25 Queer Style

Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

Dress practices have played an important role in queer cultures; visual codes have often
been used to signify sexuality and sexual preference, whether covert or not. A lily flower
worn as a boutonnière was most likely a sign of a sexually ambiguous identity, a signet
ring indicated membership of a queer community and a colored hanky in a back pocket
was the system used by gay men in the 1970s to indicate sexual preferences and fetishes.
Although there have always been queer milieus in large cities, they were clandestine, with
people gathering in private homes, bars, and clubs. As early as the seventeenth century in
England, men who practiced sex with men were known as “mollies” who frequented
Molly Houses; covert salons, coffee houses, or taverns to avoid police arrest and per­
secution. Some mollies wore women’s clothing as a form of self-identification and to
attract sexual partners. They wore “gowns, petticoat, head-cloths, fine lace shoes, fur­
belowed scarves, and masks. Some wore riding boots; some were dressed as milkmaids,
others like shepherdesses with green hats, waistcoats, and petticoats; others had their
faces patched and painted.”1 Those who more openly “experimented” with their sex­
uality and moved in artistic circles were considered bohemians, or libertines who em­
braced unconventional perspectives in life. They wore oppositional clothes to the
fashions of the time to shock and mock bourgeois values of class and social order and in
doing so troubled ideas of gender, beauty, and sexuality.
The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement marked by the Stonewall Riots in New
York in 1969 catapulted same-sex identities and their alternative dress styles onto tel­
evision and into the public arena. Despite the Stonewall Riots being an important event
for gay and lesbian liberation, ten years earlier, in May 1959, police arrested several
LGBT patrons congregating at Cooper Do-nuts, a small café located between two gay
bars in Los Angeles. Considered the first queer public uprising, police raided the café and
arrested butch lesbians and drag queens under the pretense of “sex perversion” because
their clothes and appearance did not match the gender on their identification cards.
When the word “queer” came into usage in the late 1980s, sexuality was no longer
considered heterosexual or cisgender, but included a broad spectrum of sexualities and
gender non-conforming identities. In mainstream fashion androgynous styles flaunted
arbitrary gender rules and in the new millennium “fluid fashion” entered the everyday
vernacular, following on the heels of the gender non-conforming movement. Fashion is
no longer separated into menswear or womenswear; instead, it merges and crosses
masculine and feminine garments, fabrics, and silhouettes.
The visibility of queer style and its merging with mainstream fashion from the nine­
teenth century onwards can be traced to four historical reference points. These are: the trial
of Oscar Wilde in 1895 which drew attention to the ostentatious styling of the aesthetes
DOI: 10.4324/9780429295607-30
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND license.
 Queer Style 473

and the bohemians, namely the dandy and the mannish lesbian; the Stonewall Riots of
1969 with the police arrest of drag queens, butch lesbians and effeminate men broadcast on
national television; the AIDS Crisis, with the first case diagnosed in 1981, which placed gay
men’s appearance under public scrutiny and the recent mainstreaming of the Trans lib­
eration movement that has positioned gender nonconforming bodies in the public arena
and given rise to “gender fluid” fashion. This chapter examines queer dress styles as
powerful signifiers of gender identity and sexual orientation and how these styles have
changed over time beginning in the nineteenth century to the millennium with the adoption
of “fluid” styles.
This chapter applies historiographical methods to claim a queer history of style using
source material ranging from novelistic literature, psychology, culture and gender
studies. While specialist literature is always present, any rich understanding of queer
style, identity and appearance draws on a rich depository of literary writing, as the
development of queer identity coincides with the rise of the novel in the nineteenth
century. Although queer writing dates back in the West to ancient civilizations and the
first recording of alternative sexualities and love, these stories were hidden by author’s
pseudonyms, or by a character’s gender performance, or by plot or language and
speech.2 As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (considered an early proponent of queer theory)
would later note in Epistemology of the Closet (1990), there has always been a hidden
queer subtext in any reading. It was not until queer studies began to flourish in the
1980s, after the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s when
the AIDs crisis caused a great deal of reflection on gay male appearance that queer style
became a mode of activism and political protest.

The Dandy and the Lionne

If haute couture begins with Charles Frederick Worth in the middle-to-late nineteenth
century, so was homosexuality “invented” in its official coinage by the Austro-Hungarian
Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his Psychopathia Sexualis of 1886. By this time, the figure of
the dandy had established itself as known social identity. The genealogy of the dandy is as
easy to trace as its actual constituents are difficult to map, for it is a style of identity that is
defined by elusiveness. Despite historical evidence of flamboyance and excess in the
appearance of upper-class gay men, one of the first watersheds of queer style arises with
the evolution of the suit and the beginning of what J. C. Flügel famously called the “great
male renunciation.” George Bryan “Beau” Brummel (1778–1840) is widely considered the
first dandy, one known in history entirely as result of his appearance as opposed to deeds or
tangible cultural legacy.3 Having come to the acquaintance of the Prince Regent (the future
George IV) as an officer in the same dragoon regiment, Brummell quickly ascended to be
among his closest circle of friends, influencing their dress and manners.
The precursor to the dandy is frequently named as the macaroni. This is certainly the
contention of Dominic Janes in British Dandies.4 Macaronis were named after the noodles
of the same name that were in fashion as result of journeying to Italy on the Grand Tour,
the term used by British for their edifying trip to Continental Europe that conventionally
ended in Rome. Known for their outrageously large wigs and fastidious appearance, they
were also referred to as fops which carried the undertone of feckless, vain, and unusually
effeminate. While, again, being a macaroni did not equate to homosexuality as it would
come to be understood late in the following nineteenth century, it carried significant
qualities germane to male queer style into the twentieth century. The first was a
474 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

