Article Title
447
Fashion Theory, Volume 18, Issue 4, pp. 447–464
DOI: 10.2752/175174114X13996533400079
Reprints available directly from the Publishers.
Photocopying permitted by licence only.
© 2014 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
Reviewed by
Annamari Vänskä
Annamari Vänskä, Adjunct
Professor, Collegium Researcher,
TIAS—Turku Institute for
Advanced Studies, University
of Turku, Finland. Vänskä has
published widely on queering
visual culture and fashion. Her
latest monograph analyzes
children’s representation in fashion
advertising. She is currently
investigating how the dog–human
relationship is negotiated through
fashion practices.
[email protected]
From Gay to
Queer—Or,
Wasn’t Fashion
Always Already
a Very Queer
Thing?
A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the
Catwalk, Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology,
New York, September 13, 2013–January 4, 2014
The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the
Sidewalk to the Catwalk organized by the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts and Jean Paul Gaultier himself at
the Brooklyn Museum, October 25, 2013–February 23,
2014
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Annamari Vänskä
When I first started working with fashion theory some years back, it was
exhilarating to realize how this particular branch of academic research
had lifted otherwise marginalized groups such as gays and lesbians to
center stage (Figure 1). Nowhere else in academia have I encountered
such intense discussions about the dandy as a figure problematizing the
rigid boundaries of gender, sexuality, and class by performing his toilette in front of an audience, or read texts about the fashion-obsessed
pre-dandies, the effeminate Macaronis from mid-eighteenth century,
and had the opportunity to teach courses about fashion as an essential tool in de/constructing classed, gendered, and sexualized identities.
For someone coming to fashion from critical gender studies, all theories about gender and sexuality have started to make sense in a new
way—how important a role everyday sartorial practices have played in
fashioning theories about gender and sexuality.
I am particularly thinking of the turn of the century when sexologists Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1965[1886]) and Havelock Ellis
(1895[1900]) popularized the idea that a person’s sexual identity was
not only an inner quality but could be discerned from appearance. Both
Figure 1
The exhibition A History of Queer Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk opened with “pretty gentlemen’s” dresses from the turn of
the nineteenth century. Photograph © The Museum at FIT, New York.
From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?
449
Ellis and Krafft-Ebing argued that if a woman dressed in elegant, masculine tailored suits and tuxedos, it was evidence of her homosexuality,
of her “inner pathology.”1 While some women used cross-dressing as a
way to widen their social life sphere, others used it as an erotic code,
as an expression of their active sexual desire for other women. In this
scenario cross-dressing and/or masculine behavior was manifestation of
their lesbian identity. I am also thinking about the more contemporary
theories of gender and sexuality, most often presented under the name of
queer theory, and associated especially with the names of Judith Butler
(1990) and Judith Halberstam (1998). Both have theorized gender
and sexuality by drawing from fashion—by using cross-dressing drag
queens (Butler) and drag kings (Halberstam) as evidence that gender
and sexuality are socially constructed performatives, that masculinity
and femininity are free-floating signifiers and not natural, given, and
immutable traits. Of course, fashion theorists such as Elizabeth Wilson
(1985) had already said this before Butler and Halberstam. Wilson was
ahead of her time in many ways—not least as a feminist who did not
condemn fashion but saw it as an important social technology that
represents self and body as culturally produced concepts, and allows
non-heterosexuals ways to creatively resist imperative gender norms. It
could be said that she was one of the first to queer fashion.
Queering, Not Queer, Fashion
Apropos queer. It is a very interesting little word, which has gained
ever more visibility during the past decade or so, and not least in fashion studies. Historically queer has been used in many ways: to signify
strange, abnormal, or atypical, or as a colloquial and abusive word
about homosexuality. In its theoretical form, as queer theory, as it was
first defined by Teresa de Lauretis in 1991, queer became a method that
has been successfully used to criticize identity-based gay and lesbian
studies and to challenge heterosexist assumptions about what passes
as theory and knowledge (de Lauretis 1991: iii–xviii) (Figure 2). de
Lauretis’ ideas were swiftly adapted to cultural studies where it became
an analytical concept, a performative, a way of reading cultural texts.
