A Brief History of Drag in the Art World

Drag has a rich cultural history, spanning cross-dressing performances and deliberate parodies of fixed roles of gender and sexuality. Men have been performing on stage as women since the Ancient Greek tragedies, Shakespeare famously cast men as women, and Baroque operas featured early examples of drag.The term “drag queen” was first used to describe men appearing in women’s clothing in Polari—a type of British slang that was popularized among gay men and the theater community in the late 19th and 20th centuries. And while drag has long maintained a powerful presence in popular culture, more recently, it has developed a strong foothold in the art world as well.Today, in the wake of the popular television program RuPaul’s Drag Race, drag queen Conchita Wurst winning the Eurovision Song Contest, and new drag-themed club nights popping up across London, New York, and L.A., one could say that drag is in the midst of having a mainstream moment. Riding this wave of popularity are art galleries and museums. Recently, drag has been identified as an influence among major art exhibitions, like the Whitney Biennial in New York, and performance programs, like “Contemporary Drag” at NADA New York this past March. It also serves as one of the themes in the new show “Queer British Art” at Tate Britain.

Artists have historically created work that might not be considered or intended to be “drag,” but nonetheless similarly challenge and deconstruct rigid social and sexual archetypes. Take, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy, who first appeared in 1920. The character’s name was a pun on “Eros, c’est la vie” (meaning “eros, it is life”) and she appeared in several portraits taken by photographer Man Ray. Sélavy was an expression of Duchamp’s love for subversion and enigma. Similarly, the artist Claude Cahun was the male alter ego of the Surrealist Lucie Schwob, who took self-portraits dressed in male garments.Cahun was a forerunner to contemporary feminist artists like Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ana Mendieta, Cindy Sherman, and Gillian Wearing, among many others, who have played with elements of drag, often to critique the expectations placed on their gender. Hershman Leeson created a fictional character named Roberta Breitmore between 1973 and 1978, who even had her own therapist; Mendieta photographed herself with male facial hair to challenge gender signifiers; Sherman’s conceptual portraits have seen her disguise herself as fictionalized characters; and Wearing has manipulated her self image with masks.Elsewhere in history, major artists have famously documented the practice of drag. Andy Warhol filmed drag queens like Candy Darling and Mario Montez. The video artist Charles Atlas filmed famous London nightlife star Leigh Bowery; photographer Nan Goldin captured drag queens in her hometown of Boston as a teenager, and New York’s drag communities in the 1980s and early ’90s; and later, Mario Montez collaborated with the photographer Conrad Ventur.

Atlas continues to work with drag, evidenced by his recent video, Here She Is…v1 (2015), which was included in MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition in 2015. He featured the famous New York drag queen Lady Bunny lip syncing to camera. One could also argue that the colorful characters depicted in Ryan Trecartin’s works of the 2000s had a proto-Drag Race aesthetic about them.Trecartin’s work was included in last year’s Berlin Biennale curated by the team behind DIS Magazine. The Biennale was titled “The Present in Drag,” and the DIS curators intended it to be a space for artists to reflect contemporary culture onto itself, rather than expose it. Also featured was the work of Amalia Ulman whose self-portraiture sees her enact a fake character she has cultivated via social media.

The recent drag programming at NADA New York was focused on more traditional ideas of drag, influenced, in part, by the recent explosion of a new generation of drag queens in Brooklyn. “[We brought them] out of the bars and into the streets—or rather into the art fair,” says Sam Gordon, who co-curated the performance program with Jacob Robichaux (together they run Gordon Robichaux, a curatorial agency seeking to surface under-recognized artists).That same Brooklyn drag scene was given gallery air-time at the end of last year in the show “Coney Island Babies: Visual Artists from the Brooklyn Drag Scene” at Bureau of General Service — Queer Division on West 13th Street in Manhattan. Curated by Director of the Fire Island Artist Residency Program, Chris Bogia, and drag performer and visual artist Montgomery Perry Smith, the show took stock of the vibrant community of contemporary visual artists in New York’s drag scene today. Prominent among the scene are the performance groups Chez Deep and Bushwig.