distinguishable style of dress and comportment within which gay men could express their
identity. The second was the association with effeminacy and an overly attentive attitude to
a tidy and kept appearance. The stereotype of gay men’s identity with effeminacy would be
a point of contention well into the present day. As we will continue to see, queer style is
always relatable to certain markers but none of these are ever reducible in any way, no less
than it is possible to essentialize elements of gender. Janes is perhaps mistaken to make too
close a connection between macaronis and gay men. At the same time, certain markers of
queer style would continue to be tenacious, especially excessive signs of what is more
commonly associated with the feminine. This perception was coterminous with the desire
to find determinate taxonomies for non-conforming sexualities in the nineteenth century
when non-heterosexual people were labelled “inverts.”
For Brummell’s part, there is little on record of love affairs with either men or women,
mainly because the biggest love affair was with himself. Brummel’s influence on Prince
George (later Prince Regent) and his devotees is winningly captured in the BBC television
drama, Beau Brummell: This Charming Man (2006) in which the opening scene has
Brummell (James Purefoy) enter into the Prince’s (Hugh Bonneville) personal bed­
chamber to find him decked out in cumbersome ceremonial dress, his face covered in
makeup and wearing a wig. Brummell judiciously removes all the eighteenth-century
trappings, wipes off the cosmetics and instructs him in the rudiments of simple dressing
and good taste. This would be a combination of an early version of the suit and riding
boots with an emphasis placed on clean linen and a carefully tied cravat. This meant that
men’s fashion went from being largely additive to structural, with the emphasis on
tailoring as opposed to finery. The opening credits of the series has Brummell donning
his shirt which he purportedly did in a billowing flourish to minimize creases. Brummell
turned his morning ritual into his own quasi-regal ritual morning ceremony (calling to
mind Louis XIV’s lever) in which he would often go through several shirts and would
painstakingly tie and re-tie his cravat while his friends looked on.5 Brummell is
remarkable in the history of fashion for making fastidiousness of appearance into
something of the equivalent of a religion.
The first major study of the dandy, devoted largely to Brummell, was by the novelist
and author Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, himself also very much a dandy. His celebrated
definition of the dandy is as a figure “almost as difficult to describe as to define.”6 The
dandy is liable “to come up with the unsuspected, what a mind accustomed to the yoke
of rules cannot arrive at using regular logic.”7 The enigma and inscrutability of the
dandy made him a figure of envy and fun, seldom ignored, which was the greatest
tragedy of all. Indeed, the dandy is very much a product of modernity and of the fashion
system itself, as he is someone who belonged to an elite that was of his own making, a
figure whose claim to excellence was self-styled rather than externally conferred. As an
exaggerated figure of fashion, the dandy was both someone who stood out from the rest
while posing as something to which people should aspire. As would be expected, the
difficulty in defining the dandy would result in endless attempts to do so—questing
valiantly to define the indefinable—but the consensus seems to converge on him as an
ironic figure who was able to embody contradiction. It would be precisely this ability for
multiplicity and duplicity that allowed gay men to express themselves in and through the
dandy, as a sartorial carapace and as a semantic vehicle, that was simultaneously open
and closed to the “facts” at the same time.
Barbey’s treatise was followed by a series of commentaries by his bohemian con­
temporaries, including Théophile Gautier’s De la mode (On Fashion, 1858) and
 Queer Style 475

Baudelaire’ Painter of Modern Life (Peintre de la vie Moderne, 1863). In his eponymous
entry, Baudelaire celebrates the dandy as someone “outside the law” and writes in terms
of what we would now call characteristics of a performance artist: the dandy is self-
consciously aware of his subjectivity.8 He is a container for all that is surprising and
possible about modernity, the opposite of a machine but a creation unto himself. While
all of this may not seem especially germane to queer style, it ought to emphasize that
the cult of the dandy was also a deep form of homocentrism and highly homosocial
dating back to Brummell and his circle who assembled at the club “Waiter’s” which
Lord Byron—himself notoriously bisexual—called “The Dandy Club.” The cult of
masculinity inevitably blended into homosexual activity which was already a com­
monplace in British all-male schools. The men’s clubs were an extension of same-sex
schools while the Brummellian attire with its faun trousers, immaculate cravats and short
hair in the Grecian style (à la grecque) were all part of a pseudo-sacred sartorial society
which was based on acumen of performance and appearance.
While scholars such as Olga Vainshtein9 and Elizabeth Wilson10 have argued the
perdurance of the dandy and the bohemian into contemporary times, dandy identity
reached a critical climax when Oscar Wilde recklessly went to trial for “gross indecency”
in 1895, which was as much if not more a trial of homosexuality itself. Up until this time
Wilde’s homosexuality had been known but conveniently overlooked. Since his uni­
versity years, Wilde had always been something of a sartorial pageant with his kind of
style described by his biographer, Richard Ellmann, as “bizarre dandyism.”11 While
Brummell had mandated restraint, Wilde’s code of dress was regularly extreme, inten­
tionally flouting convention with wide fur collars, rich silks and brightly-colored velvets
or styles, suggesting that he was always in various stages of dress-up. Wilde’s son, Vivian
Holland recounts how he made his entrée into London after his studies in Oxford. As a
self-anointed “Apostle of Aestheticism” he set out to blight the rigidity of conventional
British middle-class deportment. “The sight of him in the evening in a velvet coat edged
with braid, knee-breeches, black silk stockings, a soft loose shirt with a wide turn-down
collar and a large flowing tie, was bound to arouse indignant curiosity.”12 He used a trip
to Umbria as an opportunity to wear an outlandish pair of “Trasimo” trousers. Wilde’s
commitment making brash, florid historical references in his dress bordered on obsessive.
For instance, when he began to adopt pins and rings, he remarked that he was “paying
homage to the eighteenth-century dandies.”13
Ed Cohen makes a detailed analysis of Wilde’s propensity for “posing,” in which
manner and deportment were used as devices of auto-aestheticization. Posing, as Cohen
describes it was for Wilde “an attitude or posture of the body, or a part of the body,
especially one deliberately assumed, or in which a figure is placed for effect, or for artistic
purposes.”14 Before the coinage of “camp,” posing goes a long way to determining the
forms affectation that hallmark queer style in general and is again another tangible index of
its commitment to artifice. While a greater degree of tolerance persisted on the continent,
notably in France, in Edwardian Britain “deviant” behavior was taboo. This is when all
unusual styles and appearances began to be lumped into one undesirable basket, when
“dandy” and “bohemian” were pejoratives and used euphemistically for homosexual. In
his last years, Wilde understandably abandoned the provocations of his pre-prison years
but maintained a distinctive poise. As the Symbolist writer André Fontainas recalls:
“Always elegant of bearing, a blooming flower in his button hole, holding forth with
paradoxes, slow and fluent, spiritual and composed, a trifle mannered and graceful in
his contrivances and repartees, he was always disposed to an audience …”15 Wearing a
476 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

