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Queer Style
Queer Style offers an insight into queer fashionability by addressing the role that clothing has played in historical and contemporary lifestyles. From a fashion studies perspective, it examines the function of subcultural dress within queer communities and the mannerisms and messages that are used as signifiers of identity. Diverse dress is examined, including effeminate 'pansy,' masculine macho 'clone,' the 'lipstick' and 'butch' lesbian styles and the extreme styles of drag kings and drag queens.
Divided into three main sections on history, subcultural identity and subcultural style, Queer Style will be of particular interest to students of dress and fashion as well as those coming to subculture from sociology and cultural studies.
Divided into three main sections on history, subcultural identity and subcultural style, Queer Style will be of particular interest to students of dress and fashion as well as those coming to subculture from sociology and cultural studies.
- GenresNonfictionFashionQueer
208 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2012
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September 29, 2016I thought I had a pretty good english vocab but I clearly have some work to do. Dense text, centers itself around a Western LG(BTQ?) perspectives, not a good treatment/inclusion of trans issues however and I wanted more recent stuff than 2004/5. I haven't heard transvestite used like it was in the Drag section before. Heavier on the male side of things. Could have been balanced better with the 'everyone else in the world' section. I am not really convinced on why they included the BDSM section even though it was interesting to read.
I NEEDED MORE PICTURES - I had to google the difference between breeches and pantaloons and I'm still not convinced that was in any way an important point.
I NEEDED MORE PICTURES - I had to google the difference between breeches and pantaloons and I'm still not convinced that was in any way an important point.
June 16, 2021
Introduction
p.3 – What makes the study of fashion, dress and style so important to queer identity is the role of clothing in constructing material identity and its shaping of personal and social space.
2 – Lesbian Style: From Mannish Women to Lipstick Dykes
p.37 – By the 1980s, the blurring of gender and sexual boundaries had become prevalent across a range of entertainment mediums, from fashion catwalks to pop music, especially the so-called New Romantics. With the epithet taken from a line in the Duran Duran hit “Planet Earth” (1981), the members fo this group are not fixed but rather relate to the flamboyant, pretty-faced, mullet-hair style that began about 1980. Bands that are referred to under the New Romantic banner include Ultravox, Visage, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, ABC NS 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 in musicians such as Boy George of Culture Club and Marilyn (Peter Robinson). The Style was based on romantic themes, including frilly fop shirts, in the style of the English Romantic period, Russian constructivism, Bonnie Prince Charlie, French Incroyables and 1930s cabaret, with hairstyles such as quiffs, mullets and wedges.
p.38 – Transgressive gender bender music celebrities such as Adam Ant, Boy George and Marilyn and bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet gained global popularity with their flirtation with the dissolution of sartorial codes. Along with the emergence of MTV (launched in 1981), the entertainment industry recognized the value of fashion and style as forms of visual codification in gaining audience popularity. As Andermaher states, “At both ends of the fashion spectrum, couture and subcultural style, there is a space for experimentation, for transgression, and revolt.”
p.40 – Drag and androgyny, with its obsession to details, grooming, gestures, accessories and cosmetics, also highlight the contradictory qualities of fashion. Androgyny had been fashionable many times in history, but it was not until the 1990s that lesbian and bisexual women embraced androgynous style as a political force in queer culture. Until then, cross-dressing had been a recurrent theme in lesbian culture; however, it was closely aligned to sexual disorder or perversion and was bound to marginal underground identities. Even though the history of cross-dressing is bound to gay and lesbian identity, in terms of “drag” and “voguing,” argues Marjorie Garber in her analysis of cross-dressing as a site of cultural anxiety; studies fail to take into account the foundational role that they have played in queer identity and queer style.
Drag performance, writes Judith Butler, women dressing as men and vice versa, can be seen as a strategy of resistance and subversion, for drag is not an “imitation of gender,” she argues; rather it “dramatizes the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established.”
3 – Gay Men’s Style: From Macaroni to Metrosexual
p.82 – Dandyism, as Elizabeth Wilson and later Amelia Jones have argued, is a personified manifestation of capitalism’s transitory nature. It is the affirmation of self that flies in the face of bourgeois convention.
p.84 – Glam style began in London and New York in the 1970s together with punk and other subcultural styles. By now being or just looking gay had become much more hip and counted as part progressive, part cutting-edge practice. It was doe this reason the likes of Alice Cooper pretended to be gay.
Bowie came out came out as a bisexual at the time.
From the 1960s onwards, popular culture has placed a premium on sex to situate subjective meaning.