Queer as a method of reading has especially drawn from Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick’s (1997: 1–37) conceptual toolbox of paranoid reading and
reparative reading. Paranoid reading is closely related to symptomatic
reading as it points out silences, gaps, and insinuations about cultural
texts. Paranoid reading suspects; it aims to expose how heterosexism
has shaped what we know and marginalized non-heterosexual experiences. Reparative reading, on the other hand is a more positive form
of critique. It aims to open up rather than point out silences. It aspires
to repair existing knowledge and show the wide spectrum of reading
possibilities (Sedgwick 1997: 24–8).
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Annamari Vänskä
Figure 2
Early-twentieth-century lesbian
fashions accentuated crossdressing and masculinity.
Installation view of the “Le
Monocle” platform in the
exhibition A Queer History of
Fashion: From the Closet to the
Catwalk. Photograph © The
Museum at FIT, New York.
A Method of Survival: Gay Semiotics of Fashion
If Sedgwick’s analytical method reveals silences and gaps to be symptoms of heterosexist culture, fashion and proto-queer theorist Roland
Barthes has turned his analytical eye on revealing details throughout his
career and especially in his theory of the dandy (Barthes 2005[1962]:
60–4). Unlike many fashion scholars, Barthes does not only understand
the dandy as a historical figure or as a certain identity position. For
him the dandy symbolizes a special kind of clothing technique. In other
From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?
451
words, for Barthes, “the dandy” is first and foremost a theoretical and
analytical tool. His essay “Dandyism and Fashion” is often read as a
critique of mass-produced fashion due to his statement “fashion killed
dandyism.” However, less attention has been paid to his ideas about the
dandy’s details. Why does he stress the near-invisible details, the je-nesais-quoi quality of appearance? Because that little next-to-nothing is
the crucial signifier and marker of the dandy’s difference. And this difference is not a difference from unfashionability but from heterosexuality: for Barthes, the detail is a discreet sign that only communicates to
the person’s peers.
Just think about the “invisible men” Shaun Cole writes about in his
wonderful book “Don We Now Our Gay Apparel” (2000: 59–69), and
link them to the French intellectual reading women’s fashion magazines
and coming up with his theory of the dandy’s detail. This is a theory
that addresses those in the know—a rather clever invention of a closeted
gay man. Barthes invented queer theory—or, rather, queered semiotic
theory?—since he had no alternative. Being gay meant to be closeted
and belonging to a group meant to be able to read those invisible signs.
It is important to remember the historical context of Barthes’ theory: it
was a time when even such organizations as the Mattachine Society advised gays and lesbians to adhere to normative dress codes in order to be
accepted by the straight society. The association urged gays and lesbians
to dress down instead of flamboyantly: skirts for women; shirts, ties,
and suits for men. “Respectable” and “ordinary” attire was preferred
to visibly different dress in order to enhance homosexuality’s normality.
From the Margins to the Center
Gays and lesbians have indeed learned to speak about their sexuality by
not naming it directly, but through their clothing, style, and behavioral
signifiers. It is noteworthy that the modern notion of homosexuality
coincides with the rise of ideas about the modern society as a society of
appearances (Sennett 1992: 152–3) and clothing as a language-like institution from which individual styles are differentiated as parole (Barthes
1990[1967]). Both ideas have been lifesaving to gay and lesbian subculture in the homophobic and heterosexist culture. Gay semiotics (Fisher
1977) has helped sexually marginalized groups to survive.
The two simultaneous exhibitions in New York in Fall 2013, A Queer
History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk curated by Valerie
Steele and Fred Dennis at FIT and The Fashion World of Jean Paul
Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk organized by the Montreal
Museum of Fine Arts originally in 2011 with Jean Paul Gaultier himself
and remounted at the Brooklyn Museum, give an interesting angle to
thinking about this history, and the cultural and theoretical change from
gay to queer. It also stirred me to think about the differences between a
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gay or a coming-out exhibition and a queer exhibition. This difference
is already visible in both exhibitions’ subtitles which both suggest a
move from the margins to the center. The FIT exhibition’s subtitle suggests that there once was a time when fashion was in the closet, but has
now come to openness. The latter subtitle, “From the Sidewalk to the
Catwalk” suggests a move from (low) street culture to the world of high
culture, to haute couture.
In their subtitles, both exhibitions follow recent theoretical debates.