conspicuous and unusual flower in the button-hole was a familiar residue of the dandies
and aesthetes—Wilde had immortalized the lily—and it continued to be a familiar sig­
naling device until the outbreak of the World War I.
The legacy of Wilde has several strands. It allowed male gay style to claim something
like an autonomous space, allowing gay male identity a more rounded personality and
social persona. While dandyism would persist well into the twentieth century in its many
indefinable identities, gay and non-gay, there were increasingly a set of performances
that were no longer isolated or fragmented but which aggregated into a discernible
sensibility. It embraced excess, wastage and self-consciousness, eschewing naturalness—
all that was anathema to the heterosexual counterpart. It will be remembered that in
Barbey’s description of the dandy he foregrounds vanity as a singular trait, one that had
been traditionally ascribed to women. The dandy was imbued with a cool haughtiness
that rivalled that of the sexually unavailable woman, it was a self-absorption that was
had an aggressively male caste.16 In many ways the dandy’s auto-eroticism, which indeed
meant that men could identify as gay but not necessarily engage in carnal acts per se, was
the ultimate form of homosexuality, as it converged into a self-satisfied solipsism.
While it remains highly contentious that there is such thing as a female dandy, perhaps
the closest counterpart is that of the “lioness” or lionne. She became a distinctive identity
in the middle of the nineteenth century following the July monarchy. The lionne was in
many ways a reaction to the supplicant image of wilting femininity that had become
popularized by narratives such as the novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, La Dame aux
camélias (1848) and which was adapted into Verdi’s opera La Traviata. Unlike the
fashionable celebrity-driven femme à la mode, who calculated her dress and appearance
very carefully at outings and events, the lioness was interested more in sporting pursuits
than celebrity and was associated with physical vitality. Miranda Gill notes that the
lioness appropriated male physiological norms, or “surrogate masculinity” and was
considered an “eccentric” character that possessed a voracious sexual appetite.17 She ate,
drank, and smoked without the conventional proprietorial restraint and participated in
masculine-associated activities such as horse riding, pigeon shooting, and swimming.
Despite her “masculine” qualities, she was portrayed in illustrations as attractive and
fashionable and was often depicted in the company of dandies.

[They were] indefatigable amazons, spurning the peaceful recreations of their sex, and
abdicating the gentle influence of their discrete charms to follow our dandies to the
[horse] races and join in the large and small-scale schemings of the Jockey’s Club;
queens of the equestrian world, who have been dubbed “the lionnes” in recognition of
the strength, intrepidity, and inexhaustible ardour which they daily evince.18

In a fashion plate illustration (Figure 25.1), a lionne is depicted as wearing a dressing

gown; an item of clothing that was regulated to masculine evening wear and, as Gill
states, “one of the few refuges of ancient regime luxury and ‘feminine’ caprice in nine­
teenth century male clothing.”19
The French bohemian writer George Sand (Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin) writing
during the 1830s and 1840s described the rebellious heroines in her novels as lionesses
and often modeled herself on the lioness’ mannish ways. Sand cross-dressed, ate copious
amounts of chocolate, smoked profusely, and mixed in the company of men in public.
She was barely five feet-tall and her biographer Elizabeth Harlan writes that she had the
stamina and strength of an Olympic athlete regardless of her size and sex.20
 Queer Style 477

Figure 25.1 Illustration of woman wearing long coat, entitled “la lionne.” Fashion plate. Les
Francçais peints par eux-mêmes. Paris, France 1853–59. British Library Board.
Alamy.
478 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

She rode horseback hard and fast across vast stretches of French countryside and
hiked high into the mountains of France and Switzerland. By nineteenth-century
standards, she travelled and extensively frequently … . and when she was well] into
her seventies she bathed in the Indre River.

Sand would frequently appear in public wearing a masculine suit, or a banyan-type

robe, normally reserved for the interior, and Turkish slippers with their curved, pointed
toes. When the French novelist Honoré de Balzac paid a visit to Sand at her château at
Nohant, he described his encounter with her in masculine metaphors and spoke of her as
though they were male equals.

I [arrived] at about half‐past seven in the evening and found comrade George Sand in
her dressing gown, smoking an after‐dinner cigar at the fireplace of an enormous,
lonely bedroom. She was wearing a pair of pretty, fringed yellow slippers, coquettish
stockings and red trousers … . With a seriousness, sincerity, candor and conscien­
tiousness worthy of the “great shepherds” who guide the flocks of men, we discussed
the great problems of marriage and freedom … .21

There has been much speculation for the reasons why Sand chose to dress in men’s
attire. As we wrote in Queer Style (2013), before the latter half of the twentieth-century
queers lived clandestine lives and alternative societies were mostly underground. Women
passed as men by dressing and acting as men for either sexual or economic reasons, or
simply for adventure.22 Ulrich Lehmann argues that Sand dressed as a man solely for
economic reasons and as a way of earning an income as a journalist and a writer, much
as her contemporary—who shared an uncannily similar nom de plume—Mary Ann
Evans who was compelled to change her name to George Eliot. Susan L. Seigfried and
John Finkelberg describe Sand as an “unusual figure” who readily adopted masculine
attire to forge a literary career.23 She even designed and made her own suit to pass as a
man to mingle in literary circles that were restricted to men. Her male friends included
some of the most eminent writers of the nineteenth century, including Gustave Flaubert,
Balzac, Émile Zola, François-René de Chateaubriand, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Henry
James. She even went so far as to design a grey suit which she made to measure her
diminutive size. It was illegal in France for women to wear trousers and was forbidden
under the 16 Brumaire IX Act promulgated by Napoleon on November 7, 1800, as a
way of controlling their behavior and to stop women claiming male privilege (the right to
vote, own property and enter legal contracts). An exception to cross dressing could be
made if candidates lodged a valid medical certificate with their application. If the
application was approved a “permis de travestissement” [transvestite’s permit] would be
granted for six months and thereafter was renewable. It was only during times of car­
nival when social rules were permitted to be transgressed that the law was suspended.
But otherwise, cross dressing in public spaces (including balls) was prohibited by Article
471, Section 15 of the Penal Code of 1853.24
In the second halve of the nineteenth century, sexual identity was not as restricted (or
policed) which opened the way to more open visibility of sexualities such as lesbians,
homosexuals and transgender. It was the age that brought sex out into the open.25 These
sexualities were considered “inverts” and referred to as the third sex. In 1867, Gustave
Flaubert posed the following question in a letter to George Sand: “What is your view on
women then, you who are the third sex?”26 He received no reply. This shift in perception
 Queer Style 479

