Indeed, the hip-hop icon Jay Z doesn’t just mention the designer Tom Ford - who shrewdly has used his appeal to both gay men and straight women in his fashion seduction - in his music. The sensibility was not part of some secret, coded language among outsiders it was the accepted language of fashion - definitive and admired. The 21st century brought gay men who were crafting traditional styles yet assembling them with more glamour and greater sex appeal. The working-class, tough-guy costuming - cut-off denim, work boots, leather chaps - signaled the start of the modern gay rights movement. The 20th century introduced the era of hyper-masculinity and swagger, which emerged in the years after the 1969 uprising at New York’s Stonewall Inn. Capitalism’s rising industrialists rejected color and frippery, leaving it associated with homosexuality. Dandified style started to become egalitarian - far too democratic for the power brokers’ taste. To be a peacock - with the flourish of a patterned handkerchief, a colorful bow tie or a jeweled brooch - was to be an influential aristocrat.īut soon, cross-dressing “mollies” and effeminate “macaronis” from meager circumstances began to gather in secret societies, private clubs and dark corners - causing a stir by blurring gender lines. Their ability to bed anyone they pleased, whether male or female, was an extension of that omnipotence, Steele says. Men styled themselves to display power and wealth. The exhibition begins in the 18th century, when both men and women dressed to reflect their place in society. The fact that a community’s journey from red velvet cloaks worn in the shadows, to leather harnesses worn in protest, to transparent trousers worn in defiance finally comes to rest on business suits that would not be out of place if worn on Capitol Hill is testament to the power and reach of fashion itself and the influence that gay men and women have had on it. The suits, despite subtleties of silhouette and lapel width, are utterly traditional. Crew are the epitome of modern American menswear - completely devoid of subversive subtext. Kolb’s two-button Rag & Bone suit and Inkpen’s midnight-blue one from J. 27, 2012, at New York’s City Hall - a fact that Kolb tweeted to the world. The suits are the wedding ensembles worn by Steven Kolb, chief executive officer of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and his husband, Jay Inkpen, a freelance producer. Two understated business suits - one in midnight blue, the other in a slightly lighter shade of navy - represent this summer’s upending of DOMA by the Supreme Court. The exhibition’s most poignant moment - and certainly its ripped-from-the-headlines one - is when it acknowledges the demise of the Defense of Marriage Act. By far, however, gay men received the bulk of the exhibition’s attention. Steele and co-curator Fred Dennis spent two years researching the extent to which gay men and lesbians worked in the fashion industry and the ways in which their participation shaped aesthetics. “ A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk” opened Friday at the Museum at FIT and runs through Jan. 4. “Gays and lesbians had been hidden from history. “It had only been done in LGBT centers, and it had only focused on gay imagery in fashion.”įrom an academic, historical and cultural point of view: “It’s like an open secret,” Steele says.
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Yet no one in the mainstream has ever tried to examine the impact of homosexuality on fashion, says Steele, who is director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York. And, as fashion historian Valerie Steele once noted, “there is no gay gene for creativity.” But the fashion industry has been undeniably more welcoming of openly gay men than other fields have been. There are no statistics about the numbers of gay men in the fashion industry. And while there are a host of successful, brand-name women in the industry, lesser-known ones have gone on record about feeling disadvantaged because of decision makers’ subconscious belief that gay men make better designers. Whether industry insider or casual observer, people often presume that a male designer is gay until he announces himself otherwise. The stereotype of the gay designer is so deeply ingrained in the culture that it is often assumed to be a fact. But one notion remains stubbornly unchanged from city to city, year to year.
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The global search is on for all that is new and different. NEW YORK - The last of this city’s Fashion Week revelers have drained their champagne glasses and the seasonal fashion train begins to roll through London, Milan and finally Paris, where the runway presentations wrap up in October.