FIT exhibition’s subtitle reminded me of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s classic book Epistemology of the Closet (1991) where she proposes that
Western epistemology is best described with the metaphor of the closet.
She argues that the closet is not a concrete space but a discursive one,
characterized by public secrets, silencing, and euphemisms. It produces
interfaces, where private and public, visible and invisible are separated
from each other. The Gaultier exhibition’s subtitle, on the other hand,
suggests a critique of Georg Simmel’s (1971[1903]) theory of the trickledown of fashion. As it is widely known, Simmel proposed that fashion
is defined by class distinction, and the change in fashion is a dialectical
one. He argued that the upper social classes set the norm of what is in
fashion, and as soon as this norm has trickled-down to the lower classes,
the upper classes change the norms and the cycle starts all over again.
The Gaultier exhibition, on the other hand, proposed the opposite: that
it is the mundane culture, “the street,” that actually determines what is
in fashion. The Gaultier exhibition’s subtitle follows recent theoretical
approaches, that mass-production has democratized fashion and that
what is in fashion is not predicted by the upper classes but by sub- or
street cultures (e.g. English 2007).
The Gaultier exhibition presented a single designer’s collections from
the 1970s to the present. The aim of the show was to explain Gaultier’s
excellence in transforming the styles of the street and sexual subcultures
into desirable haute couture objects. It also showed Gaultier’s connectedness to media and celebrity culture, and how his personal connections
to such celebrities as Madonna have made him the cutting-edge deconstructionist of fashion that he is considered to be. The FIT’s rationale for
the show, on the other hand, was to make a wider claim: that up until
now, gays and lesbians have been hidden from fashion history—in much
a similar way as they have been excluded from art history (e.g. Cooper
1995[1986]; Duberman 1997; Hammond 2000; Fernandez 2001)—and
that this was the exhibition that reclaimed fashion’s gay and lesbian past
(Figure 3). To do this, the exhibition, though small in scale, was wide in
time: it stretched all the way from the eighteenth century to the present,
and presented singular outfits from the London-based subculture of the
fashion-obsessed and effeminate Macaronis and cross-dressing mollies,
the early-twentieth-century suit-wearing stylish mannish lesbians and
boyish garçonnes, 1980s AIDS-activist T-shirts with political slogans
such as “Safe Sex Is Hot Sex,” and suits worn at same-sex marriage
From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?
453
Figure 3
S/M leather style inspired
high-fashion designers such
as Gianni Versace, whose
leather ball gown has been said
to “disgust wealthy women
in Dallas.” Installation view of
the “Leather” platform in the
exhibition A Queer History of
Fashion: From the Closet to the
Catwalk. Photograph © The
Museum at FIT, New York.
celebrations in the 2000s. The exhibition also named designers who apparently were gay but never openly so in their own time: Christian Dior,
Cristóbal Balenciaga, Perry Ellis, Rudi Gernreich, the designer of the
topless swimsuit and unisex caftans as well as the founding member of
the Mattachine Society, and Madeleine Vionnet, who “may have been
bisexual” according to the exhibition’s website.
The exhibition also presented creations by openly homosexual designers, among these, for example, Gianni Versace’s bondage ball gowns,
Yves Saint Laurent’s iconic “Le Smoking” jacket, Jean Paul Gaultier’s
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pink sailor outfits, male skirts, and the orange velvet dress with cone
bust, as well as Jill Sander’s more androgynous looks. Some of the designers were also connected to their gay clientele: to AIDS-activist Larry
Kramer, for example, who was said to have worn a suit designed by
Yves Saint Laurent. Even though the exhibition claimed to queer the history of fashion, in reality it was more about making visible the gay designers and their creativity. Most of the designs on display, however, did
not queer fashion’s gendered norms, but were rather typical examples
of high-fashion women’s wear. Curatorial decision-making—i.e. who
gets to be included in the “queer history of fashion”—highlighted the
(celebrity) designer’s sexual orientation rather than the way garments
queered fashion.