Meanwhile, across Europe, a renewed interest in drag has seen a slew of young artists incorporating it into their performance work. In the U.K., for example, Victoria Sin uses her drag persona to critique the expectation of feminine labor; and Samuel Douek, a drag performer, filmmaker, and artist who recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, has presented his work in both cabaret venues and galleries, as part of his work around queer spaces.In Berlin, events on the city’s underground scene have recently been hosted by artists like Parker Tilghman, who enacts a drag persona as part of his work.

When asked why drag was a relevant subject choice for the NADA lineup this year, Gordon explained that within the current political climate, drag could address an urgent need. “Everyone really needed some drag right when we served it up,” Gordon told me, describing the events as joyous, defiant, and inspirational.  

While emphasizing the contemporary moment, Gordon and Robichaux also acknowledged the evolving conversation around drag over time. Through a multigenerational group of drag artists—from the famous Lady Bunny and Tabboo! to younger performers like Sasha Velour, who has been hosting Nightgowns (a drag cabaret) in Bushwick for the last few years—they highlighted the deep history of drag’s presence in gallery spaces. 

The main difference when you put drag performance in a gallery, Penney explained, is the crowd. “To be in a gallery setting where nobody is talking and they don’t even know if they should clap because they don’t want to interrupt things, it can be really intense,” he said. And in that sense, drag gets taken seriously by the art world, but Penney believes it’s still somewhat marginalized. “I think a lot of performance art still gets de-legitimized because its drag,” he said.

At this year’s Whitney Biennale though, drag—in some interpretation—has been given credence. Work relating to the practice is present across the show wrote co-curator Christopher Lew in the exhibition catalogue’s introductory essay. Collective Puppies Puppies, for example, presents Liberty (Liberté) (2016), what they’ve described as “a drag performance and sculpture,” where a performer dons a Statue of Liberty costume and stands in public. Lew pointed to works by Porpentine Charity Heartscape and Cauleen Smith, as well as Tommy Hartung’s video The Lesser Key of Solomon (2015), as all dealing with identity and emancipation, and in that sense speaking to the practice of drag. He cited these works as examples of how “in these recent times of escalating strife and partisanship, artists have taken it upon themselves to bridge divides.”

If one thinks about drag as the practice of performing gender, sexuality, or other fixed societal roles, then in a way, we’re all doing drag, all of the time. So long as it deconstructs identity categories, it’s still drag. And according to curators like Lew and Gordon, today, amid an oppressive political climate, it’s a more relevant means of expression and creativity than ever.For example, artist Alexis Blair Penney was inspired to start the drag collective Chez Deep following a performance at MoMA PS1 in 2011 with Cody Critcheloe, Colin Self and Mykki Blanco. “If this is what a drag super-group looks like, I might just have to start one,” he thought. Penney noted that Chez Deep’s performance has run the full gamut of venues, from bars to white cube spaces. In 2014, the artist Spencer Sweeney flew them out to Glasgow to perform at The Modern Institute’s gallery space. Gordon emphasizes that the current moment is just the latest iteration of drag. “Drag moves in cycles,” he says, “but it’s interesting to see how quickly the mainstream is finding the alternative.” If anything, he believes taking drag out of its traditional contexts and into the art world is helping it continue to evolve.

If one thinks about drag as the practice of performing gender, sexuality, or other fixed societal roles, then in a way, we’re all doing drag, all of the time. So long as it deconstructs identity categories, it’s still drag. And according to curators like Lew and Gordon, today, amid an oppressive political climate, it’s a more relevant means of expression and creativity than ever.

Artsy, By Amelia Abraham, April 14, 2017

Sasha Velour won season nine of "RuPaul's Drag Race" on VH1 and Logo, and she's unique: Velour, the stage name of Sasha Steinberg, was a Fulbright scholar and has a master's degree, and takes an intellectual approach to drag.

On her intellectual approach to drag performance

"The truth is I do take drag really seriously, and I think that there's kind of a place for that — to see it as this political and historical art form, and to want to continue pushing it in new directions. And also honor the old directions as well. So I'm sort of like a drag intellectual/drag queen.""I went to Vassar College for undergraduate and studied literature and queer theory, and all of the above. And then I took a Fulbright scholarship in Russia. And that's really where my direction shifted a little bit, because I became really interested in what kind of work actually helps to change things for queer people. And I became really fascinated with drag because it's such an accessible and joyful art form. I wanted to create beautiful images in drag that would not just inspire queer people who need to see some beauty and need to experience some joy, but also would engage people politically."

