I had the delight of lecturing on fashion design and the politics of style at Stanford this week. For so long I harbored shame about caring about self-adornment. I internalized the myth that style and cosmetics were merely “superficial” and that the real art/work was elsewhere. Now I recognize this as femmephobia. It is precisely the things that are dismissed as superficial that are so often the substance of survival.
Self-styling is how I cultivate life in the face of persecution. My commitment to glamor — rambunctious and relentless glamor — is what keeps me afloat. If I am going to get degraded — might as well look divine!
The uniform is not just a garment, it is a worldview. So many people are wearing it and don’t even know. Aesthetic resistance is a reclamation of the self from the uniform. A celebration of our profound inferiority — our delightfully impossible aspiration to stage what is within, externally.
Style has always been a modality of resistance for me — both a mechanism to critique gender/race norms as well a method to template the world that I want. It’s one thing to write “gender is a social construct” it is another to show it, to bring it with you everywhere you go, to turn the galaxy into a gallery, to proliferate creative expression all over.
People often ask me: “How do you put together your outfits?” Yes of course it’s about color, textile, composition, but mostly it’s about feeling. I relish in the ability to combine things that have been dismissed as dissonant and incongruous, bring them together, show the poetic harmony in everything. Our outcome is greater and more transcendent than its parts.
Powers that be devalue style because it brings art out of the galleries into the public. This is a society that attempts to sequester art from the public because if people had the space and encouragement to be creative, what new ways of living and loving could we manifest? Reality, then, might be seen as the costume that it is. Yesterday’s unambitious politics, calcified.
My friends – it is time for an outfit change!