About Identities, Not Garments: Coming out
Somehow the FIT exhibition troubles me even though I also want to
say it is an important contribution. Since homosexuality—or nonheterosexuality more generally—is such a big part of fashion and its
creative energy, it is important not to participate in the (re)production
of the closet. This theme should permeate all fashion exhibitions in one
way or another since fashion is so much about the body, gender, and
sexuality. At the same time I cannot but wonder whether the exhibition actually brought something new to the table—most of the themes
that it touched upon have been discussed widely in fashion research,
art history, and gender studies. Furthermore, isn’t it one of the most
persisting stereotypes that a male fashion designer is exactly what the
exhibition argued: a male homosexual who creates beautiful dresses for
(heterosexual) women? It remains a question whether an exhibition that
underlines the homosexuality of the designer changes the homophobic
attitudes that are such an essential part of denigrating fashion. In a
peculiar way the exhibition also lagged behind: even though its name
suggested it to be a queer exhibition, it was, in fact, a gay exhibition.
And more to the point, it was a coming-out or outing exhibition when it
bluntly stated a designer’s sexual orientation—“Dior was gay”—in the
exhibition plate explaining the queerness of a couture evening gown. It
has to be asked: does a designer’s sexual orientation emanate to her/his
designs and make them gay as well? If this were true, what does this do
to designs created by designers who are not homosexual? Can they be
part of the queer history of fashion? Why the need to produce a canon
of homosexual male designers? (Figure 4).
The problem of the FIT exhibition was in identity. Overcoming this
very problem has been at the heart of queer theory since the 1990s, and
it has been able to point out that what constitutes homosexuality—or
more pragmatically, who is gay or lesbian—is far from self-evident. Even
though there certainly are many designers who identify themselves as
From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?
Figure 4
The openly gay designer Jean
Paul Gaultier’s contribution
to queering fashion history
is seminal. He not only
transformed underwear
to outerwear, but he also
transformed gendered and
sexualized signifiers into playful
tools. Installation view of A
Queer History of Fashion: From
the Closet to the Catwalk.
Photograph © The Museum at
FIT, New York.
455
gay or lesbian, there is also an immense amount of people who do not.
The question queer theory poses to fashions on display is how does the
knowledge of a designer’s sexual orientation inform the actual objects
on display? Is “queer fashion” dependent on the designer’s sexuality?
If we did not know that the designer was homosexual, what would we
see then?
From queer theory’s perspective, it is also problematic to cast historical persons, who lived before the mid-nineteenth century, retrospectively
as homosexual. Even though Alan Bray (1988) locates the birth of the
modern concept of homosexuality at the turn of the eighteenth-century
molly houses in London and identifies it as a community consisting of
like-minded men with similar clothing and a special jargon, he also
writes that these meetings were not necessarily for sex. Although “sex
was the root of the matter … it was likely to be expressed in drinking
together, flirting and gossip and in a circle of friends” (Bray 1988: 84).
In fact, he argues that the significance of the molly houses was that they
constituted homosexuality as more than a sexual act—as a “way of
being in the world” (Jagose 1996: 12). What the community in molly
houses, the fashion-oriented Macaronis, or the dandies did was that
they queered the conventions of the rigid class-based clothing system. In
the course of time, they have become cultural figures precisely for this
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reason, not because of their supposed sexual identity. These figures are
abstractions that can now be used, in the footsteps of Barthes, as tools
in queering fashion more generally, in showing the underlying queerness
of fashion, and not of people.
In the Footsteps of the Gay Liberation Movement
One of the questions the exhibition stirred is why would an exhibition
look at queer fashion through identity in a moment in time when queer
theorists have done nothing but undo these very identity categories during the past decades? I do not mean to say that identity has completely
lost its meaning after queer theory, but it has certainly made it a problematic question. In its rather straightforward approach to the question
of identity, the exhibition seemed to follow the footsteps of the Gay and
Lesbian Liberation Movement. One of its central ideological tenets was
to encourage people to show their sexual identity openly in public—this
was the strategy that the FIT exhibition followed in naming “gay designers.” The goal of the Liberation Movement was to depathologize lesbianism and homosexuality and make them legitimate identities through
personal and collective visibility (Vänskä 2009: 227–35). This new
politics of visibility relied heavily on identity politics, markedly aimed
at challenging one of heterosexuality’s unspoken privileges: its invisible
visibility. As lesbianism and male homosexuality became more visible,
the so-called “homosexual suspicion” was generalized to all Americans
(Seidman 1998: 183). This ideological aim was clearly present in the
FIT’s exhibition too: by showing the designer’s sexuality openly for the
public, it aimed at making homosexuality legitimate in fashion history.