begins to be played out in sartorial codes and crossdressing became a common leitmotiv
for women writers in the turn of the century, including the decadent novelist Rachilde
(Marguerite Vallette-Eymery) who applied for a permis de travestissement to wear
trousers in 1884. Melanie Hawthorn argues that Rachilde, like Sand, presented herself as
a man to publish her work.27 Like Sand and Rachilde, the French fin de siècle novelist
Collette, often dressed in men’s clothes and would be seen in public with her first hus­
band, the unscrupulous literary entrepreneur Henry Gauthier-Villars, in the company of
lesbians, bisexual courtesans, sadists, masochists and crossdressers.28 It was on one of
these outings that Colette met the aristocrat and artist Mathilde de Mornay, or Missy
with whom she would have a long-term relationship (Figure 25.2) Missy, or Uncle Max,
dressed extravagantly in men’s wear and lived as a man. Missy wore his hair cropped,
ordered his suits from tailors on Saville Row, and even sent his shirts to be pressed and
ironed in London. In Sisters of Salome, Toni Bentley writes that Mathilda

comported [himself] as a man, padding out [his]small feet with socks to fit [his] men’s
shoes, wearing overalls and three-piece suits, a short haircut, and a rounded centre
that betrayed no breasts. [He] even tried making herself [himself] a moustache from
[his] poodle’s tale.29

The Early Twentieth Century

If potentialities for queer style were curtailed in Britain, they nonetheless persisted in
telltale signs that were also traceable to heterosexuals: pinkie signet rings, bright vests,
sharp coiffures and fetishized accessories such as engraved cigarette cases and bejeweled
tie-clasps. In more permissive France, signs of alterity were not as limited to the privileged
classes but were increasingly allied to artistic and avant-garde circles for whom outré
behavior was encouraged as part of alternative and experimental lifestyles.
The fashions of the 1920s were marked by an emphasis on simplicity for greater move­
ment and maneuverability. This also meant that inflections of eccentricity could be more
evident. But for those who could afford it, gay men’s style continued to cherish the devil in
the detail such as expensive cufflinks, a fine-cut suit with just enough evidence to show that it
was hand-sewn. Lesbian style in the 1920s was dominated by men’s formal attire, top-hats
and tails, popularized by Hollywood actresses Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland.
Remarking on Dietrich’s dragging, a magazine in 1933 carried the headline “Marlene
Sets Trouser Fashion” where readers were informed that she had ten suits which she wore all
around Hollywood.30 Upper class lesbians and gender non-conformists that were financially
independent such as Radcliff Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness (1928),31 Mathilde
“Max” de Mornay (Marquise de Belboeuf) and the artist Romain Brooks wore clothes that
were in part an extension of the dandy. They dressed in tuxedos and cravats in public,
smoked a cigarette or a cigar and often wore a monocle and wore their hair in an Eton
crop. Women belonging to the lower classes only wore mannish clothes in the evening
concealed under a coat on their way to a lesbian venue. High and low, these women, lesbian
and otherwise, were now characterized as the “New Woman” (also the “Modern Girl” and
the “Masculine Woman”) whose penchant for flouting inhibitions were tied up with
the bloomerites and the suffragettes. The choice of alternative, less-than-feminine clothing
was caught up in the clamor for liberation and equal rights. As Janes observes, the
sartorial exploits of such women were not quite a matter of dragging or cross-dressing but
more of “gender stretching”: “These women did not become women. They stretched what
480 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

Figure 25.2 Colette and Mathilde “Max” de Mornay. Unknown source. Public Domain.
 Queer Style 481

a woman could be.”32 In many ways, they laid the basis for the destigmatization of unisex
dress, such as jeans that we have today.
A cultural and social presence of self-fashioning lesbians began to emerge in Europe
and the United States in the 1920s in urban metropolises such as Paris, Berlin, and
Harlem and Greenwich Village in New York. Paris was the center of sexual freedom and
American and European expatriate lesbians joined with French artists and writers to
form cultural milieus. Lesbians gathered at Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat) cabaret and Le
Monocle bar made famous by Brassaï’s (Gyula Halásc) black and white photographs of
femme-butch couplings. Femmes wore bright red lipstick, dresses that that hung loosely
on their hips and hair that bobbed just below their ears. Masculine garçonnes dressed in
stiff white shirts, black tuxedos and wore their hair in the style of a Roman emperor or
Joan of Arc. The wealthy (and notorious) American playwright, poet and novelist
Natalie Clifford Barney established a salon that became a lesbian hub, attracting a
coterie of artists and literati, including Radcliff Hall, Colette and Mathilde “Max” de
Mornay amongst others.
Queer styling in Berlin after the World War I was rife. In a country that was confused
by what they believed was a phony defeat and humiliating peace terms, throwing many
social structures into disarray meant that identities, guises, and poses were more than
just an individual choice but an expression of collective ennui. Exacerbated by the
hyperinflation of the early 1920s, that saw the fortunes of most of the middle class in
tatters, the once strict mores were breached by all manner of expressions of disaffection,
dissent, and deviance. As Richard Dyer remarks, Berlin at this time was a melting-pot for
drag which began to morph into particular styles and looks, including the “Belladonna”
which deeply darkened eyes mimicking the femmes fatales popularized by pre-sound
cinema such as the alluring dominatrix of Theda Bara’s (an anagram of “Arab Death”)
portrayal of Cleopatra.33 Berlin’s vibrant lesbian community included clubs, bars, balls
and two prominent publications, Die Freudin (The Girlfriend) and Garçonne.
Across the Atlantic in New York, Greenwich Village and Harlem were transgressive
enclaves that attracted subversive crowds. To white American’s Harlem was a free-for-
all party and many women frequented the many nightclubs and bars to partake in sexual
experiences with other men and women known as “slumming.” During the Harlem
Renaissance (1920–35), African American lesbians gathered and socialised at rent par­
ties34 and cabarets. The most popular lesbian venue was The Clam House which pre­
sented live stage acts and drag performers. The mannish “bull-dyke” impresario Glady
Bentley and Ma Rainey often performed at the club dressed in a tuxedo and top hat.
“Freak parties” or masquerade parties popular as forms of entertainment in Europe since
the eighteenth century, enjoyed a revival amongst lesbians and queer men during the
1920s and 1930s. Such parties were characterized by burlesque performances and
crossdressing and by 1945 shows featured butch “crooners” and drag queens dressed in
sequinned gowns, glamorous wigs and feather headdresses.35 Like Paris and Berlin,
lesbian venues were zones where sartorial display indicated sexual tastes and preferences
and where one could explore same sex desire.

