Gays were already interested in fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries, though we don’t have the names of explicit couturiers. Valerie Steele: Certainly as early as the 1920’s but probably sooner than that. Once gay people started to work in the fashion industry it started the beginnings of a more welcoming setting for other gays to enter into. And gays have been involved in a lot of those.
I think another aspect is that fashion is one of the so-called ‘artistic’ professions.
So I think gays and lesbians had to be hyper aware of how to read and analyse clothes so as to dress in a way that would allow them to communicate with other people but not to be recognised by a homophobic society.
It involves the whole history of oppression and secrecy surrounding gay sexuality, which was illegal for many years and regarded as a mental illness. Valerie Steele: It’s complicated because it goes way back further than we’d thought. It’s like an open secret – everybody knows this but nobody ever really talks about it.ĭD: Why has the LGBTQ community always shared such close ties with fashion? Valerie Steele: That was one of the main reasons why Fred and I wanted to do this as a subject. For Steele, fashion is chained to identity, to which sexuality is heart and soul.ĭazed Digital: When you think about how many big name designers are gay it’s actually quite mind-blowing. This complex subject is Steele’s thing: she has previously penned books on fashion and eroticism, fetish and gothic style – to name a few. It features contributions by some of the world’s most acclaimed scholars of gay history and fashion. Edited by Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, the book accompanies an MFIT’s exhibition of the same name. ‘A Queer History of Fashion: From The Closet To The Catwalk’, explores how gender and sexuality have been inspiring and informing fashion for over 300 years. Yet, until now, there had never been an in-depth study on the subject. The sex-charged creations of designers like Walter Van Beirendonck, and the androgynous looks flooding fashion week’s runways, prove that sexuality and the way we style ourselves are inextricably entwined. And for centuries, fashion has been an instrument of expression and experimentation for this community. So why don’t we talk about it? From Christian Dior to Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent and Jil Sander many of the world’s greatest designers have identified as LGBTQ.