Stan Hawkins writes that Bowie’s “artistic identification with Mod culture and lifestyle played a decisive role in his turning to fashion,” His sensibility found its best expression “as a bisexual space alien” – where space travel met transvestism, positioning Bowie in opposition to the heterosexual conventions of rock. With his red, spiked hair and tight-fitting glitter costume, Bowie turned the Elvis look into an amphibious alien.
Hawkins concludes that Bowie’s “transformation from Mod to hippie, to Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane, throughout the avant-garde rock style of Low and Heroes, to the pop dance style of Let’s Dance, his queering renegotiated masculinity.
p.3 – What makes the study of fashion, dress and style so important to queer identity is the role of clothing in constructing material identity and its shaping of personal and social space.
2 – Lesbian Style: From Mannish Women to Lipstick Dykes
p.37 – By the 1980s, the blurring of gender and sexual boundaries had become prevalent across a range of entertainment mediums, from fashion catwalks to pop music, especially the so-called New Romantics. With the epithet taken from a line in the Duran Duran hit “Planet Earth” (1981), the members fo this group are not fixed but rather relate to the flamboyant, pretty-faced, mullet-hair style that began about 1980. Bands that are referred to under the New Romantic banner include Ultravox, Visage, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, ABC NS 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 in musicians such as Boy George of Culture Club and Marilyn (Peter Robinson). The Style was based on romantic themes, including frilly fop shirts, in the style of the English Romantic period, Russian constructivism, Bonnie Prince Charlie, French Incroyables and 1930s cabaret, with hairstyles such as quiffs, mullets and wedges.
p.38 – Transgressive gender bender music celebrities such as Adam Ant, Boy George and Marilyn and bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet gained global popularity with their flirtation with the dissolution of sartorial codes. Along with the emergence of MTV (launched in 1981), the entertainment industry recognized the value of fashion and style as forms of visual codification in gaining audience popularity. As Andermaher states, “At both ends of the fashion spectrum, couture and subcultural style, there is a space for experimentation, for transgression, and revolt.”
p.40 – Drag and androgyny, with its obsession to details, grooming, gestures, accessories and cosmetics, also highlight the contradictory qualities of fashion. Androgyny had been fashionable many times in history, but it was not until the 1990s that lesbian and bisexual women embraced androgynous style as a political force in queer culture. Until then, cross-dressing had been a recurrent theme in lesbian culture; however, it was closely aligned to sexual disorder or perversion and was bound to marginal underground identities. Even though the history of cross-dressing is bound to gay and lesbian identity, in terms of “drag” and “voguing,” argues Marjorie Garber in her analysis of cross-dressing as a site of cultural anxiety; studies fail to take into account the foundational role that they have played in queer identity and queer style.
Drag performance, writes Judith Butler, women dressing as men and vice versa, can be seen as a strategy of resistance and subversion, for drag is not an “imitation of gender,” she argues; rather it “dramatizes the signifying gestures through which gender itself is established.”
3 – Gay Men’s Style: From Macaroni to Metrosexual
p.82 – Dandyism, as Elizabeth Wilson and later Amelia Jones have argued, is a personified manifestation of capitalism’s transitory nature. It is the affirmation of self that flies in the face of bourgeois convention.
p.84 – Glam style began in London and New York in the 1970s together with punk and other subcultural styles. By now being or just looking gay had become much more hip and counted as part progressive, part cutting-edge practice. It was doe this reason the likes of Alice Cooper pretended to be gay.
Bowie came out came out as a bisexual at the time.
From the 1960s onwards, popular culture has placed a premium on sex to situate subjective meaning.
Stan Hawkins writes that Bowie’s “artistic identification with Mod culture and lifestyle played a decisive role in his turning to fashion,” His sensibility found its best expression “as a bisexual space alien” – where space travel met transvestism, positioning Bowie in opposition to the heterosexual conventions of rock. With his red, spiked hair and tight-fitting glitter costume, Bowie turned the Elvis look into an amphibious alien.
Hawkins concludes that Bowie’s “transformation from Mod to hippie, to Ziggy Stardust to Aladdin Sane, throughout the avant-garde rock style of Low and Heroes, to the pop dance style of Let’s Dance, his queering renegotiated masculinity.
August 7, 2023
Over the centuries what did queer style, clothing and accessories, look like, and how did it fit into the societies it existed in? The authors take on this question and work through centuries of queer style to tell a story which hasn't really been told before in one place. Their academic rigor, scholarship is solid. Those interested in a particular slice of fashion history should take a look, along with those folx interested in queer material history.
January 18, 2023
2.5 stars. not terrible but not especially well written and quite boring. perhaps the authors thesis was on the dandy figure as that was the strongest and most well-researched part of the book. may serve if you have very limited familiarity with queer fashion or history and a high tolerance for dull prose
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