After the Two World Wars

No doubt the many horrors of World War II played a significant role in gay men wanting
to address stereotypes about them as being effeminate “pansies.” This meant that men of
the latter part of the twentieth century went to great lengths to reclaiming masculinity
482 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

for themselves which meant overturning the connotations of femininity. One citable
example of this in the early postwar years was Jean Genet who was fêted as a major
writer and cultural figure, not to mention a gay archetype. Once a successful writer,
Genet spurned affect and finery, dressing plainly and usually maintaining links to his
underbelly origins: he would frequently pose with his collared shirt with sleeves rolled up
beyond the elbow and holding his cigarette in the more uncouth workmanly manner of
between finger and thumb.36
Genet drew considerable cachet from his shady origins as street fighter and petty thief
and his subsequent incarceration, always displaying himself as the universal tough-guy.
His Our Lady of Flowers (1944) brought the idea of the butch queen into the main­
stream while the dominant intellectual of the day, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a massive, if
occasionally dubious (contending that homosexuality was a matter of personal choice)
treatise on him (Saint Genet. Comédien et martyr, 1952), proclaiming him as the new
hero of twentieth century letters.37 Genet turned his life experiences into the novel,
Querelle de Brest (1947) whose main character the young bisexual sailor Georges
Querelle who is a thief and a murderer is based on Genet himself.38 Set in the French port
town of Brest, the novel involves sadism, predatory murder, and masochistic submission
as Querelle manipulates and kills his lovers for thrills and profit. The novel resonates
with the gay culture of promiscuity and cruising that courts with the risk of being dis­
covered and the implication that the sexual encounter was rough and illicit. The sailor
becomes a cipher for ephemerality (the itinerant traveller) and danger (military strength)
the archetype of the ephemeral sexual being that was later explored in the illustrations of
Tom of Finland (Touko Valio Laaksonen). Images of sailors with tight uniforms that
exaggerated their crotch, bulging muscles and pectorals were depicted in scenes of group
sex in erotic settings like a galley of a ship or the cubicle of a men’s toilet. The illus­
trations exploit hegemonic codes of masculinity by drawing attention to the desiring
homosexual body and the sexual act as one of empowerment.
Disenfranchised gay men returning from the war hungry for the danger and excite­
ment of military combat were attracted to the masculine bonds and romanticized image
of the “bad boy” motorcycle clubs that were gaining popularity since the screening of
The Wild One (1955, dir. Làzló Benedek) starring Marlon Brando. Members of such
clubs, for example the Satyrs, happily cultivated the machismo style of heterosexual
heroes like Brando. Bikers wore motorcycle boots, black leather jackets, leather peaked
caps and white tee shirts. They carried chained leather wallets tucked into the back
pockets of their blue jeans worn under their black leather chaps. It was not until the
1970s that biker culture became more widespread amongst gays and lesbians as part of
the leather bondage and sado-masochist club scene (BDSM). Leather dykes would ex­
perience discrimination from feminists in the early 1980s over debates about sexual
expression that culminated into the lesbian “Sex Wars.”39 Lesbian sexual practices such
as sado-masochism, butch and femme identities and female-to-male transmen were
denounced by feminists as male-identified or coerced by patriarchal thinking, arguing
that all sexuality must be between consenting partners with equal power.
In London in the 1950s, some areas of display were beginning to open up that catered
to gay men’s tastes. One such place was Vince Man’s Shop in a small back street in Soho
owned by Bill Green. Green had an earlier career as a physique photographer and
became more interested in men’s fashion after a trip to France where he was stuck by the
men in black shirts, jeans, and the way that clothes were used as much to show off the
body as cover it. It is often regarded as the first all-male boutique store which sold
 Queer Style 483

garments designed and made by Green with sleek and provocative look that appealed to
a largely gay clientele.40 Not only did Green not hold back in his choice of colors but he
is also credited with using pre-faded denim. He also ensured that his clients were able to
display their manliness, favoring tight cut over flamboyance or flow, the “Torso Shirt,” a
tight-fitting, muscle-hugging T-shirt was a quick favorite.
The most visible sign of lesbianism in the 1950s was the appearance of the butch—or
stud lesbian—with her short hair stylised into a “duck’s arse,” men’s tailored suit or blue
jeans, loafers, or sneakers. She held doors and lit cigarettes for femme women and paid
the bill when on a date. Her wardrobe consisted of chino pants and western shirts and
penny loafers with argyle socks. Tuxedos and ties were popular for evening wear, as
were low cut men’s dress boots. Butch lesbians or “diesel dykes” as they came to be
known, modeled their mannerisms and attitudes on Hollywood stars and rock “n” roll
heart throbs such as Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Marlon Brando. Femmes wore tight
dresses and skirts with matching cardigans known as “twin-sets” (rarely pants) and
panty hose with high-heeled shoes.