On the role of drag in LGBTQ advocacy

"We need to talk about representation for queer people in the media and also in law. And there's a long history of drag queens leading those discussions in marches on the street and even in bars going back to the time of Stonewall and before. Gay bars have always been spaces of getting angry about politics and about legal situations, and we need that now more than ever.""Drag is so much more than gay men dressing up as women. It's about creating space and creating validity for people who want to express gender differently and by their own rules. And drag queens, drag kings, need to be at the forefront of pushing for rights and protections and safe spaces for the entire spectrum of gender non-conforming and trans people."

On how young people can get their start in drag"It's the simplest thing. You just go and you find whatever you can find. If it's a simple pair of heels or if you have to strap some cans of food to the back of your shoes so you have that little lift, if you want to go and get some mascara or if you want to use a little Sharpie on your eye, you can make drag out of absolutely anything. And if that is what inspires you, I say everyone should go out and do it." 

Sasha Velour On Why Drag Is A 'Political And Historical Art Form'.  wbur, July 24, 2017

It’s Time To Change The Definition Of “Drag”  By Eric Shorey, Nylon,  April 4, 2017.

“You're born naked and the rest is drag,” RuPaul has famously quipped for decades. But the phrase has been so oft-repeated, it's hard to say it aloud without the nearest drag queen rolling her eyes. Despite the whimsy of the quote, many people's definition of drag has remained rather stagnant: It's when a man dresses up as a woman–or something–right?

But as the very concept of gender explodes, perhaps we should reconsider the accepted definitions of the word “drag.” The term originated in Shakespearean times as shorthand for “dressed as a girl,” or so the story goes because back then women were not permitted to be actors. Whether or not that tale has any validity now is beside the point; drag slowly morphed into its own art form over the past few hundred years, and only recently have we begun to rethink the word so completely.

If the post-Tumblr generation of millennials has taught us anything, it's that gender is a social construction; there are never-ending possibilities of gender expression and identity. The idea that "drag" could be defined as “clothing typical of one sex worn by a person of the opposite sex,” which is actually how it's defined in Merriam-Webster, now seems almost laughable to those who spend their lives in gay bars. Isn't the idea of an “opposite sex” itself obsolete? As we reconsider the vast complexities of gender, it's about time we threw out the idea of gender as a spectrum (with male on one end and female of the other) and start doing better with our explanatory metaphors. Gender is closer to (if you can forgive the hippie turn of phrase) a mandala than a spectrum, with maleness and femaleness knotting eternally in interlaced spirals. But gender is more than any 2-D image—gender has a smell, a feel, a taste; it exists in time and space.

If drag has nothing to do with the now-defunct concept of “opposite sex,” then what the hell is it? A semiotics professor of mine once quipped that after Marcel Duchamp, “anything can be art, but not everything is art.” Could the same be said of drag? Has the word become as nebulous and confusing as “art” itself? Post-modern theory aside, a simple visit to a Brooklyn, New York, nightclub would immediately relieve one of their assumptions about drag as an art form of illusion based on binaristic ideas of anatomical difference. Bearded queens have become common, as are fashionable, alien-esque club kids in the tradition of great artists like Leigh Bowery. Plenty of trans women do (and probably always have) performed as queens, with many realizing they were trans as they played with their own expression through art. We reached out to a handful of trans and non-binary drag performers to get their takes on the subject: "For me, [drag] was the beginning of learning to navigate spaces as someone who isn't read as 'boy,'" says Daphne Sumtimez, a Brooklyn-based transgender drag performer. "It’s taught me how much agency we all have in forging our identities."

"I’d say that the number of definitions is increasing," Sumtimez adds. "I’m sure drag still means the same thing it always has to a lot of people, but there are as many definitions of drag as there are people thinking about drag, and that number is certainly on the rise… Drag is just dressing up as someone or something other than what you are currently dressed up as." 

Drag is one of the world’s greatest forms of escapism because of its capabilities in transcending identity beyond reality – in this realm, artists can become whoever they desire to be. With the use of excessive visual markers, performers break free from the social constructs that oppress them.

