployed as a subversive and politically charged dress style and act known as
“kinging.” Lesbian clubs such as London’s Drag King Club, Club Casanova in
New York, Kinselas nightclub in Sydney, and Club Geezer in San Francisco
were dynamic spaces for drag king performances, which became a popular
form of entertainment amongst queer communities in those cities. Clubs’
drag king contests, and events such as Gender-Blender (part of the Sydney
Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras), the International Drag King Community
Extravaganza (IDKE), the first of which was held in Columbus, Ohio in
1999, and Drag King Rebellion in Wisconsin, provided a space where lesbians
could act out diverse gender roles and sexual desires.
In Female Masculinity, Halberstam writes of the drag king as “a female
(usually) who dresses up in recognizable male costumes and performs
theatrically in that costume.”*' Halberstam divides female masculinity into
three distinct categories: the drag king, the male impersonator, and the drag
butch. She contends that while “male impersonation has been a theatrical
genre for at least three hundred years, the drag king is a recent phenomenon.”
Whereas the male impersonator attempts to produce a plausible performance
of maleness as the whole of her act, the drag king performs masculinity (often
periodically) and makes the exposure of the theatricality of masculinity into
the mainstream of her act. Both the male impersonator and the drag king
are different from the drag butch, a masculine woman who wears masculine
attire as part of her quotidian gender statement. Moreover, “whereas the male
impersonator and the drag king are not necessarily lesbian roles, the drag
butch most definitely is.”
For some kings, performances of masculinity are about decentering and
deconstructing dominant paradigms of masculinity, whilst for other drag
kings, performing masculinity expresses an aspect of their own identity. Drag
kinging is more than the visual and stylistic presentation of the performance,
it is also about the act of revealing the instability of gender roles, in this case
masculinity, what it is and how it is produced.As Halberstam has argued, drag

kinging is one mode of making “assaults upon dominant gender regimes.”**
It is about rearticulating representations of masculinity and male agency and,
as such, it destabilizes femininity vis-a-vis. In doing so, the drag performance
calls into question butch/femme subjectivities and their complexities: bull
dyke, stone butch, diesel butch, soft butch, top and bottom butch, lipstick,
neo-femme, and so forth. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the
imitative structure of gender itself. It also calls into question issues of
ethnicity and race as signifiers of Otherness and marginality as cross-ethnic
performances draw attention to the disempowerment produced by racial
discourses.*°
In her study of drag king culture and performances in New York and San
Francisco in the mid 1990s, Halberstam identified four modes of “kinging”:
impersonation, understatement, hyperbole, and layering. All four modes
represent the inauthenticity between “acting” and “being,” as drag kings
“perform their own queerness, whilst simultaneously exposing the artificiality
of conventional gender roles.’ Drag kings produce an acceptable masculine
aesthetic via the use of props (suits, ties, crotch stuffers, greased hair, facial
hair) and through role-playing and mimicry. They generally “tape” down
BORN THIS WAY / 207

Model Jenny Shimizu, Helmut their breasts, add the illusion of male genitalia by wearing a prosthetic penis
Red campaign. Photogra
by Mark Seger 2d erase some, if not all, forms of feminine features to create gender illusion
in their performances. Kings walk with a stagger, drink beer from a bottle,
and their legs are always spread comfortably when seated in stereotypical
male style.
A drag king incorporates dancing and singing, or lip-synching, into her
performance and often performs as iiber, or exaggerated, male personas from
a taxonomy of masculinities. These characters range from the popular “white
trash trucker” to the “suave gentleman crooner” and the “macho Latino
lover,’ and attempt to reproduce the stereotype with or without a twist. Like
the drag queen, the drag king adopts a stage name, which tends to evoke
sexual innuendoes such as well-known Australian drag kings Jonnie Swift,
Sexy Galaxy, and Rocco Amore, and Mo B. Dick, Buck Naked, and Buster
Hyman from the United States.
Scholars of female masculinities have argued that drag king culture
is more than the visual and stylistic presentation of men, and that these
representations aim to dissolve exclusive associations of masculinity with men.
Their performances, writes Patterson, “provide forums in which lesbians can
act out and interact with fantastic masculinities, examine their responses to
different female masculinities and experience . . . different gender roles and
sexual desires.”*7 Kinging is about performance, excess, and politics. It is about
traversing and breaking the gender system and its sexual codes, and about
opening a space where masculinities and femininities are redefined producing
new erotics, new genders, and new modes of power.
LIPSTICK LESBIANS AND LESBIAN CHIC: MEDIATED POSTFEMINIST IDENTITIES
In the 1990s, Calvin Klein was looking for an androgynous model to represent
his new perfume, CK One, and enlisted the Japanese-American supermodel
Jenny Shimizu. A former mechanic, Shimizu went on to model for Versace,
Anna Sui, Prada, Jean Paul Gaultier, and Yohji Yamamoto, and was featured in
beauty campaigns for Clinique and Shiseido. Tagged “The fragrance for a man
or a woman.A fragrance for everyone,’ the black-and-white media campaign
featured young, hip, and androgynous models casually conversing in small
BORN THIS WAY / 209

eroups and laughing coyly at the camera.
The script reads, “The sexy one, the
nasty one, the wild one, the male one, the female one, CK One, a fragrance
for everyone.”
The advertisement ends with Shimizu dressed in faded blue
Calvin Klein jeans, white masculine singlet, and black leather wristband, a
large tattoo of awoman astride a giant phallic wrench on her bicep. Shimizu’s
appeal lay in her assertive and confident androgynous femininity, which
became representative of an androgynous style in the lesbian club culture of
the nineties but was also indicative ofa lesbian chic that was being circulated
in mainstream media.
At about this time, the masculine white singlet top became a popular
garment amongst lesbians, as casual wear often worn with blue jeans or cargo
pants with combat boots, or as club wear teamed up with a pair ofblack, low-
hip dress pants and black spats. Because of its association with the military
and combat wear such as fatigues, cargo pants were popular in the mid to
late 1970s amongst gay men who identified as rugged and hyper-masculine.
But it was not until the nineties when cargo pants were adopted by the new
countercultures such as rap and grunge* and then co-opted by mainstream
fashion labels such as Gap, County Seat, and Bugle Boy did cargo pants enter
lesbian subculture.
It was also the beginnings of a wider subcultural movement that became
known as New or Neo Primitives that drew on the belief that the tattoo
was a key towards transformation and self-realization. Many of the ideas
popularized in this movement were a central part of the body modification
practices of lesbians, including the BDSM community. Extensive tattooing,
piercings, scarification, and branding were practiced as a form ofbody politics
by an increasing number of lesbians who envisioned inscribing the body
as symbolic ownership and as an act of resistance to mainstream culture.
Because style is a cultural construction, it is easily appropriated, reconstructed
and divested of its original political or subcultural signification. “Style as
resistance,’ writes Danae Clark, “becomes commodifiable as chic when it
leaves the political realm and enters the fashion world. This simultaneously
diffuses the political edge ofstyle.’ Tattooing and piercing practices amongst
lesbians is also specific to gendered identities. Butch women typically tend
to choose large tattoos on areas of the body such as the bicep or forearm to
emphasize muscularity, whereas femme lesbians often borrow images from