Feminism, Sexual Liberation, and F***king with Gender

For politicized lesbians in the 1960s and 1970s, dress style was essentially androgynous
or anti-fashion. Feminist lesbians considered mainstream fashion and beauty as catering
to the whims of men, so they rejected cosmetic products such as lipstick and nail polish
and wore comfortable loose fitting clothes such as flannel shirts and pants as well as
loose jackets. Hair was cut short and footwear consisted either of tennis shoes,
Birkenstock sandals, or Fry boots, in other words anything connoting feminine heels was
definitely out. This was a sartorial statement about not dressing for men. It was that look
that became a “uniform” and a way for lesbians to identify one another in solidarity. To
lesbian feminists this was a style that spoke about identity and belonging to the sister­
hood and to women’s liberation. Many feminists lesbians rejected the strictly coded
butch-femme culture of the 1920s, 1940s, and 1950s because they were seen to mimic
the repressive male-female binary of patriarchal society. The butch style of dressing,
including hairstyles and mannerisms such as holding a cigarette with thumb and index
finger were seen as aspiring to “maleness.” As Alix Genter explains: “Butches not only
challenged normative conceptions of gender and claimed lesbian space, they also defi­
antly announced their queerness through their looks.”41 When the Stonewall Inn riots
occurred in 1969 on Christopher Street in New York, an important event in the LGBT
liberation movement, it was the butches that were arrested (and the drag queens) because
their dress styles made them visible.
Images of masculine virility were further appropriated by gay men in the 1960s and
1970s in the stylized hypermasculine “clone” or “muscle Mary” to counter dominant
cultural assumptions that gay men were effeminate. The act of dressing up perpetuates
the performative aspect of gender, as a subversive bodily act that can be used as a
powerful tool of resistance. The adoption of masculine-encoded clothing—denim jeans,
plaid shirts worn over white t-shirts, construction boots and army fatigues worn tight to
emphasize genitalia and musculature—presented a new macho image of erotic virility.
The clone grew out of a more celebratory bent in gay culture precipitated by the sexual
revolution after which queer identities, male and female were more inclined toward
carnivalesque, theatrical displays that amplified the ways in which discrete social iden­
tities could be manipulated and redeployed. Hypermasculine identities proliferated after
484 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

Stonewall, the diesel dyke and the clone used stylized masculine dress to subvert hege­
monic power and claim their identities in a social and political space. In 1979, the
Radical Fairies rejected hypermasculinity and its association with gay urban culture and
instead embraced their femininity through drag practices. They subverted macho gay
masculinity by dressing up in feminine clothes but maintained their body hair, beards
and genital bulge, creating a sense of gender confusion. Like the Fairies, who rejected
urban culture by gathering in rural settings, the Bears strove to embody a particular
representation of gay masculinity that drew on icons of working class country men,
particularly the lumberjack. Rejecting smooth skinned and slim bodies for heavy set
“chubby” silhouettes, they maintained beards, wore jeans and boots and braces over
their plaid shirts instead of leather belts. As Shaun Cole states, “[i]n ‘passing’ as straight
to outside observers, but embracing their homosexuality, Bears challenged the percep­
tion of what a gay man looks like.”42
The celebratory culture of queer expression was jolted by the AIDS epidemic that
commenced in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere in the early 1980s. The loss of
lives and the stigmatization of gay men gave vent to some of the most explosive political
opposition and creative forces of the decade. The blurring of gender and sexual
boundaries had become prevalent across a range of entertainment media, from fashion
catwalks to pop music. This gender-bending was particularly evident among musicians
such as Boy George whose dress style of kaftans, nail polish, eyeshadow and heavy
eyeliner was counter-sexual and androgynous. Young lesbians began to reconceptualize
role playing and the stylistic cues that accompany gender identities to challenge domi­
nant mainstream culture. The resurgence of butch-femme identities was marked by cross
dressing, gender switching and gendered role playing, as they translated this look into a
style with belted high-waisted stone wash jeans, white T-shirts with rolled up sleeves,
and black Dr Martens boots. A “mullet” or “sho-lo” was popular amongst butch les­
bians with the sides and top cropped or buzzed short while the hair at the back of the
head remained long, at times plaiting the hair strands into a long, skinny “rat’s tail.”43

Kinging, Voguing, and Lipsticks

The “Sex Wars” of the 1980s marked the end of second-wave feminism and gave rise in
the 1990s to third-wave feminism and queer theory which argues that gender is socially
constructed rather than a naturally given or essential category. Lesbians began to use
gender paradigms as a way of deploying power and decentring dominant models of
femininity and masculinity. Crossdressing, or “kinging” performances in the lesbian club
circuit became a way of performing queerness, that exposed the artificiality and
instability of gender by using props (suits, ties, crotch stuffers, greased hair, moustaches,
and beards), role-playing, and mimicry. Drag kings perform a taxonomy of masculinities
from the Latinx lover strutting his machismo, the “white trash trucker,” the “suave
gentleman,” and the “professional boxer.” Such cross-ethnic performance drew atten­
tion to race as a signifier of Otherness and marginality produced by racial discourses.
Lesbian’s used “kinging” “as a way of traversing and breaking the gender system and its
codes, and about opening a space were masculinities and femininities are redefined
producing new erotics, new genders and new modes of power.”44
Meanwhile, in Harlem, New York, African American and Latinx transwomen and gay
men were gathering together at balls in “Houses” to compete against each other for
“realness” in “walks.” Ball culture had its roots in the beginning of the nineteenth century
 Queer Style 485