And, perhaps, even to generalize “homosexual suspicion” to all fashions. As such, this goal is an admirable and a welcome one.
After queer theory, however, it is not unproblematic to curate exhibitions that rely on the liberation movement’s identity politics and state,
for example, that a designer, who never openly identified himself as gay,
was homosexual. It has to look beyond the singular designer and ask,
how does non-normative sexuality show in the designs? Do garments
deconstruct heteronormativity (Warner 1991: 3–17) of fashion, challenge the norms of masculinity and femininity, and make space for other
forms of sexuality beyond rigid identity categorizations?
A positive effect in the exhibition was that it clearly exposed the
historical specificity of lesbian and gay clothing and style. Even if crossdressing and gender-bending have become part of the seasonally changing fashion cycle in contemporary times, they once were the means to
talk about one’s sexuality to like-minded people. The visibly different
homosexual is undoubtedly an important landmark in the history of the
Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement’s identity politics in the 1970s.
These outfits displayed in the exhibition also showed that there are no
From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?
457
transhistorical sexual identities—on the contrary, these styles are the
products of specific historical practices within certain historical and
social contexts. There is no authentic or true gay or lesbian style.
Happily Ever After?
If the history of queer fashion relies on identity and styles accompanying it, what does the present, or future, look like, then? According to
the exhibition, it looks like we are getting married in matching wedding suits. Or, as the exhibition states about two women planning their
wedding: “We are dandy Rasputins. We wouldn’t be caught dead in
gowns.” It is of course everyone’s right to get married in a suit if they so
desire, and discard frilly wedding gowns while doing it. I am not convinced, however, that this is the only direction queer fashion is going. In
fact, it has been debated whether those who marry a same-sex partner
are particularly queer—or that contemporary queer dress still is about
masculine or androgynous gender blending. Why not show women getting married in frilly dresses? Is that not queer enough?
Be that as it may, one of the most heated debates in queer theory
at the moment concerns the marrying homosexual. Following Lauren
Berlant (2011), for example, same-sex marriage can be described as a
fantasy of an unachievable good life: as upward mobility, as promise
of moving away from the stigmatizing label of homosexual to durable
(monogamous) intimacy. For some, gay marriage represents conforming
to heterosexual norms and thus assimilation, a turning away from the
liberationist impulses of queer politics as sexual freedom. For others,
same-sex marriage merely represents the widening of the privatized,
neoliberal state, where social benefits such as healthcare are mainly
available to those who are married (see e.g. Bernstein and Taylor 2013).
And, still for others, same-sex marriages are but a representative of
an era when heteronormativity transformed into homonormativity
(Duggan 2002: 175–94).
While the appeal of educating the general public may validate concentration on identity, it is regrettably limited from a scholarly point of
view. It fixes queer as an identity and not as a method that can be used
to analyze actual garments and explain the limitations and blind spots
of identity discourse. In the exhibition, concentration on identity had
the effect of displaying clothes that were, for the most part, ones that
cross the categorical boundaries of masculinity and femininity, such as
the masculine suits worn by Marlene Dietrich and the contemporary
lesbian brides/grooms, or the flamboyant pink sequined cape worn
by Liberace. Concentration on identity has the danger of producing a
queer history of fashion that only includes those who are the most visible: (openly) gay designers and cross-dressers.
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Where Have All the Femme and Non-White
Fashions Gone?
I am specifically thinking here the femme lesbian: what would a femme
history of fashion look like—or does she not belong to the queer history of fashion? Theoretically, a femme fashion history could indeed be
something that queers fashion (e.g. Volcano and Dahl 2008). Femme
or femmenine fashion goes against the grain of both straight and lesbian fashion and challenges any clear-cut categories of fashion, gender,
and sexuality—whether lesbian or straight, female or male, feminine or
masculine—by pointing out that traditional identity categories are not
a desirable starting point when thinking about “queer fashion.” Rather,
femme fashion calls for the multiplicity and mobility of identification
and desiring possibilities. Indeed, it could be a position to expose that
all fashion is queer by heart, and that even mainstream women’s fashion
has subversive potential even though it does not visibly challenge gender
categories. Femme fashion—feminine clothing on feminine women—
demonstrates that queer fashion is a performative, something that does
gender and sexuality instead of reflecting a fixed homosexual identity
underneath clothing.