mythology, and choose to emphasize their feminine features by placing tattoos
on hips, ankles, or breasts. Similarly, butches select piercings that are coded as
masculine, such as a ring or bar on the eyebrow or the bottom lip, whereas
nipple, naval, and clitoral hoods were popular amongst femmes.*°
In the May 1993 issue of New York, Jeanie Kasindorf’s article on “lesbian
chic” describes a lesbian bar called Henrietta Hudson in New York City:
[Inside the bar] sits a young woman straight from a Brooks Brothers
catalogue — wearing a conservative plaid jacket and matching knee high
pleated skirt, a white blouse with a peter pan collar, and a strand of pearls.
She chats with her lover while they sip white wine and rub each other's
backs. Across from them, at the bar, sits a group of young women in jeans
and black leather, all cropped hair ... The Brooks Brothers woman and her
lover leave, and are replaced by two twenty-six-year-old women with the
same scrubbed, girl-next-door good looks.*!
By the early 1990s lesbian sexuality began to break free from the restrictive
binary of femme—butch and began to explore the boundaries of representa-
BORN THIS WAY / 211

tions (via dress, accessories and stylistic codes) in mainstream and “under-
ground” culture. After her visit to the lesbian sauna Dykes Delight in London,
Isabelle Wolff wrote in a June 1993 copy of the Evening Standard, “Forget the
old dungarees image, the latest lesbians are bright, chic and glamorous . .
Everywhere you look, the joys of dykedom are being vigorously and joyfully
extolled.”As Guy Trebay pointed out in the New York Times in the article,“The
Secret Power of Lesbian Style’ many of America’s street fashion mavens are
lesbians with spiky haircuts, chain wallets, trucker hats, and cargo pants.
When The ‘L’ Word debuted on the American television network Showtime
in 2004, many lesbian viewers complained that the characters were all too
“femmey” and that the fashion was unrealistic. Viewers argued that rather
than being inclusive of allwomen regardless of class and ethnicity, the cast de-
picted lesbians as glamorous, middle-class, professional women with the oc-
casional token Asian, Black-American, and Latino-American cast for political
correctness. Cynthia Summers, costume designer for the series, stated that the
show’s creator and executive producer, Ilene Chaiken, wanted The ‘L’ Word to
be a show that spoke about fashion and debunked the old stereotyped image
of the “mannish” lesbian without fashion sense.
The series was based on the lives and loves of a group of glamorously
affuent and ambitious lesbian friends, a mix of talented and creative
individuals, living in Los Angeles. The cast, which consists of butch and
femme characters, as well as both gay and straight, depict a sexually flexible
style. The narrative of lesbian fashion and style marks an important aspect
of understanding lesbian visibility (or invisibility) as a form of subcultural
identity. The success of the appeal of The ‘L’ Word, which ran for six seasons
till 2009, rests in its portrayal of the confident upward mobility and material
success embodied by lesbians and their relationship to fashion discourse. All
the main characters are young and stylish, dressed in high-end designer labels.
Bette Porter, played by Jennifer Beals, is an art museum director and later
the Dean of the School of Art. She is styled in a tailored-menswear look,
often wearing Max Mara and Balenciaga, and occasionally dresses and skirts,
depending on the occasion. Her long-term partner, Tina Kennard, played by
Laurel Holloman, is a film producer whose signature style is best described
as casual, often wearing jeans and a black bra under a white shirt, or business,

wearing tailored suits or flowing jersey and silk dresses
to corporate events. Alice Pieszecki (Leicha Hailey),
the only bisexual in the series, is dressed in sexy, bright
colors, often Cacharel or Marc Jacobs. The character
Shane McCutcheon, a troubled and promiscuous
hairdresser played by Katherine Moening, is styled in
a “rock chick” look and is loosely based on seventies
rock icon Mick Jagger. With wild, shaggy hair, tight-
fitting blue jeans, vintage tee-shirts, and loose white
shirts under a black dinner jacket, Shane represents the
“butch” character on the show. Kit Porter (Pam Grier)
Bette’s half sister and the only “straight” member
of the group, is styled in what can be described as a
“bohemian vibe” look, with sarongs worn over jeans,
for example. Whilst the characters have their own
individual styles, they are neither completely femme
nor butch, but represent ideas of conventional beauty
and versions of mainstream femininity.
The discourse of “lesbian chic,” a constructed phe-
nomenon of the 1990s media representation, and a
fashion advertising and marketing trend, placed lesbian
Birls at the Par identity onto the mainstream cultural landscape and produced a particular
lesbian representation whilst erasing others.At the time, lesbian chic was proof
Herdy that “lesbian women,” writes Julia Himberg, “were no longer associated with
“ second-wave feminist, anti-consumption stereotypes, and instead were new,
apolitical, postfeminist consumers.’*? Some critics argue that the emergence
of the lipstick lesbian, has normalized, heterosexualized, or even “straightened
out” lesbian sexuality in order to render it palatable to a straight audience.
Scholars such as Eve Kosotsky Sedgwick, on the other hand, advocate that
representations of lesbianism such as those found in The ‘L’ Word, are daring
because of their normalcy. The ‘L’ Word is appealing because it portrays a
community of women and a variety ofdiverse, interweaving narratives rather
than one or two token lesbian characters. Despite the show’s racial and gen-
erational gaps, “A visible world in which lesbians exist in forms beyond the
BORN THIS WAY / 213

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rie
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- ae
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fa
solitary and the couple, sustain and develop relations among themselves of
difference and commonality ... seems, in a way, such an obvious and modest
representational need that it should not be a novelty when it is met.”
What is of importance in any critique of lesbian subjectivity is that it
raises (or rather that it does not raise) issues concerning the construction of
beauty, glamor, gender, sexuality, and style. The “masculinized” power wielded
by these new, attractive, and assertive women, demanded that she be incor-
porated into heteronormativity because she was not amenable to it. Imbued
with a dynamism that melded traditional femininity with assertiveness, writes
Dittmar, this woman evoked lesbian codes of quasi-cross-dressing and female
bonding, but remained open to heterosexual readings of “power dressing and
cosmopolitan sophistication.” Rendered both queer and safe, Dittmar points
out, “this new chic at once allowed heterosexuals the frisson of bisexual and
lesbian desire, and opened up for lesbians — notably middle-class and up-
wardly mobile white lesbians — a hospitable new space for self definition.’”*

Several critics have argued that the construction of a lesbian chic by mar-
keters is due in part to the rise of income, social mobility and class standing
amongst lesbian women since the 1980s. An article in the New York Times
Magazine in 1982 reported that the peak advertisers were attracting the les-
bian market. High-end magazines, such as Vogue, Newsweek, Cosmopolitan and
Esquire also echoed such findings, and The Wall Street Journal confirmed this
in 1994 with the article ‘More Marketers Aiming Ads at Lesbians’. In her
article, “The Straight Goods. Lesbian Chic and Identity Capital on a Not-So-
Queer Planet’, Linda Dittmar, writes that this new lesbian look called “chic”
is a category defined by class, not sexuality, whose main purpose is to encode
power and to give women a place at the crossroads of femininity and author-
ity. “Like so many other cultural products which sustain our economy and
safeguard dominant ideology,” writes Dittmar, “the sartorial design and pho-
tography that constitutes the ‘lesbian chic’ phenomenon absorbs lesbians into
heterosexuality even as they invite straight women to tour lesbian terrains.”*
High-end designer brands such as Ralph Lauren, Gucci, Emmanuelle Ungaro,
Calvin Klein, and Prada, to name a few, took the opportunity to market their
designs to appeal to a lesbian sartorial taste. This media-hyped style expresses
codes and subtexts that corresponded to lesbian subculture, whilst simultane-
ously reaching out to a dominant heterosexual market.
CONCLUSION: WHERE HAVE ALL THE BUTCHES GONE?
In February 2012, twenty years after Jeanie Kasindorf’s article on “lesbian

chic” was published, accompanied by a photograph of model Harmony
Boucher whose lips were locked in a kiss with her partner, Nicole, Style.com
asked readers the question “Is Lesbian Chic here to stay?”
“Lesbians! They’re everywhere,” declared Maya Singer:
This summer, the New York fashion scene was buzzing with gossip about a
couple of high-profile ladies who ditched their marriages and started dat-
ing women; across the pond, meanwhile, British Vogue ran a whole article
on that phenomenon, while society rag Tatler chimed in with a feature on
London’s seven “loveliest lesbians.” (Only seven?) ... What will this high-
vis lady love mean for fashion?
BORN THIS WAY / 215

Since the 1980s lesbian visibility in popular culture has mushroomed. Signifiers
of lesbian style have slowly and steadily made their way into mainstream fash-
ion, redefining and repackaging lesbianism as that which is indicated by a
certain style, whether femme, butch, or androgynous. The mediated lesbian
is defined by her embodied subjectivity and constituted as a sexually desir-
ing and desirable subject who is attractive and sexy within heteronormative
terms. Palatable to a dominant heterosexual market she is simultaneously
produced as an object ofdesire to be consumed by women and men alike. As
a postfeminist construction born out of the lesbian wars of the eighties, the
twenty-first century mediated lesbian is sexually desiring, autonomous, and
self-pleasing who “chooses” to perform in the spirit of playfulness.‘
The Madonna/Britney/Gaga (aka Jo Calderone) kiss is framed as a staged
performance of a lesbian/drag act. Whilst on the one hand the kiss can be
read as a resistance and subversion of mainstream representations oflesbians,
it can also be viewed as titillating to a male gaze, reinforcing rather than chal-
lenging discourses of hegemonic masculinity. Madonna and Lady Gaga reveal
the ambiguity and artifice lurking behind the veneer ofidentities of all kinds.
Their performances on and off stage highlight the instability of gender and
call into question the slippery categorizations of sexuality.
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between Woman since 1500 (Oxford, Conn., 2007), p. 188. Domestication of Ellen DeGeneres,” Communication and
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Land: Recontextualising Butch in Twentieth-century Pp. 364-S.
Lesbian Culture,” in Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason Jamie Skerski, “Tomboy Chic: Re: Fashioning Gender
(eds.), Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rebellion,” Journal ofLesbian Studies, vol.15, no. 4 (2011), p. 4.
Anthology (New York, 1996), p. 15. Total Fashionista www.totalfashionista.com/
Arlene Stein, “All Dressed Up but No Place to Go? Style Skerski, “Tomboy Chic,” p. 477.
Wars and the New Lesbianism,’ in Corey K. Creekmur Halberstam, Female Masculinity, p. 22.
and Alexander Doty (eds.) Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays Ibid., p. 23.
on Popular Culture, Q Series, (Durham, N.C., and London, Ibid., p. 24.
1995), Pp. 479. Ibid., p. 34.
10 Ibid. Geczy and Karaminas, Queer Style.
Shu Ibid. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, p. 26.
12 Quoted in Stein, “All Dressed Up but No Place to Go?” Jennifer Lyn Patterson, “Capital Drag,” Journal of
p. 479. Homosexuality, vol. 43, no.3, (2003), p. 98.
13 Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power (Oxford, 1996), Hancock et al., Fashion in Popular Culture, p. 189.
p. 105. Danae Clark, quoting Lisa Walker, “Embodying Desire:
14 Jodi R. Schorb and Tania N. Hammidi, “Sho-Lo Showdown: Piercing and the Fashioning of Neo-Butch/Femme
The Do’s and Don’ts of Lesbian Chic,” Tulsa Studies in Identities,’ in Sally R. Munt (ed.), Butch/Femme: Inside
Women’s Literature, vol. 19, no. 2 (Autumn 2000), p. 56. Lesbian Gender (London, 1998), p. 194.
15 Grace Jones, “Walking in the Rain,” Nightclubbing. Island 40 Lisa Walker, “Embodying Desire: Piercing and the
Records, released October 1981. Fashioning of Neo-Butch/Femme Identities,” in Sally R.
16 Patrizia Calefato, The Clothed Body (London and New York, Munt (ed.), Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender (London,
2004), p. 117. 1998),p. 131.
17 Sonia Andermaher,“A Queer Love Affair? Madonna and 41 Jeanie Kasindorf quoted in Anne M. Ciasullo , “Making her
Gay and Lesbian Culture,” in Diane Hamer and Belinda (In) Visible: Cultural Representations of Lesbianism and the
Budge (eds.), The Good, The Bad, and The Gorgeous: Popular Lesbian Body in the 1990s,” Feminist Studies, vol. 27, no. 3
Culture’s Romance with Lesbianism (London, 1994), p. 32. (Autumn, 2001), p. 593.
18 Olga Vainstein, “Dandyism: Visual Games and the Strategies 42 Gezcy and Karaminas, Queer Style, p. 378.
of Representation,” in Peter McNeil and Vicki Karaminas 43 Julia Himberg, “Lesbian Femininity on Television,” in
(eds.), The Men’s Fashion Reader (Oxford, 2009), p. 93. Thinking Gender Papers, UCLA Centre for the Study of
19 Lucy O'Brian, Madonna: Like an Icon (London, 2009), p. 244. Women (Los Angeles, 2008), http://escholarship.org/uc/
20 Arlene Stein, “Androgyny Goes Pop: But is it Lesbian item/48v69502, p. 5.
Music?” in Arlene Stein (ed.), Sisters, Sexperts, Queers: Beyond 44 Quoted in A. Dove-Viebahn, “Fashionably Femme: Lesbian
the Lesbian Nation (Harmondsworth, 1993), p 107. Visibility, Style and Politics in The L Word,” in Thomas
21 Cited in Gill Valentine, “Creating Trangressive Space: The Peele (ed.), Queer Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and
Music of k.d Lang,” Transactions of the British Institute of Television (New York, 2007), p. 77.
Geographers, New Series, vol. 20, no. 4. (1995), p. 56. 45 Linda Dittmar, “The Straight Goods,” in Deborah Bright
22 Gillian Rodger, “Drag, Camp and Gender Subversion in the (ed.), The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies ofDesire
Music and Videos of Annie Lennox,” Popular Music, vol. 23, (London, 1998), p. 320.
no.rt (Cambridge, 2004), p. 26. 46 Ibid.,p.323.
23 New York Entertainment, 2008, p. 205. 47 Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of
24 Jess Cagle. Entertainment Weekly (September 8, 1995), p. 22. Sensibility,’ European Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 2
25 Ibid., p. 24. (2007), pp. 147-66.
BORN THIS WAY / 217