Tracing how this freedom has existed as an art form across history is London’s Hayward Gallery with their upcoming show, Drag: Self Portraits and Body Politics that will run from August 22–October 14. Through a lens of artist self-portraits from the early 1920s–today, the show explores how drag is an act of rebellion that goes far beyond its perception as an act of gender performativity. While drag is an essential act for driving the future of gender forward, its capabilities go far beyond this.

Through the works of Ana Mendieta, Robert Mapplethorpe, Victoria Sin, Cindy Sherman, Samuel Fosso, and more, the Hayward’s Drag show reveals that drag resists all social constructs – race, class and sexuality included. “Drag is an act of resistance that emerged from systems of oppression,” explains the Hayward Gallery’s senior curator Vincent Honoré. “Drag performances, as seen in visual arts, resist binary systems and norms, challenge oppressive structures, and echo social changes: in the exhibition, drag and the way it is used reflects on societal debates including feminism, civil rights, gay rights, Aids crisis, anti-consumerism, and post-colonialism.”

Eight artists who use drag as a political tool of rebellion.   By Lexi Manatakis, Dazed , August 14, 2018.

Drag, by definition, is ephemeral, transitional and transformative. It’s the act of temporarily inhabiting a character to break through the gender binary, challenge the status quo, and perhaps even live out a political truth. In 2018, drag seems to be going through a kind of global renaissance — not only in the mainstream, with shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and Dragula, but in bars, galleries, cabarets and venues around the world. The misconception of drag as a Las Vegas stereotype has all but dissipated, and vibrant performers of all ages, genders and backgrounds are creating a new artistic community.But how would you represent this community? How could you do all these artists — who are cultural warriors in their own right — justice within a traditional art institution? These are the questions that Drag: Self-Portraits and Body Politics, opening at London’s Hayward Gallery today, tries to answer, with works from over 30 artists exploring drag through their respective lenses. When we spoke with Drag’s curator, Vincent Honoré, a week before the show’s unveiling, his vision for the exhibition was clear. “The concept of the exhibition is to address drag and how drag has been used as an art form, via the work of visual artists from the ’60s onwards,” he explained. “We are including emerging artists as well as historical ones, and looking at how all these artists use drag to address cultural shifts, from many different angles — from feminism to post-colonialism to civil and gay rights.” Taking inspiration from their own bodies, alter-egos, identities and environments, the artists showcased in the display range from heavy-hitters like Leigh Bowery, Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, to newer, but just as important, drag practitioners like Victoria Sin and Samuel Fosso.

“While researching the exhibition I spoke to a lot of drag performers, sociologists, and people from different backgrounds,” says Honoré, speaking to the wide range to experiences represented in the show. “I realised that it was absolutely crucial to offer a diversity of expressions. Actually, I believe about 50% of the artists we have are drag kings, with a lot of feminist artists included, for example Eleanor Antin or VALIE EXPORT. I think it was very important to speak from different cultural perspectives, so looking at Asia, African and South America. South America had so much political drag art in the ’70s, especially in Chile, where it was forbidden to have any personal expressions other than the binary one. Doing drag, or being a crossdresser, was illegal. So there’s this fantastic artist in the exhibition called Francesco Copello who is dancing in drag with a Chilean flag. That was extraordinary for people at the time.”

To preserve an authentic outlook on drag culture, the exhibition purposefully shines a light on more underground and subversive drag scenes. “We are only addressing self-portraiture, therefore I excluded everything that has to do with documentation,” states Honoré. “I really wanted to present something that has to do with self-performativity and the own voice of the artist. We are not showing mainstream culture, apart from a video by Leigh Bowery of a performance from 1988, and a painting by David Hoyle — he usually does these when he does drag cabaret, and they’re rarely exhibited. In terms of the breadth of all the different kinds of drag, we are including drag queens, drag kings, and biodrags, and we are including very different narratives of drag. Drag originated and is mainly rooted in mainstream culture. It’s really coming from that culture, and that’s why it’s so critical because it embraces it — it embraces cabaret, music, fashion, balls, everything.”

10 Radical Self-portraits serving Ultimate Drag Realness. By Cameron Cook. Sleek Magazine,  August 22, 2018. 

Also of interest :

Drag is an art form. By Emilia Slupecka. Artefact , March 1, 2018 

Who Says Drag Can't Be Fine Art? By Emily Colucci.  Vice, October 14 2016

The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric

 

Every book has a jumping-off point, a theoretical idea, a text or an artwork that sparks the imagination and gets the ideas up and moving. For me, that point was embodied in the turn-of-the-twentieth-century social economist Thorstein Veblen, a Yale-trained academic whose ideas I discovered as a Yale graduate student and who helped set my ideas about spectacle in motion. Actually, you could say two theorists shaped my ideas: Veblen and RuPaul. If you’ve heard the term conspicuous consumption or seen a person carry a designer handbag with the logo scrawled across the front in a giant font, you already know a lot about Veblen. He was best known for a book published in 1899 called The Theory of the Leisure Class in which he lays out his claims about the ways that conspicuousness, spectacle, and over-the-topness connect to power. The book was published less than two years after the opening of the sumptuous Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. The Theory of the Leisure Class made such a splash that it inspired of-the-moment novelists like Edith Wharton, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, and Marcel Proust to write fictional illustrations of Veblen’s teachings about the role of appearance. One critic described Veblen’s book as “an opportunity for American fiction,” a chance for writers to fictionalize Veblen’s economic theories. His ability to see beyond the dazzling surface of things shows how he was able to offer up a theory of the leisure class, and it is telling that the boldest analysis of wealth and its patterns of consumption was written by a critic who was the child of immigrants and who grew up in a simple agrarian household where luxuries were not tolerated. As Veblen’s fictional mother Kari Bunde Veblen says in the economist Leonard Silk’s posthumous 1966 satirical play Veblen: A Play in Three Acts, “All those Yankee women are good for is to dress up.”

The narrative of The Theory of the Leisure Class goes like this: leisure is the only job of the wealthy class, as opposed to the working or middle classes, so all the leisure class has to do is appear, exist. That’s their only task. Of course, this is all wrapped up into a spirit of capitalism that rewards those who are able to seize the most, as if barbarians in a jungle. For Veblen, one of the defining features of the leisure class is the need to always look really rich, where looking that rich highlights a competitive ability to get more and better and bigger things than anybody else. Under capitalism man hunts but he also requires physical evidence of his conquests, evidence that takes the form of “trophies”–stuff–that show off his prowess. He beats his chest and yells in triumph, and as he screams and yells, gold coins pour out of his mouth.

Veblen’s theory of the leisure class is an alluring one because it is all about appearance. Clothes are the most visual artifacts available to convey messages about social standing. A high-society portrait like John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Hugh Hammersley (1892) gets straight to the point: a well-heeled woman of means luxuriates in a reddish-pink couture gown with ruffles around her neck. She crosses her legs, pointy gold shoes on. The rug is opulent, as is the chaise she gracefully leans on. There is an abundance of abundance in this image: an abundance of gold cloth behind her, framing her portrait, and the dress itself is so voluminous that the whole thing couldn’t even be captured within the frame of the painting. No finger is lifted–not even one–and here the painting tells us, in unmistakable terms, that Mrs. Hugh Hammersley doesn’t work. She is not only posing for the painter; she has the leisure to do so. Here’s what Veblen would have said to Mrs. Hammersley if he had stormed into the room during her portrait sitting: “Our dress . . . should not only be expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer is not engaged in any kind of productive labor.” Or, put plainly, Mrs. Hammersley is a show-off, bragging about her pocketbook and her luxury.

Fancy clothes are restrictive, binding, and otherwise totally ridiculous for everyday tasks. We can look at this painting of Mrs. Hammersley, which is ultimately a trophy, and feel certain that she is not about to mow the lawn in that dress. It’s the clothes that drive home the message. Indeed, Veblen was always interested in the binding powers of clothing and once taught a seminar at the University of Chicago on the history of high heels, arguing that they were intended to bind women as yet another trophy item for men while also demonstrating the man’s ability to pay. Think of the stunning photo-realistic paintings of the contemporary American artist Marilyn Minter, a work like Strut (2005), a blown-up image of a dirty, bruised, even bound foot struggling to walk in a glamorous, diamond-laced Christian Dior heel. For Veblen, the high heel is added evidence of enforced leisure, an object that places women under house arrest. It is “obviously unfit for work.” While such apparel may make women attractive and expensive-looking, the trade-off is that it incapacitates the wearer, making her conspicuously exempt from manual labor and turning her into an object in the process.

Veblen focused on how fashion is used to communicate power by showing off, but what he missed is that when you are forced to the margins, drawing attention to yourself is an act of self-love. Veblen wrote about wealthy people who already have power, and that’s fair enough. But using the effervescence of creative agency, style, and fabulousness allows marginalized people to empower themselves as a triple act of defiance, confidence, and self-love. For the fabulous, those beautiful eccentrics, a group of rogue creative individuals linked together by sensational style, the body is the canvas for creative expression, but it’s never just style for style’s sake. Eccentrics see norms but then use their bodies and aesthetics to displace and expose them.

Fabulous is a form of currency, there’s no doubt about it. The catch is that a sickening outfit doesn’t pay the rent. You can’t give your landlord twenty thousand Instagram likes instead of the rent–cash money, honey! This kind of currency falls into what Elizabeth Currid-Halkett has called “the Warhol economy,” an economic world of creativity where being at the right party or fashion show at the right time is just what you need to advance in the creative industries. In our social media era, the more followers you have and the bigger the splash you can make online, the more chance you have to turn those followers’ admiration into paid opportunities. More likes means more attention, which then can often be translated into other forms of cultural and economic capital. If we can figure out how to get the attention of consumers and other passersby long enough to make them interested in a specific product, idea, or experience, then knowing how to get attention becomes an important type of currency.

That’s why 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 alternative universes and systems of value. The thing about these kinds of alternate universes is that the real world and the alternative universe both exist at the same time.

Madison Moore 

Full Stop 

The Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in an essay called “Why Can’t a Smart Woman Love Fashion?,” wrote of her frustration that women in Western culture who want to be taken seriously need to show an indifference to appearance: “I hid my high heels. I told myself that orange, flattering to my skin tone, was too loud. That my large earrings were too much. I wore clothes I would ordinarily consider uninteresting, nothing too bright or too fitted or too unusual. I made choices thinking only about this: How should a serious woman writer be? I didn’t want to look as if I tried too hard.”

Indeed, why is it that if you care about fashion, style, and being a bit flashy, then somehow your work is unserious? Why does wearing a sequined caftan to a department meeting make you unproductive and incompetent? I agree with Jack Halberstam, who wrote in The Queer Art of Failure that “being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant.” The problem with “seriousness” is that we don’t get the chance to follow “visionary insights or flights of fancy.”

In 1991, fashion historian Valerie Steele wrote, very humorously, that “academics may be the worst-dressed middle-class occupational group in the United States,” not because they are roundly incapable of fashion, but because they have been trained to associate an interest in surfaces with frivolity, inappropriate to their practices of close reading, deep interpretation, and analysis, all tools that aim to dig beneath the surface. In the essay Steele explains how her dissertation on fashion history was received by the Department of History at Yale with scorn and suspicion. “Academics implicitly believe that fashion is frivolous, vain, and politically incorrect.”

The issue is why certain people believe that fashion is not worth pursuing, intellectually or aesthetically. The answer to this hostility to fashion, for the art critic Hal Foster, might be that we are in an age of “total design”; in the megastore of commodities, packaging is more important than what’s inside. This culture of superficial appearances is “all image and no interiority.” If only we could get rid of surfaces once and for all, the suggestion seems to be, then we would finally be liberated from the chains of capitalism and able to enjoy a truly democratic social world.

Appearance matters, so much so that the French philosopher Guy Debord once said, “All social life is mere appearance.” As early as ancient Egypt, laws were in place to rigidly define who could wear what kinds of clothing. At the time, only the upper classes were allowed to wear sandals, and later in Rome only a citizen could go out in a toga. In medieval Europe both church and state viewed luxurious clothing as an indication of the excesses of vanity. As citizens aimed to outdo their neighbors in the ballet of appearances the church retaliated by inaugurating sumptuary laws that defined how members of a given social rank could dress, essentially sifting them out by controlling how they could appear. At one point it was illegal for lower classes to wear clothes that were above their social class even if they could afford them. The whole point was to prevent confusion between the upper class and the lower class. What these laws tell us is that appearances matter enough that large-scale institutions, like the church and the government, have intervened to manage how people look.