At its best, the queer fashion exhibition managed to show that fashion
is fluid and paradoxical: while it aims to shape gendered and sexualized
identities, it also aims to blur categorical boundaries—between heterosexuality and homosexuality, masculinity and femininity, and passivity
and activity. I would have wanted to see a section about the subversive
potential of the femme in queering fashion history since I do believe it
also has potential to queer fashion, much in the same way as femme
gaze has subverted the notion of gaze (Vänskä 2005: 65–85). There
is no reason to suppose that women’s feminine fashions—high heels,
revealing dresses, or body-hugging shirts and trousers—are necessarily
straight. Nor is there a need to reiterate that the only subversive lesbian
fashions are equivalent to gender neutrality, androgyny, and butchness.
The connection between femmenine dress and female anatomy should
have been explored, but now we were left with the erroneous idea
that queer fashion relies on cross-identification. Many contemporary
popular representations could have been useful for this analysis—the
feminine lesbians of the television series L Word or the postfeminist
characters in Sex and the City, for example. It would have been interesting to see how the curators saw these representations affect the history
of queer fashion.
Furthermore, the exhibition could also have taken into account
the recent arguments about queer really being about canonized white
Western males (Halberstam 2005: 219–33), such as white gay designers, or about canonized white figures such as the dandy. Not all gay
designers are male or white, and the dandy most certainly was and is
not merely about white men (e.g. Miller 2009). It is disquieting that in
From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?
459
2013, a queer fashion exhibition fails to include any non-white designers or fashionable figures. This calls for postcolonial critique: an exhibition that focuses excessively on a mythic queer past and constructs a
story from the (white) gay subject also produces a romanticized understanding of a gay past (e.g. Muñoz 1999). It neutralizes the potency of
critique of that very past that nevertheless exists in the present; for example, the critique of how white, racially monocultural, and masculine
the fashion world still is despite the ideal of fashion being “global” and
speaking to a universal “queer subject.”
Dancing in the Street
The strongest—and queerest—part of the FIT exhibition was definitely
the section of AIDS-activist T-shirts. It not only challenged the conventional definition of (high) fashion, but it also fitted better with the
title of the exhibition: the term queer is directly linked with AIDS and
the networks of activism that generated in part the theory that became
to be known as “queer theory” in 1990s academia. AIDS-activism
showed the problematic way medical discourse had conceptualized the
notion of “individual,” shifted emphasis from identity to sexual acts,
and widened the notion of identity by including not only gays and lesbians but also bisexuals, transgendered people, sex workers, and HIVpositive people (Jagose 1996: 94). The collection of activist T-shirts was
a potent reminder of how the gay and lesbian community was forced
to take action and radically revise its politics. Queer emerged as opposition to identity and clothing played an important role in fighting
homophobia. The collection of T-shirts underlined that fashion can be
a potent tool for queer activism even though using T-shirts to convey
politically charged messages is nothing new per se in late-twentiethcentury fashion.
What AIDS activism did to identity and its legibility from clothing,
Jean Paul Gaultier did to high fashion and gender codes of clothes
only a couple of years earlier. Gaultier, if anyone, has built his whole
career in queering fashion. Gaultier’s oeuvre is a very good example of
how designers have moved beyond fixed identities to creatively treating markers of identity as building blocks that can be put together
in countless ways. The exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum showed that
Gaultier is much more than just an openly gay designer whose contributions to late-twentieth-century fashion are the cone bra corset and
the male skirt. He took his inspiration from the streets, and especially
from gay subculture and its stereotypes: the Genetian sailor, obviously
(even though Gaultier also connected the striped sailor outfit to his
mother and how she used to dress him as he was a little boy), the drag
queens, the leather fetishists, the hustlers, the male prostitutes, the gay
punks.