when the LGBT community began organizing cross dressing masquerade balls in oppo­
sition to laws that banned wearing clothes associated with the opposite gender or against
the banning and racial vilification of African American and Latinx performers. Participants
performed in categories such as Butch Queen Realness, or Realness with a Twist and
belonged to “family” groups known as Houses (much like fashion houses) with whom they
formed relationships, lived, and performed together. There was the legendary Houses of
LaBeija and Ninja, the House of Xtravaganza, and the house of Ladocha amongst many
others. Dressed as supermodels in DIY fashions resembling haute couture creations, they
strutted down the catwalk, dipping, popping and spinning, lip syncing and stopping
midway to “strut a pose” that became known as “Vogueing.” Three consecutive events
occurred that ushered the Drag Ball scene from a countercultural event into a major
fashion and musical style. Beginning in 1989 was the first AIDS fundraiser Love Ball
judged by American Vogue magazine’s editor-at-large André Leon Talley and supermodel
Iman. This was followed by the release of Jenny Livingstone’s Paris is Burning (1990), a
documentary film that explored the elaborately structured balls and their performers. Then
in 1990, American singer-songwriter Madonna’s hit single “Vogue” toped the billboard
charts around the world and tipped over into the zeitgeist.45
Although Madonna was straight, she was sexually assertive and used signifiers and
codes that appealed to a lesbian audience. When “Express Yourself” was released in
1989, Madonna wore a 1930s-style pin-striped men’s suit designed by Jean Paul Gaultier
on top of a pink satin corset with embellished cone breast cups. Suspenders hung down
the sides of her trousers as though she was caught in the midst of disrobing. As the fog
cleared on the stage Madonna peered through her monocle and asked the audience, “Do
you believe in love? Well, I’ve got something to say about it.” She then gyrated, thrust
her hips, and kissed her female backup singers. Dressed as an androgynous butch,
Madonna sang of freedom to love whomever you desired. The song became a lesbian
anthem. Three years later, when the openly erotic single “Justify my Love” (1993) was
released, a song that celebrated polymorphous and transgressive sexuality, Madonna
was a lesbian icon.
By the mid-1990s, lesbian sexuality began to break free from the butch-femme binary
and women began to explore the boundaries of representation of mainstream culture.
The 1990s was a decade of lesbian visibility and commodification by mainstream en­
tertainment media. Once considered unstylish and mannish, the lesbian became sexually
confident and erotically charged as images of powerful lesbian’s began to filter into
popular culture. American singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge, who began performing
in lesbian venues in the 1980s “came out” to the public in 1993 in the lyrics of her debut
single “Bring Me Some Water” (1988) from her self-titled Grammy award winning
album. The same year Canadian country singer-song writer k.d. lang (Katherine Dawn
Lang) appeared on the cover of the August issue of Vanity Fair magazine with super­
model (and straight) Cindy Crawford. Lang was dressed in a three-piece pin-striped suit,
tie, and brogues, sitting on a traditional barbers’ chair whilst being shaved by Crawford,
who was wearing a maillot. Then, in what is considered to be a historic moment in
television (and queer) history, the American comedian Ellen DeGeneres “came out”
publicly as a lesbian. By the time Showtime’s The L Word debuted in 2004, the lesbian
had become a mediated and commodified identity and the butch and femme binary had
begun to blur. The characters in the L Word were ambitious professionals with suc­
cessful careers who dressed stylishly in designer labels, lived in designer homes, wore
makeup and hung out with their fashionable lesbian friends at bars, cafes and
486 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

restaurants. The butch lesbian, associated in the cultural imagination with the idea of
lesbianism, was diluted or feminized. Instead, the lesbians in the L Word were
“straightened out” and normalized in order to become more palatable to heterosexual
audiences. The fashion and media industry placed lesbian identity on the mainstream
cultural landscape and produced a particular lesbian representation as professional
middle class and upwardly mobile while erasing others. As the “lipstick lesbian” began
gaining currency as an identity category, lipstick lesbians become chic.

Gender Non-Conforming “Fluid” Style

Meanwhile, the increasing visibility of the Trans* liberation46 movement was becoming
exceedingly vocal and gaining momentum in the media ever since TIME magazine
featured African-American transgender actress Laverne Cox on the cover in a story titled
“The Transgender Tipping Point. America’s Next Civil Rights Frontier” (2014) dressed
in a midnight blue off-the shoulder sheath dress. Cox, best known for her role as Sophia
Burset in the Netflix series Orange is the New Black told TIME, “We are in a place now,
where more and more trans people want to come forward and say, ‘this is who I am … . I
stand before you this evening.”47 The following year, Caitlyn Jenner was photographed
by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair magazine, wearing a white silk bodice, for the cover
story “Call me Caitlyn” (2015). Soon, other transgender celebrities followed, going
public with their transition stories. In a Vogue article on how fashion was leading the
way on the mainstreaming of transgender, Maya Singer asked whether “blurred gender
lines were the latest cultural fixation.”48 Transgender models Hari Nef, Lea T, Casey
Leglar, and Andreja Pejic walked runways and fronted fashion advertising campaigns
while fashion brands Hood by Air, Eckhaus Latta, and JW Anderson feigned little
interest in male and female as meaningful categories, designing collections that blurred
gender lines: suits for women, Pussy bow blouses, and dresses for men by Yves St
Laurent and Gucci, and there are plenty more examples.
The ability to choose a garment regardless of its association with a gender is creating
new ways of expressing and exploring subjectivities that are not limited to clothes or
bodies associated or oriented toward specific gender norms. By mixing gender signifiers
and citations embedded in the design and manufacture of womenswear and menswear
“fluid” fashion draws attention to the instability of gender. Much like how anti-fashion,
or “confrontational”49 and “oppositional”50 clothing is a semiotic system of resistance
and dissent that is deployed against what is considered normative and dominant. Whilst
unisex or androgynous fashion may challenge constructions of masculinity and femi­
ninity, the gender dichotomy remains fixed, whereas the goal of fluid fashion is to dilute
and dissolve gender differences altogether. Various strategies are deployed by designers
of fluid fashion to achieve this goal, including combining womenswear and menswear
and casting a broader range of genders with different body shapes and sizes in their
catwalk shows. The use of block patterns to produce garments with non-gender specific
silhouettes that are proportional to a person’s style and body by reworking the sizing
chart and by using zippers, stretch fabrics, and draw strings.
There is no doubt at all that fashion has traditionally been a staunch supporter of gender
binaries, establishing a vast industry predicated on the sale of womenswear and menswear,
effectively locking traditional notions of gender firmly within their prison. As Trans*
visibility is becoming more prominent across media platforms and as more as
LGBTQIA+51 people are coming forward as gender non-conforming, the fashion industry
 Queer Style 487

