Title:
Unsuitable : a history of lesbian fashion
Author:
Publication Date:
2024
Publication Information:
London : Hurst and Company, 2024.
©2024
Physical Description:
xi, 268 pages, 28 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), portraits (some color) ; 24 cm
ISBN:
9781805260967
Abstract:
"The way we dress can show or hide who we are; make us fit in, make us stand out, or make our own community. Yet "lesbian fashion" has been strangely overlooked. What secrets can it reveal about the lives and status of queer women through the ages? The lesbian past is slippery: often deliberately hidden, edited or left unrecorded. "Unsuitable" restores to history the dazzlingly varied clothes worn by women who love women, from top hats to violet tiaras. This story spans centuries and countries, from "Gentleman Jack" in nineteenth-century Yorkshire and Queen Christina of seventeenth-century Sweden, to Paris modernism, genderqueer Berlin, butch/femme bar culture and gay rights activists--via drag kings, "Vogue" editors and the Harlem Renaissance. This book is a kaleidoscope of the margins and the mainstream, celebrating trans lesbian style, Black lesbian style, and gender nonconformity. You don't have to be queer or fashionable to be enthralled by this hidden history. "Unsuitable" lights it up for the world to see, in all its finery" --Sleeve.
Contents:
Introduction -- Part One: We Were Always Here -- 1. Tunics and Violets: Sappho and Her Afterlives -- 2. Christina of Sweden, Girl King -- 3. Anne Lister: Diaries and Dress -- 4. Literary Lovers: 1910s Japan -- Part Two: Paris to Harlem: The Lesbian 1920s -- 5. Paris Lesbos: The Sapphic Capital -- 6. The Queer Modernism of British Vogue -- 7. The Complete Appearance of a Lady: Trans Lesbians in Weimar Berlin -- 8. In the Life: Lady Lovers of the Harlem Renaissance -- Part Three: A Butch/Femme Interlude -- 9. Looking 'Right': The Mid-Century Lesbian Bar -- 10. A Note on Femmes -- Part Four: Miraculous Masculinity -- 11. Breeches Roles and Female Husbands: Cross-Dressed Britain in the 1700s -- 12. Variety: Music Hall, Male Impersonation and a Turning Century -- 13. Gladys Bentley: A Sartorial History -- 14. Stormé DeLarverie and the Dawn of the Drag King -- Part Five: Lesbian Politics, Political Lesbians -- 15. The Lesbian Threat of the Suffragettes -- 16. Uniforms of the Second Wave: Lesbian Feminist Dress Codes -- 17. T-Shirts: The Billboards of the Body -- 18. The Fashion of Liberation -- Afterword.
Language:
English