JONATHAN D. KATZ
QUEER ACTIVIST FASHION
We were to have a new family photo, paid for and orchestrated by my brother
as an anniversary gift to my parents. My siblings and I were all now more or
less adult and this was to be the first family picture to include our various
spouses and offspring, and thus the first family photo since we lived altogether
as one family. But it almost didn’t happen, and by day’s end, my siblings were
furious at me, my parents said this time I had gone too far, and even the very
patient photographer’s wan smile grew thin and tight. What happened, they
said — indeed, they still say — was my fault. But in trying to explain myself, I
hope as well to explain the power of activist drag, and why I held our family
photo hostage to it.
Weeks before the shoot, we received explicit instructions as to what to
wear. Jackets were mandatory for the males, with a preference for suits. But
I was having none of it. In the stilted lexicon of the formal family photo-
graph, this preference for formal wear serves to telegraph many things: class
ne author
Queer
wearing’
Nation jacket
status (or aspiration), gender, adherence to social norms and, not least, an
narter. untroubled evocation of that social code, visible only in its breach, mark-
QUEER ACTIVIST FASHION / 219

ing the traditional nuclear family. But the nuclear family, at least in 1990,
had indeed gone nuclear, making heterosexuality the sole available option,
and moreover mobilizing explicitly against queer families, my other, elected
family. Amidst an era in which “the family” was deployed on a national scale
to police people like me, and “family values” was taken actually to mean
something, and that something was not queer; when Bush Senior was in the
White House; Reagan had just left it; the radical Religious Right was still
ascendant and AIDS stalked the land leaving horror in its wake, I couldn’t
elect simply to camouflage myself and blend seamlessly in the comfort and
security of my own family.
Too much was at stake as the 1990s dawned: we were in the middle of a
national culture war, including vicious right wing attacks on what they then
still called “gay art’’ Only the previous year, the Corcoran Gallery of Art
censored a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition and explicit Federal regulations,

promulgated by that tiber-bigot, Senator Jesse Helms, began to police what
could be said or done in addressing our lives publicly. Helms, working hard
to conflate queerness with AIDS in the public imagination, actually said on
the Senate floor on June 23, 1989, “Mr. President, instead of denouncing
the homosexual ‘lifestyle, countless politicians, some in this Chamber, fall in
line with a repugnant organized political movement — and that is what it is
— attempting to persuade the American people that this is a desirable way to
conduct their lives ... In the meantime, thousands more in this country will
continue to die from AIDS while the homosexuals continue to proclaim the
virtues of their perverse practices.” But the sad truth was that we were dying,
and I went to more funerals than parties in my youth. At the time of the
photo, I was a thirty-two-year-old veteran street activist with an arrest record
I held like a badge of honor, and from my vantage point in San Francisco, it
felt like there were two Americas; one placid and prosperous, where people
talked of and planned for the future, and the other, the one where I lived,
where everyone was either dying or talking about death, and the future was
no more than an abstraction, a figure of speech.
Hounded into a tiny sliver of America by this onslaught of “family values.”
I wasn’t about to blend smoothly into this politicization of the family. Let me
underscore that my own family, progressive and educated, were as horrified
by those who held my kind in contempt as was I. I had no beef with my
family, but still I showed up at the family photograph not in a suit but in jeans
and a red tee-shirt with black letters that read “QueER.’ After much argument,
one in which I kept repeating that there were only two options, a photo
without me, or a photo with me in my queer shirt, this photograph was
snapped, printed, and circulated. No one in the family likes it, including me.
From an historical perspective, my queer family photograph is worthy
not because I sought to make a statement about my queerness, but because
I sought to make my statement by wearing an actual statement, the word
“queer.” Fashion, of course, had always sought to make a statement, but doing
so literally, in the queer world, was still relatively new. But beginning in the
1980s, statements everywhere adorned queer activist tee-shirts, leather jackets,
muscle shirts, and sweatshirts. While queers had traditionally identified each
other through various kinds of queer uniforms (including literal uniforms)
for purposes of solidarity, visibility, and not least sexual intimacy, these queer

fashions used color, fabric, and tailoring to declare solidarity, not literal
declarations. But soon, speech act fashions were sold at Act Up and Queer
Nation protests, and at marches and rallies, and literally every new activist
organization or affiliated group made the design and manufacture of a tee-
shirt bearing a slogan among their very first acts.
The rise of sloganeering in activist fashion can be tied to two key develop-
ments, the beginning of mainstream media coverage of queer protests, and
the development of a truly collective queer politics. A slogan on your chest
was tailor-made for a politics of mass visibility, and marches, sit-ins, and other
collective acts of public dissent were quick to capitalize on their televisual
appeal. Hordes of people dressed the same send an unmistakable message, one
that was, moreover, notably easier to convey than hand lettering cardboard
at two in the morning. Still, from our current vantage point, the advent of
sloganeering clothing seems vastly less of a defining break with the past than
in fact it was. Queer fashion once spoke sotto voce to insiders, at once defin-
ing membership in a subculture while excluding interlopers; its legibility to
the straight world was very much to the point. But wearing a tee-shirt that
literally reads “queer” articulates a very different kind ofpolitics, one that no
longer ratifies any distinction between the inside and outside of a culture, but
instead sees the overcoming of that distinction as a central tenet. In this sense,
the rise of the tee-shirt was predicated on the development of a new histori-
cal identity, one that embraced the forthright declaration ofvisible difference
as a strategic political advantage.
Pre-Stonewall activist fashion instead turned not on a declaration ofvisible
difference but an essential sameness. The pre-Stonewall “homophile” rights
organization, the Mattachine Society, in fact promulgated the following
“Regulations for Picketing,’ to govern the behavior of their membership:
“Precepts: Picketing 1s not an occasion for an assertion of personality,
individuality, ego, rebellion, generalized non-conformity or anti-conformity
... Men will wear suits, white shirts, ties; women will wear dresses.’? For
these queer pioneers, establishing a vision of equality demanded that sexual
minorities look, act, and dress in an equivalent way to their straight peers.
The early lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis even offered workshops
on make-up and dress for lesbians, a move intended to challenge the social
visibility of the butch dyke, very much as the Mattachine’s efforts were

intended to counteract the social visibility of drag queens as the sole public
face of the gay movement. Among conservatives, various strains of this
ideology continued well into the 1980s: Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen
argued in their 1989 book, After the Ball: How America will Conquer its Fear and
Hatred of Gays in the 90s that gay pride parades should regulate the visibility of
drag queens lest the movement continue to promulgate a vision of manifest
distinction, a differentiation that they argued would set the movement back.
In short, the argument here is that while queers may be distinct in terms of
our expression of intimacy within the generally invisible sphere ofprivate life,
we were otherwise the functional equivalent of straight people and looked
the part.
At an earlier historical moment, this was a useful activist strategy, but one
that waned in favor of amass queer politics. And by a queer politics, | mean
a specifically anti-identity model of sexual dissidence, one that turned not on
the declaration of one’s individual and “authentic” self as lesbian or gay or bi
or even trans, but rather one that saw queerness as a broad refusal of sexuality
as a useful or socially necessary classificatory system. Lesbian and gay politics
were seen by a nascent queer movement as having won the battle, but lost
the war, for no matter how liberated we'd eventually become, we'd still be
a minority identity appended to a normative mainstream — and thus always
reliant on the kindness of strangers. Better, queer politics held, to challenge
the primacy of the classificatory system itself and manifest not an “authentic”
identity in keeping with its terms, but a deep political kinship with all those
of any sexuality who refused to attribute to desire a gender, who saw sexuality
as NO more important than any other taste. But while we readily acknowledge
that there are countless individual differences in taste, and that these differences
don’t really signify in any important way, this is not so with sexuality. Thus
queerness built ideological connections across sexual differences, permitting
even the most confirmed heterosexuals an equal claim to queerness, so long
as they, too, refused a binary understanding of something as complex as desire.
Once queerness as a category took hold across our individual differences,
it was hardly necessary to assert that we were a broad constituency of many
different types and identities, for we were plainly visible as such. No longer
tied together by an essentialized sexuality, but by an ideological predisposi-
tion, queerness was many different things to many people, but at core, it was

a refusal of heteronormativity.A new politics of visibility then took hold, one
that used activist fashion not to declare one’s individual selfhood, but to knit
a broad array of ages, races, gender identifications, body types, and indeed
sexual orientations into a visible instantiation, a public queer face. In short,
once we became manifest as a diverse community we reinvested in a politics
of queer visibility, seeking to mark out our queerness in a way that had oth-
erwise become culturally invisible given our diversity. Hence the rise of the
queer tee-shirt. That queer activist fashion took up typography is in fact one
of the most notable, but least acknowledged markers of change in the post-
Stonewall queer activist world.
Not surprisingly, tee-shirts were first deployed as a means of statement in
electoral politics, and the 1960 presidential election featured Kennedy tee-
shirts. Very quickly, however, the roving billboard quality of the tee-shirt was
recognized and they soon came to feature messages of every stripe. In queer
terms, the tee-shirt’s first glorious moment was probably the disruption of
the National Organization of Women’s (NOW) Congress to Unite Women in
1970 in New York City. At that event,a group of women wearing lavender tee-
shirts reading “Lavender Menace” took the stage and seized the microphone,
disrupting the proceedings, generally to the delight of the audience. Their
slogan was inspired by the ostensible dismissal of lesbians in the women’s
movement as a “lavender menace” by NOW founder and then president
Betty Friedan. In response to that comment in 1969, the editor of theNOW’s
New York newsletter, the celebrated lesbian author Rita Mae Brown, quit and
with other women, founded the organization Lavender Menace.
Lesbian and gay tee-shirts were visible from that moment on, but they
were not yet the workhorse of the activist closet that they would eventually
become. This began to change in the 1980s as an ascendant Christian right
and their friends in the Republican leadership put us squarely in their cross-
hairs. While in the early 1980s the Republican party actually briefly flirted
with the gay community as a way of boosting their cool quotient — no less
a Republican stalwart than Nancy Reagan gave her premier interview as
First Lady to Andy Warhol’s very queer Interview Magazine — AIDS would
soon change that. Hideously, AIDS was used by the Right to resuscitate, at an
historical moment that threatened its immanent disappearance, that very old

i SUPPORT
LESBIAN 2
THE GAY
LESBIAN 2 PRIDE IN
AMERICA
1@
GAY Marcu
On
WASHINGTON,
Ce
SUNDAY, appn 25,1993
HAs Keaen<e
homophobic politics of queer pathology — a diseased identity, and alongside it,

as its predicates, rampant contagion, infection of the young, unhappy life, and
sctio nathan | early death. These old stereotypes were thus newly instrumentalized against
us, having been given new credence through the etiology of a virus.As a re-
sult of the newly radical Right’s attacks against us, we began to organize, and
build a truly national movement.
With the Supreme Court’s Bowers v Hardwick decision, a 1986 decree
that, in upholding a Georgia anti-sodomy law, essentially ratified the illegality
of homosexuality, a relatively new national activist movement came to rely
on the tee-shirt as a statement of mass affiliation. Protesting the Supreme
Court decision on October 13, 1987, activists belonging to the affiliate group
Queer and Present Danger, who had trained in civil-rights era techniques of
civil disobedience such as passive resistance, for example not walking to the
waiting police van, but requiring the cops to drag you there, donned black
tee-shirts to better contrast with the white steps of the Supreme Court. They
knew that images of activists’ limp bodies while under arrest were irresistible
media fodder and too good an opportunity to ignore, so they made sure the
tee-shirts bore the words “Queer and Present Danger” framing a pink tri-
angle superimposed over the colonnaded fa¢ade of the Supreme Court. Since
this was a period in which the word “homosexual” was still ubiquitous in the