By 1750 Jean-Jacques Rousseau railed against the emptiness and vanity of luxury and the pursuit of appearance, advocating for a more naturalist state of humankind. “There would be neither vanity nor luxury” in his vision of an idealized, definitely unfabulous Christian society, because such artifice places emphasis on the external rather than on the qualities of one’s character. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft took it further, describing women who follow the whims of fashion as slaves. “The soul is left out,” she felt, “and none of the parts are tied together by what may properly be termed character. This varnish of fashion, which seldom sticks very close to sense, may dazzle the weak; but leave nature to itself, and it will seldom disgust the wise.” Wollstonecraft believed that the artifice of fashion blinds the weak, whereas the truly wise do not feel a need to enhance the natural. Here again is the association of fashion and appearance with artifice and deception, wherein the naturalness of the body automatically means the display of truth.

Despite church- and government-backed sumptuary laws and intellectual efforts to control appearances up through at least the late 18th century, the boom in industrialization and the rise of commodity culture in the 19th century ushered in a heightened role for appearance, shifting the focus away from the body as an expression of truth and toward external appearance as a manifestation of personal character. Take the volume of novels, realist fiction, fashion journals, and etiquette guides published in the 19th century, such as Stephane Mallarmé’s 1874 fashion journal La dernière mode as well as writings by Zola, Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Oscar Wilde on the dandy as a creature of cultivated appearance. As Lord Henry memorably tells Dorian Gray in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” But the emphasis on appearances and new ways of looking that exploded in the 19th century, which included things like world exhibitions, arcades, fashion, the display of commodities, and the flâneur, did not mean that appearances were finally emancipated from theories of deception. Negative critiques of appearance increasingly led to what one historian called “conspiratorial theories of mass deception,” or the ways skeptical critics argue against the value of spectacle, fashion, and ornamentation.

In 1904 the German sociologist Georg Simmel argued against fashion because he felt it differentiated groups at the same time as it actually created a certain unity within them, at least temporarily. The evolution of fashion was largely about keeping the class boundaries intact. “Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses; and thus the game goes merrily on.” Fashion, for Simmel, is a line of demarcation that visually solidifies unity and membership within a social class. This is still true today: the moment a red-hot fashion item becomes all the rage, the trend is over. Trends are less about class status and more about subcultural status and an access to cool. The reason fashions change so quickly is essentially to make sure that a higher class status is not given in error to someone like Rastignac who can afford to purchase the status symbols of a particular class but isn’t actually a part of it.

For what it’s worth, I don’t actually believe in “trends.” Trends do happen, of course, but I’m of the mind that having a personal look, a signature style, is a much more interesting way to go about fashion. A signature look means you are you all the time, no matter what’s going on in the fashion world. I will always love black leather pants and big hoop earrings, whether or not they are “in.” Period. Have you ever seen Anna Wintour with a different haircut? Or Lady Bunny? Even as you hold down the fort of your personal look, the fashion system will still move at a breakneck pace, but having style is timeless.

No matter how much or how little you’re interested in fashion, whether you’re invested in the latest trends or if you march to the beat of your own drum, and even if you think fashion doesn’t impact you, know that it does. I have a pair of spiked wedge shoes that are always a conversation piece when I wear them out. They are my favorite thing, and I would be totally depressed if I lost them somehow. Whenever people see them in my room they always ask to try them on. Everyone does this—male, female, heterosexual, gay. They try them on for the fun of it and they love the feeling the shoes give them. But then they say: “I could never wear those,” a phrase we have all used to describe an item of clothing that makes us uncomfortable or that we don’t see ourselves in because it goes against the image we have already constructed for ourselves. But who actually says we can’t wear it?

The power of appearance, that’s “who.”

Fashion naysayers are often people who are “uncomfortable with taking full responsibility for their own looks,” Anne Hollander tells us, “who either fear the purely visual demands of social life—‘appearance’ or ‘appearances’—or don’t trust the operation of their own taste,” which means in the end that they “feel threatened and manipulated by fashion.” Negative theories of appearance emerge out of a nervousness and anxiety about one’s own way of looking, which coincidentally works to reinforce the power of appearance. When Rastignac puts on his best clothes and shows up at the house of Madame de Restaud he believes he is entitled to be there. The influential sociologist Erving Goffman, who used theater as a metaphor to explain everyday social interactions, also believed that as soon as we walk into a room we are already busy trying to understand details about a person’s background, things like his or her class status, trustworthiness, and sense of self. Appearance prompts a close reading of other people, a reading strategy meant to tease out biographical and contextual information.

Everyone has a ritual of appearance. When we groom ourselves and choose what to wear for different social occasions we are already performing a specific version of ourselves. Even choosing not to groom, wearing the same thing every day, or saying things like “I don’t care about fashion!” is still a confirmation of appearance. It is still a look. There are ways of dressing up for job interviews, going shopping, first dates, and gym class that are different from going to a concert, getting into exclusive nightclubs, attending a vogue ball, or working at avant-garde fashion boutiques. No matter the given socio-theatrical situation, people are always subject to the laws of appearance. This is what the American drag icon RuPaul meant when in his 1995 autobiography Lettin’ It All Hang Out he said, “You’re born naked and the rest is drag,” a significant comment because it implicates everyone in the act of getting dressed.

Madison Moore

Lit Hub

And when I listen to all my favorite Prince tunes or every time his music comes on at a party, I will whisper, Thank you. Thank you for setting me free. Thank you for helping me accept my own identity as a black gay male, diamonds, pearls, and all.

                                                                Madison Moore

                                                                 The Paris Review

In your book you talk about writer Minh-Ha T. Pham’s idea of ‘Fabulousness as the right to be seen.’ When was this something you knew for yourself?

When you try to live in your body differently, there are so many ways that you are suppressed. Whether that’s being told you’re too femme or you’re not masc enough or you’re too that or you’re too this, it's really harmful and it actually makes you fold up inside. It makes you want to feel like oh, okay, well I need to be like this now because if I want to be desired, to be kissed, to meet people, to be loved, I have to be the way they want me to be. What I’ve discovered and what I love so much about fabulousness as an idea is that people say, fuck you and do you know what? That’s not me, I don’t want to do that anymore. That’s the recurring theme that I found in almost all of the interviews I did with the folks I spoke to for the book as well as thinking about my own personal experience. If you can’t take me at my most, if you can’t take me living my best life, then maybe you don’t deserve me at all. Then finding a community of folks who are with you and deserve you as you are.

In what ways is fabulousness politically powerful? What is the power of fabulousness in marginalized and queer communities especially?

Fabulousness is a political gesture because to live in the world is to be constantly under surveillance. As we see people, we try to read their bodies and assess them visually based off of the clues they give us and the clothes they wear. It could be that you might be a business person in a suit and I might assume these 10 things about you because you’re in a business look. But the stakes are different when you are gender nonconforming or queer, marginalized in other ways and you decide to be a spectacle or to be visual. You are not fitting into the boxes people want to put you in. You are more visible thereby more able to be attacked verbally, even physically. Think about how privileged people are to circulate and move totally unbothered totally unharassed then think about people, what it must be like, to actually have your photo taken without your permission or to be laughed or to be verbally or physically attacked. Just try to get a sandwich. And you can’t even do that without being somehow harassed. For me, these are the political stakes of fabulousness and that’s what I would want people to remember or realize.

from : The Politics of Being Fabulous,interview by Elissa Goodman, Them

Dr. Moore, who is already at work on a second book, about the sociology of clubbing, says gentrification in cities like London, New York and Barcelona is threatening clubs and other arts spaces that act as crucibles of fabulousness.

The difference between clubs in Europe and U.S. is that in Europe, club culture is seen as an engine of creativity,” Dr. Moore said. “My love for techno — my ability to get lost in that perpetual motion — is due to my love of classical music. It all ties together and merits support. Could you imagine a club in New York getting the same tax breaks as the New York Philharmonic or Lincoln Center? Yet that’s that happens in Europe.

He also points out something that had been a subtext of the Berlin ball weekend — that in an age of President Trump, populist firebrands like France’s Marine Le Pen, and a global lurch to the right, clubs, ballrooms and other spaces frequented by marginalized people and their allies need to coordinate and fight for their right to exist.

 Clubs are engines of politics,” Dr. Moore said. “A day after the ball, nearly all of the clubs in Berlin got together and staged one of the country’s largest protests against the AfD,” a far-right political party whose full name translates as Alternative for Germany, and which now sits in the Bundestag, the country’s federal legislature. The party’s leader has been rebuked for playing down Germany’s Nazi past.

from : He Literally Wrote the Book on Fabulousness.  New York Times

What ‘Fabulous’  means to the queer community. review by Brandon Tensley.  PS Mag.