Gay flag wallpaper aesthetic
Sanders constructed a white catwalk to display mannequins dressed in high-fashion clothes. To suggest the implicit reciprocal relationship between gay culture and high fashion, Mr. Joel Sanders, the architect and queer theorist who designed the exhibition, said: “As outsiders, as queers, gays and lesbians have always had to have feelers out, to be more aware of coded signifiers.” Every era, in other words, had its “tell”: There were red neckties in the 1890s, bleached hair in the 1930s, hatbands in the 1940s, Levi’s in the 1970s - crotch sanded by the wearer to enhance genital display.
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“Even as a gay man, I don’t know my own history,” he said. One problem that creates is that, among a younger generation, there is a lack of remembrance” of centuries of intolerance. “The point of doing this exhibition was to recognize the people who went before my generation,” said Mr. Steele added, noting that Dior, the great French couturier, never came out for fear of shocking his mother that the Austrian-born innovator Rudi Gernreich, a gay activist in private life, never dared come out publicly for fear of deportation that the visionary British fashion editor Madge Garland was cashiered by British Vogue when her sexuality was revealed. “The fact that so many people were closeted kept them from being credited and recognized,” Ms. Steele suggested, it offered “a chance to create another world in reaction to a homophobic society.” In all likelihood, many found their way to fashion because the doors to more-conservative professions were barred to them. Whether there evolved out of this a “gay aesthetic” is arguable, though it can certainly be supposed that gay and lesbian people may historically have found a haven in fashion because, as Ms. Steele said.Īnd in that grim fact can be found insight into the necessity for devising systems of covert signs and symbols, visual codes gay people improvised in response to oppression. You really couldn’t make this stuff up.” (In fact, you wouldn’t need to, since the gay historian Rictor Norton thoroughly explored this particular gay subculture in a 1992 book, “Mother Clap’s Molly House.”)Įnlightenment liberality only went so far, though, and during a 1710 purge, the London police padlocked the molly houses and jailed their patrons. “One of the molly houses was run by Mother Clap. Steele uncovered records of London taverns known as molly houses, frequented by “cross-dressing quote-unquote sodomites, who drank and caroused,” and wore women’s clothes, she said. “But then, when you looked more deeply into the history, you found these proto-gay cultures in cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam.”Ĭombing through 18th-century accounts, Ms. “This was our attempt to write them back into history.”Īt first “we figured we’d start with the middle of the 20th century, because historians can’t seem to find anything earlier than Dior,” Ms.
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Somehow, gay men and lesbians were left out of most official accounts of fashion history, Ms. That was the task when they began organizing the show two years ago, with little to go on but a determination to restore to a proper place in history the countless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who, without question, contributed greatly to fashion. Steele added, “Was how are you to going to demonstrate that there is a gay aesthetic?” The challenge faced by the curators of “Queer History of Fashion,” which opens this week, Ms. Steele and her colleague, Fred Dennis - makes a cogent case for a more balanced view of fashion history, one that, given the widely held perception that gay men dominate fashion, has curiously tended to skew heterosexual and male.
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Whether or not this assertion stands up to scrutiny, “A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk” - a pioneering show curated by Ms. “And she answered, ‘Probably not as much as gay men.’ ”
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“I once asked Vivienne Westwood what women have contributed to fashion,” said Valerie Steele, the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology.