Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric

by Madison Moore

An exploration of what it means to be fabulous—and why eccentric style, fashion, and creativity are more political than ever

" Fabulous does not simply track new club worlds, it takes us to them. The book does not just tell us about fashion and clubs, it is immersed in the scenes it conjures. This is engaging, relevant, and glamorous." —Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity and The Queer Art of Failure

“ Fabulous lives up to its title. Who knew there was such riveting sociopolitical drama behind those velvet ropes?"— New York Times Book Review

Prince once told us not to hate him ’cause he’s fabulous. But what does it mean to be fabulous? Is fabulous style only about labels, narcissism, and selfies—looking good and feeling gorgeous? Or can acts of fabulousness be political gestures, too? What are the risks of fabulousness? And in what ways is fabulous style a defiant response to the struggles of living while marginalized? madison moore answers these questions in a timely and fascinating book that explores how queer, brown, and other marginalized outsiders use ideas, style, and creativity in everyday life. Moving from catwalks and nightclubs to the street, moore dialogues with a range of fabulous and creative powerhouses, including DJ Vjuan Allure, voguing superstar Lasseindra Ninja, fashion designer Patricia Field, performance artist Alok Vaid‑Menon, and a wide range of other aesthetic rebels from the worlds of art, fashion, and nightlife. In a riveting synthesis of autobiography, cultural analysis, and ethnography, moore positions fabulousness as a form of cultural criticism that allows those who perform it to thrive in a world where they are not supposed to exist.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, Fashion, LGBT, Academia, Pop Culture

280 pages, Hardcover

Published April 17, 2018

Reviews

[John Antoniello · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book so much. Moore traces a line though history that shows how queer people – especially queer people of color – use creative clothing as a means to take up space and assert their bodies, beauty, and power in a world where they are so often marginalized, invalidated, and otherwise rendered invisible. Reading this book made me feel seen in a way that I’ve never felt before. Moore’s writing tapped into something very deep that I’ve felt since I was very young, but had neither the vocabulary nor context to understand – an inherent difference; an urgent need to express myself through what I put on my body. Thank you Madison Moore, this book is such a healing, educational, and inspiring gift to so many queer people. Reading it truly did give me life – I feel bolder, fiercer, and more confident about wearing whatever the fuck I feel like, and I will not censor myself for the comfort of the rigid, heteronormative world we spend so much of our lives existing in.

[Sadie Seroxcat · Rating 5 out of 5]

From social economist Thorstein Veblen, through more contemporary theatre historians, fashion stylists, cultural critics, film theorists, photographers, costume designers, black feminist theorists, art critics, writers of social commentary .....and on to encompass example, demonstration, interviews and quotations from famous drag queens and style icons such as Ru Paul and performance artists, poets and musicians such as Madaew Fashionista, Alok Vaid-Menon and Prince - Madison Moore has put together a heartfelt and accessible exploration of what it is to be Fabulous.

Moore talks of marginalised people, vulnerability, transfeminine, queer people of colour, who are fabulous not out of vanity and frivolity, but instead as a political statement ,a way of claiming space to be safely and truly themselves within a world of frightening and threatening white supremacy, misogyny, transmisogyny, patriarchy and queer bashing. The voguing and styling of the catwalk, club and ball is a loud and proud announcement of their presence on the margins of current cultural 'norms', a way of redefining long stagnated western white colonial and capitalist concepts of masculinity and femininity. We are introduced to people with Asian backgrounds who help us understand that not every societal group concurs when it comes to expressions and categorisation of gender and sexuality.

Some fascinating people are mentioned, quoted and interviewed - it took me so long to read this book, because I kept sliding off down rabbit holes of exploration, looking for more writing, photos and videos of and about those Moore talks about.(and I have added various books to my wish lists as well, so that I can continue reading about the subjects and people written about here)

All in all, 'Fabulous: The Rise Of The Beautiful Eccentric'' was an excellent insightful read, which informed without becoming too academic and inaccessible. It's important and a highly interesting entryway into further depths of work on this subject - which I for one am very thankful to begin to explore. Excellent writing and highly recommended.