mainstream press, generally preceded by the word “open” or “avowed” as if it
was still socially loaded to declare one’s sexuality openly (even the word gay
was considered too progressive for the New York Times until 1987) the use of
the word “queer” here was truly radical.
In contrast, at the first National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian
Civil Rights in 1979, plenty of people dressed in home-made protest tee-
shirts, but for the vast majority, signs and buttons were the chosen form of
expression. But by 1987, the over half a million activists participating in the
Second National March on Washington For Lesbian and Gay Rights were
encouraged to buy an array of protest clothing, both at the March headquar-
ters and through private vendors. Publicly challenging the still widespread
presumption of closeted sexuality, the tee-shirts available, such as one reading
“IT Support Lesbian and Gay Pride in America” and featuring a large pink
triangle, were self-consciously donned as emblematic of this ascendant queer
politic of mass visibility.
But it was ACT up, founded in 1987, that helped make the slogan tee-
shirt ubiquitous, and its activist graphics arm, the collective Gran Fury, were

responsible for some of the most eye-catching tee-shirt images of the mo-
ment. Such tee-shirts did double duty as both activist sloganeering and as
a source of revenue for the mother organization. At an historical moment
wherein countless obituaries still refused to list AIDS as the cause of death
and instead noted only “after a long illness,” or at best, pneumonia, because
to admit to having AIDS was still so socially fraught, the wearing of a tee-
shirt proclaiming public affiliation with AIDS activism was a powerful gesture
of dissidence. Often riffing on an image vocabulary derived from canonical
queer artists like Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol, or deploying Madison Avenue
catch phrases such as Silence=Death, act up’s imagery was at once vaguely
familiar and memorably formidable. Especially notable was the fact that
many HIV-negative individuals, including a number of lesbian and bisexual
women from a community with a historically low HIV infection rate, were
key organizers of AcT up. This embracing ofstigmatized identities that one did
not even necessarily share personally would emerge as a defining tenet of the
new queer activism — in keeping with this queer politics, to wear a tee-shirt
was to express a political opinion, not to declare one’s identity.
Indeed, central to this new queer politics was the idea that activist drag
was now actually drag, which is to say dress that didn’t confirm but instead
challenged notions ofauthenticity and truthfulness. Of course, this was hardly
new in the queer world, as the legions of Dorothys from the Wizard of Oz
regularly made manifest on Halloween. What was new here wasn’t donning
clothing that refuted ostensibly “natural” categories around gender and sexu-
ality — queers had done that forever. After all, a community long persecuted
precisely because it was deemed “unnatural” would have a distinct and highly
personal investment in revealing nature to be a mere social construct, such
that “femaleness” could be realized by men and maleness by women merely
through mobilizing the right cultural signifiers. No, the difference here was
the development of historically queer modes of resistance like camp as self
consciously activist strategies — ones that elevated fluidity ofidentity in place
of the traditionally earnest declaration of authentic selfhood. For example,
members of aQueer Nation—San Francisco affiliate group, S. H. O. P., or the
Suburban Homosexual Outreach Project, would travel outside of the city to
perform campy street theater, while deliberately refuting any essentialized
identity categories. When, for example, a suburban East Bay street named Gay

Court sought a legal name change to High Eagle Road,S.H.O.P. descended M278 Son’ Sook nylon flight
on that wealthy enclave, and dressed in Queer Nation drag, invited its home- Reem itl ee
owners to join Queer Nation, even offering them Queer Nation tee-shirts "oo CU
reading “PROMOTE QUEERNESS,” since the fact that they sought to change their
street’s name testified to the fact that they felt the deleterious effects of ho-
mophobia too. Doors were slammed in our faces, but the message we wanted
to send was telegraphed by the media nonetheless — homophobia was the
problem, whatever our individual sexuality.
In contrast, earlier notions of gay dress tended to make clothing an index
of truth, a proclamation ofindividual and highly personal desires — often as a
means ofidentifying oneselfin the hope of finding a sexual partner. One of
the earliest post-Stonewall fashion statements was what came to be called the
“Clone look.” Visible primarily in coastal gay ghettos, such as the Castro or
Christopher Street, the Clone look was a hyperbolized variation of a typical
straight blue collar worker's uniform — jeans, white tee-shirt, plaid or checked
shirt, heavy boots. But unlike his prototype, the tee-shirt was now skin-tight,
and even rolled at the arms in 50’s fashion, and the plaid shirt could be left
open to reveal the muscled torso, or dispensed with altogether in favor ofjust
the tee-shirt. It was not unusual for the Clone to sand his jeans at the crotch
or buttocks better to reveal the body beneath, and the jeans — generally Levis
button-up sors — were complimented with a bandana, itself resonant with
meaning depending on its color and placement. In short, the Clone look
sought to accomplish two things. First, it manifested specifically gay desire,
emphasizing those parts of the body other men would find erotic. The reason
those jeans were buttoned was for the sensual thrill of ripping them open,
and the bandana advertised one’s particular sexual proclivities (for example,
yellow was for piss play, black for S&M, baby blue meant oral sex, and so on,
and if itwas worn on the left it meant one was active, while the right was for
men who preferred a passive role.) So baroque grew this hanky code that a
delightfully arch book, Gay Semiotics, by Hal Fischer was published in 1977
to explain it all.
Secondly, in contradistinction to an earlier, softer, effeminized queer look,
the Clone signified a redefinition of the value of masculinity. Many gay men
were now not only desirous of masculinity in a partner, they could themselves
embody the very masculinity they sought, becoming both desiring and the

a4
,
eesgy
ant,
needed
Leh
ye
—_—_—
MILITANT
HOMOSEXUAL
ed
object of another’s desires. Notably but a few years earlier, such a version of
a clean-cut masculinity would have been aggressively denigrated in the gay
world, for it carried far more ominous overtones. While the US was still at
war in Vietnam, masculine styles were associated with the military and milita-