is recognizing the influence and buying power that the queer, non-conforming movement
possesses. We already know that fashion takes sociopolitical movements and gives them
visual currency by placing them on the catwalk, in fashion editorials and in brand cam­
paigns then transmits them across transmedia platforms. The power wielded by the fashion
system draws attention and makes a noise that enables change.
In surveying the development of queer style in Western cultures, there are two clearly
defined trajectories. The first is its assertion as an ontology and a form of expression that
was distinctive from heteronormative values and expectations. This occurs gradually in
early modernity and can be more decisively located in the eighteenth century with the
rise of middle class values—which were more rigid than those of the aristocracy—and
the Enlightenment subjectivity, which allowed greater levereage for independent thought
and appearance. At first queer identities needed to be hidden under encoded social
manifestations that were themselves not “autonomously” queer as we might understand
them today (the macaroni, the dandy), and they would eventuate into more clearly and
proudly articulated forms of appearance such as the gay clones of the 1970s. But it was
also these more clearly defined modes of identifiable queer identities that highlights
the second trajectory which was precisely to rebel against clear definition, clichés, and
stereotypes, most commonly that of queerness as characterized by hallmarkings of the
opposite gender (femininity for gay men, mannishness for lesbians, for example). This
“unwillingness” to adhere as we put it in out conclusion to Queer Style (2013) is the
most most compelling and illusive aspect of queer identity and appearance. Queer vis­
ibility in the new millennium is largely due to the embodiment of resistance that renders
traditional norms of style and behaviour sclerotic and anachronistic.
The gender and sexual polarities that we have inherited since the nineteenth century
means that we inhabit a deeply stratified and aestheticized world. Constantly jostling
subject positions to find a comfortable place to inhabit, albeit for a time being, until the
time comes to move on. Traveling through these transitory and contested spaces with
only the clothes on our backs; a colored hanky in our back pocket, a signet ring on our
finger, or a lily flower worn as a boutonnière. Clandestine dress codes that once
announced who we were and what we liked, where historically queer identity had been
hidden in smoky bars or salons encrypted under the dandy, the clone, the mannish or
lipstick lesbian, sexualities (and genders) are now virtually indistinguishable. Above all,
more than anything else, queer style reveals the changing practices of dress and clothing
in staking our claim to who we are, and who we are not in this world.

Notes
1 Trumbach, The Birth of the Queen, 138.
2 See Robert Aldrich Gay Life and Culture. A World History, London: Thames and Hudson,
2006.
3 See Ian Kelly, Beau Brummel: The Ultimate Dandy, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2005.
4 Janes, British Dandies, 2022.
5 Beau Brummell: This Charming Man, dir. Philippa Lowthorpe, BBC4, 2006.
6 Barbey D’Aurevilly, Du Dandisme et de George Brummel, 31.
7 Ibid., 34.
8 Baudelaire, “Le Dandy,” Le Peintre de la vie moderne, 906–9.
9 Vainshtein, Fashioning the Dandy.
10 Wilson, Bohemians: Glamorous Outcasts, 2000.
11 Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 38.
12 Holland, “Introduction”, Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 9–10.
488 Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas

13 Schaffer, “Fashioning Aestheticism by Aestheticizing Fashion: Wilde, Beerbohm, and the Male
Aesthetes’ Sartorial Codes,” 45.
14 Cohen, “Posing the Question. Wilde, Wit and the Ways of Man,” 39.
15 Fontainas, Mes souvenirs du Symbolisme, 173.
16 D’Aurevilly, Du Dandisme, 21ff. In the words of Jessica Feldman, “Barbey likens Brummell to
coquettes, courtesans, and muses. Women never forgive him for being as graceful as they. His
vocation is to please: the Prince of Wales’s courtship of Brummell is as simple as the conquest
of woman. Even the dandy’s characteristic aggressive coldness, his defining aloofness from
women, it itself a female characteristic.” Gender on the Divide, 87–8.
17 Gill, Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth Century Paris, 87.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid, 89.
20 Harlan, George Sand, XIV.
21 Barry, “George Sand was at Home to Life, Work and Love at Nohant,” New York Times,
1972.
22 Geczy and Karaminas, Queer Style, 23.
23 Siegfried and Finkelberg, “Fashion in the Life of George Sand,” Fashion Theory, 2020.
24 Hawthorne, Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship, 109.
25 Foucault, The History of Sexuality I, 1978.
26 Lehmann, “Modernism Versus Feminism,” 79.
27 Hawthorn, Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship, 109.
28 Geczy and Karaminas, Libertine Fashion. Sexual Freedom, Rebellion and Style, 99.
29 Ibid., 145.
30 Janes, British Dandies, 119.
31 The Well of Loneliness (1928) was a lesbian novel written by Radcliffe Hall that follows the
life of Stephen Gordon, an English woman belonging to a wealthy English family that suffers
from “sexual inversion.” The novel was banned on publication under obscenity laws and was
republished in 1959.
32 Janes, The British Dandy, 120.
33 Dyer, The Culture of Queer, 65–6.
34 Rent parties were popular during the 1920s as a way of paying the weekly rent. Tenants would
hire a musician or band and pass the hat around the crowd for donations towards the rent.
35 See “Lesbian Style’, in Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas, Queer Style, London and New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013.
36 See Edmund White, Genet: A Biography, New York: Knopf, 1993.
37 Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Comédien et martyr, Paris: NRF, 1952.
38 Jean Genet, Querelle de Brest, Paris: Marc Barbezat-Arbalète, 1947.
39 Vicki Karaminas, ‘Born this Way. Lesbian Style Since the 80 s,’ A Queer History of Fashion:
From the Closet to the Catwalk, edited by Valerie Steele, London and New Haven: Yale
University Press.
40 Shaun Cole, Don We Now our Gay Apparel, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000, 72–4.
41 Genter, “Appearances Can be Deceiving: Butch-Femme Fashion and Queer Legibility in New
York City, 1945–69,” Feminist Studies, 604.
42 Shaun Cole,“Queerily Visible: Gay Men, Dress and Style 1960–2012,” A Queer History of
Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk, edited by Valerie Steele, London and New Haven:
Yale University Press, 154.
43 Vicki Karaminas, ‘Born this Way. Lesbian Style Since the 80 s,’ A Queer History of Fashion: From
the Closet to the Catwalk, edited by Valerie Steele, London and New Haven: Yale University Press.
44 Ibid.
45 Billboard https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100/1990-05-25/
46 The asterisk is used in trans to include the widest range of gender variation. It denotes a
movement or transition that has no final destination.
47 Steinmetz, “The Transgender Tipping Point,” Time, May 29, 2014.
48 Singer, ‘The Year in Fashion. The Transmovement Went Mainstream in 2015, and Fashion
Led that Way,” Vogue.
49 Vivienne Westwood called Punk “confrontational” dressing because of its use of swastika’s,
safety pins and rude tee shirts which were stylistic tools of resistance. In Subculture the
 Queer Style 489

Meaning of Style (1979), Dick Hebdige engages with the concept of style as a form of com­
munication, bricolage and confrontation.
50 Elizabeth Wilson uses the term oppositional dress to describe subcultural style. See Wilson,
Adorned in Dreams. Fashion and Modernity, 1985.
51 LGBTQIA+ is used to refer to people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer,
intersex, and asexual. The + signs refers to everyone else that is not included in the acronym.

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