(I received a free advance copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.)

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

I saw Madison Moore at the Dallas Museum of Art, where he gave a talk based upon this book. I really liked his talk, in part because he could incorporate video and images more organically. Because the book is about visual aesthetics, I really missed that element while reading it this time.

Moore is a really great consolidator of a vast archive that is largely digital, ephemeral, and contemporary. Unfortunately, the book feels repetitive by the end--in his intro, he states that he wants to use the book to generate a theory of fabulousness. He really only needed the introduction to do that. I do recommend this book for people interested in queerness, nightlife, and drag culture.

[Navya · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

A great read on the 'fabulous' aesthetic, both in near-history as well as in contemporary times. The author provides great insight on what fabulousness is, and what it does/can mean as a queer aesthetic in personal and political realms. There are also a few great interviews with the 'practitioners' of this aesthetic, which I enjoyed quite a lot.

[Katrina Sark · Rating 4 out of 5]

1 – The rise of the Beautiful Eccentric

p.12 – One common misconception about fabulousness is that it is just about gay men channeling femininity. That’s because in a post-RuPaul’s Drag Race moment men in drag are seemingly more visible than ever. When we say fabulousness is simply men in drag, we’re really promoting an essentialist idea that femininity belongs to women and masculinity belongs to men, case closed. This is the source of much transphobic violence, to be sure, but it also obscures the glorious powers of abstraction, eccentricity, fantasy, futurism, and even the wild nature of a fabulous aesthetic. […] All forms of drag practiced by all genders and nonbinary people are equally potent critiques of gender.

p.13 – Instead of strictly adhering to or circulating hard-edged notions of “male” or “female,” I’m convinced that fabulousness wants us to get past gender, to abstract it, to end it altogether.

p.14 – For Alok [Vaid-Menon], boredom is one of the most oppressive aspects of not doing fabulousness. “I always say let’s add boring to our list of oppressor identities: cis, white, straight, boring men. The truth is I don’t want to dress this way not just because I’m trans. It’s because I don’t want to be boring!”

p.16 –The most important thing about fabulousness, I find, is that it is a special kind of embodied creative genius largely expressed by people who do not fit in, who have been forced to the margins, and who are not cis-gendered, white, male, and straight. It is no wonder that the people most inclined to do fabulous performance almost always emerge from marginalized backgrounds—they are poor, gay, lesbian, or trans, outcasts, of color—and they splash on glitter and sequins to parade themselves in the club, on the street, and in photographs. Echoing Manalansan’s theory of fashion as ethical self-making, beautiful eccentrics look forward to every new chance they get to use fashion and performance to say that they are not their marginalization.

p.17 – Patricia Field, the iconic downtown New York fashion stylist and costume designer known for her work on Sex and the City, told me that fabulousness is not something you can purchase: “Fabulousness is something that catches the eye. The reason it catches the eye is that it is unique and has not been seen before. If you see 1 million pairs of jeans and a polo shirt it’s not fabulous. You’ve seen it before. Fabulousness is creating a story, a narrative, a meaning around the way you present yourself as to who you are and what you are presenting. Jeans and polo shirts are not presenting anything. They’re just covering their bodies because it’s our custom not to go running around naked.” For Field, fabulousness means creating a story, telling a narrative about who we are. It is a specialness, a uniqueness that arrests us visually because we have not seen anything like it.

p.19 – At the heart of fabulousness is a philosophy of creativity that has many things in common with the gay sensibility of camp, in particular its commitment to style and extravagance. But there is a major difference. As Susan Sontag famously wrote, “Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization. […] The difference is that fabulousness is never there just for the sake of being fabulous. It is never just art for art’s sake, nor is it style over content. When you are brown, queer, and eccentric in appearance, fabulousness is the political content.

p.20 – Self-couture here means being a one-person theatrical production: you create every aspect of the look from scratch, inhabiting multiple creative roles at the same time. Making your own headpieces, doing your own makeup, finding looks, or creating your own clothes, constantly adorning yourself. Thinking about fabulousness as self-couture helps us understand the labor that goes into producing a single look. But self-couture also means a couturing of the self, where the word couture also suggests exclusivity—insurance that what we are seeing is unusual, one of a kind.