rism, and thus reviled. Indeed, in the 1960s, queer hippies and straight hippies
were largely indistinguishable, for both dressed in performative opposition to
the culture of machismo that, it was thought, engendered our involvement in
Vietnam in the first place. A unisex garb of flowered shirts, bright colors and
patterns, hip-hugging bell-bottom pants, long hair, and beads were ubiquitous
among men precisely because they sought to communicate their refusal of
ostensibly masculine prerogatives. For queer hippies, perhaps the only visible
difference in this unisex hippie uniform was the addition of more explicitly
camp elements such as bouffant hair, ribbons in one’s beard, lots of glitter,
and/or make-up.
Almost immediately, however, after the US pulled out of
Vietnam in 1973
the hippie style faded in favour of the Clone look; and by 1975, the very year
South Vietnam fell to the communist North, the Clone look was already the
most visible gay male style in San Francisco and New York. Ironically, lesbian
separatist culture of the same period also elevated flannel shirts and jeans, and
even occasionally white tee-shirts, to cultural centrality. This lesbian flannel
uniform was sufficiently gender variant to mark resistance to a masculinist
construction of female identity, namely all those fashions, like the high heel,
that were designed for women but crafted to appeal to men. At the same
time, flannel was just gender neutral enough that it skirted re-inscription in
the butch/femme paradigm, a historically valuable and courageous stance of
queer visibility that was roundly (and erroneously) attacked in lesbian separatist
culture as merely a failed mimicry of heterosexism. Flannel was certainly
too butch to be femme, but at the same time it was not on its own butch
enough to be stone butch, or conventionally masculine. One result of lesbian
separatism’s resistance to power hierarchies and concomitant celebration of
equality in all its forms was thus that a fairly inexpensive, ubiquitous mode
of dress, the flannel shirt, could assume the significance of a uniform. But
although the Clone and the separatist shared this article of clothing, they
invested it with vastly diverging meanings.
The flannel shirt was thus the progenitor of the activist tee-shirt, a legible
declaration of queer selfhood, whether the self in question was a separatist
telegraphing membership in an egalitarian commune or a Clone advertising
his sexual availability to other men. Like the activist tee-shirt, it, too, was
a unisex style. But while flannel may have been shared by gay men and

lesbians, it signified in almost opposing ways in each community. Not so the
message tee-shirt. And as queers ofall genders embraced declarative tee-shirts
a decade after the heyday of flannel, in relatively short order the meanings
of their declarations grew increasingly ironic, or fuzzy, or redundant, or
hard to parse. How else are we to understand such Queer Nation clothing
stickers as “promote fag/dyke visibility”; “what causes heterosexuality?” or
“militant homosexual,’ especially as worn by militants whose queer identity
was premised against the notion of a homo/hetero divide.To wear a tee-shirt
today, as I once did, boldly reading “QUEER” would now not even be read as
a non-ironic statement by other queers. That we have no single message to
emblazon, as we once did,1in bold sans serifon our chests, is, | think, the surest
: su : 5
sign we re winning.
I Congressional Record (June 23, 1989) Vol 135, no 86.

iS) Box 80, Frank Kameny papers at the Smithsonian National
Museum of American History.

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FACING: Ralph Rucci,

Kinbaku short-sleeve leather
iress, Fall 2012. Photograph
jurtesy Ralph Rucc
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 7 244