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Even if the Gaultier exhibition was about a creative genius who belongs to the canon of white male designers, it also openly indicated the
sources of this inspiration and detached the designs from reflecting the
designer’s sexual identity. Even if he has drawn from sexual subcultures,
he has also been able to transform the subcultural “gay semiotics” into a
profitable device in queering fashion more widely and to open up space
for new, alternative identities that are not straightforwardly pinned to
any particular identity position. His corsets or cone bras do not only
address women—they are equally offered to men. Gaultier has not been
named as the “enfant terrible” of fashion in vain—the show made it
very clear that he has always refused to be a respectable or chic designer
and, instead, has devoted himself in deconstructing gender, fashion, and
taste (e.g. Vinken 2004: 119–26). He is also representative of a designer
who uses all signs—be they sexual as in his “Boudoir,” subcultural as
in the “Punks,” ethnic as in the “Urban Jungle,” or religious as in his
“Chic Rabbis”—as free-floating signifiers that the designer can assemble into different collages with a tongue-in-cheek playfulness.
The Gaultier exhibition was also a success in terms of queering a
fashion exhibition: even if the exhibition was a parade of mannequins,
these dolls were not silent dummies but some sort of hybrid post-human
cyborgs à la Donna Haraway. They were enlivened with Tony Ourslerlike videos projected onto the mannequins’ faces that sang, winked an
eye, or talked to the viewer as Gaultier himself, welcoming the visitor
into the exhibition. Each section of the exhibition had its own particular
atmosphere that changed according to the collection. His early collection “Punks” (1977), for example, comprised a street scene with graffiti
and outfits made of non-fashion materials following the punk ideology:
garbage bags, neoprene, and distressed denim. His signature garment,
the cone bra worn by Madonna, and the corsets that transformed underwear to outerwear were displayed in a boudoir decorated with pinkish padded satin—as if to accentuate the garment’s connection to the
sensual body (of Madonna).
Jean Paul Gaultier has never been afraid to be an iconoclast—in this
sense he definitely is a product of the Gay Liberation Movement—and
this ultimately made his show particularly queer. He has merged the
conventions of gendered dress codes with his subcultural knowledge
and succeeded in deconstructing what gender, sexuality, clothing, and
fashion can mean. Gaultier’s exhibition was not only a show about fashion, it was a multimedia installation that mixed and matched elements
and materials that are conventionally associated with women or men’s
garments. One thing is for certain: Jean Paul Gaultier queers fashion
history.
Having the opportunity to see the FIT’s exhibition simultaneously
with the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition was truly a great pleasure and
an experience that will stay with me for a long time. Together these
exhibitions, despite all the critique I might have, stress the importance
From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn’t Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?
461
of discussing queer, fashion, and history. I can only hope that these were
not the end, but a starting point for further research, discussion, and
exhibitions. In times like these, when gay and lesbian rights are cracked
down upon in countries like the Russian Federation, it is all the more
important to stir and keep up discussion about the queer undertone of
all cultural production, including fashion. These two shows managed
to highlight the complexity of the subject, as they also pointed out the
challenges of the fashion exhibition format itself. Fashion exhibitions
are bound to rely on objects that convey meanings that are very hard to
drill down and explain to the public. The multisensory Gaultier exhibition seemed to underline the urge of fashion exhibitions to overcome
the object, the clothes, and problems they continually pose for curators.
The Gaultier show had solved the problem by artifying the exhibition;
by blurring the boundary between a media-art exhibition and a fashion
one. By creating an artistic context for the clothes and collections, it
shifted focus from singular outfits and designs to a more fantastical
world of “Jean Paul Gaultier.” The show was also more cohesive due
to its concentration on one single designer. Even though the staging of
the Gaultier exhibition made it a complex display, the queer history
exhibition at FIT was more ambitious and complex in its content. I
have to salute the work Valerie Steele and Fred Dennis have made in the
exhibition—it is not an easy task to exhibit the disparate LGBTQ identities let alone their deconstruction through an exhibition format. Both
exhibitions made a very clear statement about the need to continue the
discussion about how to exhibit queer fashions, and how an exhibition
can contribute to the project of queering fashion history.
Note
1. It is debatable whether the psychological and sexological definitions
of lesbianism produced lesbianism as it appeared or whether the
already-existing forms of lesbianism fed theory formation. Lesbian
historians and theorists have argued that masculine lesbians existed
long before Ellis’ and Krafft-Ebing’s theories about sexual inversion
(see e.g. Donoghue 1993; Halberstam 1998).
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