p.21 – There is no centralized physical archive of fabulousness, no major author, no all-in-one site to see and study it because it is a quality that moves across time, media, and space. That’s why this book is not a history of fabulousness but a theory of fabulousness as a form of creativity from the margins. It’s one thing to “be” fabulous or “look” fabulous, but it’s another to understand where fabulousness comes from. And you can’t understand fabulousness unless you get that it emerges from trauma, duress, exclusion, exhaustion, and depression, and that in some ways being fabulous is the only thing that can get us out of bed in the morning. Sometimes that little jolt of creativity is all we’ve got.

p.22 – Fabulousness is always a unique set of aesthetic properties engaged by people who take the risk of making a spectacle of themselves—to stretch out and expand—when it would be much easier, though no less toxic, to be normative, as when Alok Vaid-Menon asks, “What feminine part of yourself did you have to kill to survive in this world?” If fabulous eccentrics played by the rules and fit in, then they wouldn’t have to worry about being harassed or feeling unsafe on the sidewalks. At the end of the day, the question fabulousness asks all of us is: When can we have a world where it will be safe to just be me, where I don’t have to be depressed because my body doesn’t fit in with norms and ideals that never had me in mind in the first place?

p.29 – Fabulousness, at its heart, is an expression of visibility for people who are made invisible. Yet some have warned against too much visibility. “Visibility is a trap,” performance theorist Peggy Phelan once observed, and the performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon picks up on her claim when they ask, “Do trans people have to be fabulous to matter?” Increased visibility does not necessarily bring increased power with it. Disenfranchised bodies—now made fully visible—will not suddenly feel at ease the moment they see their images in representational media. If this were the case, “then almost-naked young white women should be running Western culture,” Phelan wrote humorously. Heightened visibility is a trap: as an imagined, discursive form, vision itself is always already flawed because it encourages surveillance, framing, fetishism, and voyeurism. If I can see you, then I can also keep tabs on you. But what happens when we take control of our own image as a way of returning the gaze, not to be passively looked at but to do the looking ourselves?

p.34 – Fabulousness is a kind of “symbolic capital,” a term the philosopher Pierre Bourdieu used to describe any alternative, nonmonetary form of capital that pops up and assumes value in a social group. Symbolic capital works in all kinds of subcultural groups. Think of the secret gay hankie codes of the 1970s, whereby handkerchiefs of a certain color placed in a specific pocket indicated interest in a specific kind of sex—but only to those in the know. For Bourdieu, the sex appeal of symbolic capital lies in its world-making power and its ability to create alternate universes and systems of value. The thing about these kinds of alternate universes is that the real world and the alternate universe both exist at the same time.

“I Don’t Want to Be Boring!” A Conversation with Alok Vaid-Menon

p.49 – “People need to actually understand that femininity does not belong to cis women. What you’re doing is retreating into biological essentialism. It is a rhetoric and a discourse created by a fundamentally racist and misogynist state that has and continues to fund pseudo-science to legitimate the biological basis of race and gender.”

[Bee Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a terrific read about really digging deep into the idea of fabulousness, where it comes from, the performing of it, and how it empowers the marginalized communities who created this performance art. This was clearly a passion project for Madison and it shows in how much affection is in their writing. I would love a chance to talk more with the author as they do a wonderful job conveying their love of what is fabulous, and the queer, black, brown and trans people who created what we know as fabulous today. I highly recommend this for everyone interested in portrayals of and the history of black and brown queer people's in popular culture and how pop culture unfortunately consistently let's them down through our lack of acknowledgment of their creativity and art.

[Sheldon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Jack Halberstam’s more recent projects, Madison Moore articulates a queer theory, this time on fabulousness through foregrounding black and brown queer nightlife, in a seamless synthesis of high and low. Colloquial language paired with a wealth of theoretical references allow accessibility to sometimes quite lofty ideas. These references serve as quite an overarching archive in queer theories, theories of aesthetics, black feminism, and even economic treatises.