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Organizing a book and exhibition of this complexity has been a significant undertaking, and
we have accumulated many debts. First and foremost, I would like to thank my colleague, the
senior curator of costume, Fred Dennis, who first came up with the idea for this project. I am
also deeply grateful to all of the contributors to this book.
The Museum at FIT is grateful to The Coby Foundation and its Executive Director, Ward L.
E. Mintz, for their support of our exhibition, A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the
Catwalk, and its related public programs. The exhibition was also made possible in part through
the generosity of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor
Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. As always, we wish to thank the President
of the Fashion Institute of Technology, Dr. Joyce F. Brown, and the members of the Couture
Council of the Museum at FIT, especially its Chair, Yaz Hernandez.
The Museum at FIT would like to extend our thanks to everyone who provided advice,
assistance, and support, including members of our advisory committees and lenders to the
exhibition, especially Ron Amato, Richard Anderman, The Andy Warhol Museum, Joey Arias,
John Bartlett, Walter Van Beirendonck, Beverly Birks, AnnaBlume, Hamish Bowles, Christopher
Breward, Peter Brown, Antoine Bucher, Chanel Inc., Xavier Chaumette, George Chauncey,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / 246
Vasilios Christofilas, The Cincinnati Art Museum, Shaun Cole, Liz Collins, Francisco Costa,
Jeffery Costello, The Costume Institute, New York, Simon Doonan, Deutsche Kinemathek,
Museum fiir Film und Fersehen, Scott Ewalt, Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising
(FIDM), Susan Forbes, Gordon Frey, Jean Paul Gaultier, Stan Herman, Vicki Karaminas,
Jonathan David Katz, Steven Kolb, Kourosh Larizadeh, Freddie Leiba, The Liberace Foundation
for the Creative Arts, Didier Ludot, Peter McNeil, John Mincarelli, Darrell Moos, The Museum
of the City of New York and Phyllis Magidson, Rick Owens, Nicolas Politis, Eric Ramirez,
Narciso Rodriguez, Pierre Rougier, Hal Rubinstein, Ralph Rucci, Jenny Shimizu, Cator
Sparks, Karlo Steel, Robert Tagliapietra, Linda Tain, Olivier Theyskens, Randolph Trumbach,
Christopher Uvenio, Robert Verdi, Versace S.p.A., James Windsor, Elizabeth Wilson, and
Colette Wong. Please forgive us if we have forgotten anyone!
Our thanks to all the photographers and artists who permitted their work to be featured
in this book especially Joyce Culver, Jill Furmanovsky, Chris Geary, Rick Gerharter, Michelle
Harper, Hilary Knight, Andy Levin, Chris Moore, Michael James O’Brien, Barbara Rix-Sieff,
and Mark Seliger. Thanks also to Frank Arre at The Naval Historical Center, Alexandra Ault at
the National Portrait Gallery, Gillian Bard at Saint Laurent Paris, Jennifer Belt at Art Resource,
April Calahan and Karen Cannell at the FIT Library Department of. Special Collections &
FIT Archives, Raphaélle Cartier at RMN — GP Photo Agency, Stephen Cartwright of the Vince
Estate, Jeannette Cordero at Corbis Images, Katia Cordova at Nationaux Grand-Palais/Agence
photographique de la Réunion des Musées, Ashlee Couldwell at Catwalking.com, Anna Davies
at the University of Nottingham, Holly Daws at Catwalking.com, Lonyea Ellis at Getty Images,
Jill Farish at City of Sydney, Andrea Felder at The New York Public Library, Zoltan Gerliczki,
Jessica Glasscock at the Costume Institute, Melissa Green at Rock Archive.com, Thomas
Haggerty at the Bridgeman Art Library, Jeff Hendricks at Here Media, Nikita Hooper at
The National Trust, Alex Jeffcoat, David Kahn, Perrine Latrive at SAEML Parisienne de
Photographie, Ruth Levy at Mark Seliger Photography, Thomas Lisanti at the New York
Public Library, Richard Macfarlane at the Bankfield Museum, Anne MacKenna at Edinburgh
College of Art/University of Edinburgh, Bethany Matia at the Costume Institute, Jonathan
Melton, Tal Nadan at the New York Public Library, Alexandra Palmer at the Royal Ontario
Museum Toronto, Neil Parkinson at the Royal College of Art, Charles-Antoine Revol at
Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue, Patrick Rodgers at the Rosenbach Museum & Library,
David Rosado at the New York Public Library, Laetita Roux at Fondation Pierre Bergé —
Yves Saint Laurent, Michael Slade at Art Resource, Caroline Sones at the National Trust, Jon
Swinstead at PYMCA, Elizabeth L. Taylor at the National Portrait Gallery, Justine Taylor at
OPUS 9, Autumn Thu at Chado Ralph Rucci, Karine Tsoumis at the Gardiner Museum, Neil
Walker at the University of Nottingham, Susan Odell Walker at the Lewis Walpole Library,
Yale University, Rich Wandel at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
National History Archive, Miriam Ward at the Wellcome Trust/ Wellcome Images, and Nicola
Woods at the Royal Ontario Museum Toronto. If, despite our best efforts, we have not been
able to trace all copyright holders, please inform us and we shall make corrections in the next
edition of the book.
Fred Dennis and I are grateful to our colleagues at the Museum at FIT who contributed
their time and efforts to this project, especially Melissa Marra, associate curator of education,
who served as the project manager and picture researcher for the book. Thanks also to Nicole
Bloomfield, Gail Bowden, Boris Chesakov, Nateer Cirino, Julian Clark, Ann Coppinger, Eileen
Costa, Sonia Dingilian, Michael Goitia, JillHemingway, Marjorie Jonas, Patricia Mears, Tanya
Melendez, Gladys Rathod, Lynn Sallaberry, Tamsen Schwartzman, Thomas Synnamon and
Vanessa Vasquez. Thank you also to our interns: Heather Briggs and Alexis Carreno. Our
gratitude to the FIT Foundation, especially Kevin Hervas, and to the Office of Communications
and External Relations, especially Loretta Lawrence Keane and Cheryl Fein.
As always, we are deeply indebted to our wonderful editor at Yale University Press, Gillian
Malpass, and to our talented designer, Paul Sloman.
Valerie Steele
Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum
at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, where
she has organized more than twenty exhibitions, including
The Corset, Gothic: Dark Glamour, and Daphne Guinness.
The
auchor of numerous books, including Fetish; Fashion, Sex
and Power, and, most recently, Fashion Designers, A-Z: The
Collection of The Museum at FIT and The Impossible Collection
of Fashion, she is also the founder and editor-in-chief of
Fashion Theory:
TheJournal of Dress, Body and Culture.
Jacket designed by Paul Sloman.
Jacket illustration:
Model Jenny Shimizu, Helmut Red campaign.
Photograph by Mark Seliger.
Printed in Italy
“Revelatory, thoughtful, and fun, this pioneering collection of essays charts the multiple ways
LGBT people have used style to proclaim — or hide — their identities, and illuminates their central
role in the fashion system itself. Ranging from eighteenth-century Mollies to the early twentieth-
century lesbian icon Radclyffe Hall, and from the House of Dior to Alexander McQueen, this
collection offers fresh perspectives on the queer origins and meanings of style.”
GEORGE CHAUNCEY
SAMUEL KNIGHT PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, YALE UNIVERSITY
AUTHOR OF GAY NEW YORK
“T just love the word ‘queer, because when you are queer — like me — you do see the world and
all that’s in it from a distinctly uncommon perspective. So who better to advance our concepts
of beauty and taste and innovate our objects of desire and sex than the men and women who,
whether proudly or in secret, can lay claim to this controversial yet apt adjective. In words and
pictures, A Queer History of Fashion deliciously proves that through both the reticent inference of
Dior and Hartnell and the brazen exuberance of Versace and Jacobs, gays and lesbian designers
have used their craft as tools of mass seduction and we are all their happy victims.”
HAL RUBENSTEIN,
AUTHOR OF 700 UNFORGETTABLE DRESSES
“A fantastic and fascinating read on the constant intersection between fashion and LGBT history.
It’s about time that the LGBT communities’ vast contributions to fashion be acknowledged and
celebrated as they are in A Queer History of Fashion. From Christian Dior’s timeless elegance, to
Marlene Dietrich in drag, to Alexander McQueen’s cutting-edge masterpieces, these artists and
their work are explored in this fascinating book.”
GLENNDA TESTONE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF NEW YORK CITY'S

LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL & TRANSGENDER COMMUNITY CENTER
“A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk explores how fashion became a magnet
attracting the talent of gay men and women. More than most other professions, fashion has long
provided a safe environment, where gays could work with dignity and pride — and where they
have excelled in creating clothes for men and women ofall orientations.”
RALPH RUCCI, DESIGNER
ISBN 978-0-300-19670-2
80300"196702
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN AND LONDON « FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NEW YORK

A Queer History of Fashion - From The Closet To The Catwalk - Steele, Valerie, Editor - 2013 - New Haven - Yale University Press in Association With - 9780300196702 - Anna's Archive

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A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION: FROM THE CLOSET TO THE CATWALK

EDITED BY VALERIE STEELE

A ground-breaking exploration of gay contributions

From Christian Dior to Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander

Published to coincide with an exhibition at The Museum

Published in association with The Fashion Institute of Technology,

All rights reserved.

Designed by Paul Sloman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CHRISTOPHER BREWARD COUTURE AS QUEER AUTO/ BIOGRAPHY

ELIZABETH WILSON WHAT DOES A LESBIAN LOOK LIKE?

JONATHAN D KATZ QUEER ACTIVIST FASHION

A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION: FROM THE CLOSET TO THE CATWALK

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PRETTY GENTLEMEN OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY:

Same-sex desire and behavior have existed throughout world history — in

A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION / 12

A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION / 13

R oe C7 Lhe (Naegay - Mies :

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WILDE STYLE: AESTHETES AND DANDIES

e : A QUEER HISTORY OF FASHION

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THE RISE OF THE GAY MALE DESIGNER

“Hairstyles and dress constitute one of the most continual preoccupations of

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Many predominantly homosexual men were married (sometimes to lesbians)

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BEFORE AND AFTER STONEWALL

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SEXUALITY AND STYLE

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