While I really loved Moore’s writing style, this book does get quite repetitive after the introduction and first chapter. Describing terms such as “critical mascara” and “self-couture,” Moore does an excellent job in contextualizing fabulousness as a political framework for thinking about aesthetics; however, they then spend the next 150 pages regurgitating the same foundational ideas present in the initial chapters again and again only to be masked through different case studies (e.g. at the club, on the underground runway, etc.).

Overall, I find this book to be a great introduction to queer theory in its accessibility, expansive archive of references, and the premium placed on black and brown gender nonconforming people. While the later chapters are repetitive in academic substance, they happen to be quite enticing depictions of various queer nightlife settings in metropolitan areas such as Berlin and New York City thus providing an entertaining read throughout.

[Benji · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Any “theory” of eccentric style needs to think about how it works as lived experience—how it is actually done—but not in a way that takes lived experience as the last word. Obviously our lived experience offers a rich, personal archive of everyday life, but we should also be sensitive to the ways those experiences are produced and framed. And this means thinking about the systems that create the experiences we have.
Lived experience transforms fabulousness from a heady, abstract theory into something that happens right before our eyes and that wields certain real-time consequences. I agree with Sianne Ngai, for whom writing about aesthetic categories is not just about “exotic philosophical abstractions,” as fun as it can be to think big and play with abstract concepts, but instead a part of the fabric of the everyday. Thinking about aesthetics allows us to share and confirm our experiences with others.”

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moore's book really is just a rumination about how the category of fabulous came to be used by queer minorities, focused primarily on his own life. While it raises lots of interesting ideas and cloaks itself in all the latest theory it really is a subjective treatise on style, filled with interviews with others who share Moore's own ideas.

"Fabulous is about how eccentric style is staged in performance as well as in everyday and overnight life by club kids, creatives, artists, and other people like Madaew Fashionista and Amadeus Leopold." 7

"Fabulousness is important because it shows how marginalized bodies create art and beauty in states of duress-a creativity from the margins. That duress highlights the violence brown, queer, and other disenfranchised bodies face as they figure out how to survive within a system of power." 18

[Jules · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is brilliant. Moore takes lived experience and crafts it into a thoroughly researched academic treatise. It is about challenging gender archetypes, penning the self into a poem, giving voice to those terrorized by the fashion police. Above all else, it celebrates the imaginative powers of the marginalized Creative. A fashion choice can be both empowering and frightening! For those who have an interest in Fashion Theory, this is a gem. In addition, Moore focuses primarily on the violence and harassment faced by both queer and trans bodies, while also reflecting on intersections of race. Moore's work captures the spirit of the fabulous, as a kind of divinity on earth.

[V.A. Kenyon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would concur wholeheartedly with the previous four reviews. I'm not sure I can say anything that they haven't already said, so I'll keep this brief. This is an excellent and encouraging book for anyone who is marginalized. It validates and elevates creativity in a world that tries to destroy some of the best things that people have to offer. This book is powerful and necessary. READ IT. THEN MAKE IT.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was lucky enough to meet madison moore. He kissed my book when he signed it in blue lipstick. That's an important detail, because all books are better with a kiss.

The book is amazing, just collections of his work. He is a sharp cultural critic, a wonderful storyteller, and just the epitome of style. I'm fond of queer culture, and love learning about it, and this was a breath of fresh air.

[Elizabeth Judd Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about eccentric fashion, and how it is a personal and political statement. The book mainly concentrates on brown queer culture, but it will be of interest to everyone who feels fashion is central to the way they present themselves to the world. Recommended.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really fun first chapter articulating a theory of Black queer fabulousness (visibility, performance, transgression, pleasure, fun!), But then repeated itself completely through the rest of the book through interviews (who were admittedly fabulous !).

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Combines the personal, political, and academic in a really fantastic way.

[Antoinette · Rating 5 out of 5]

A delightful book that talks specifically of different aspects of black & brown queer fabulousness from fashion to ballroom voguing. Loved this and learned so much.