Can fashion help abolish gender norms altogether? PERFORMANCE DUO DARK MATTER EXPLORE HOW FASHION CAN TRULY SUPPORT THE TRANS EXPERIENCE WITH NEW ONLINE PROJECT BY: IONE GAMBEL SOURCE: DAZEDDIGITAL.COM
The accessibility of information online has undoubtedly provided a number of platforms for marginalised people to speak out and construct their own realities. Away from a world in which their voices are often unable to be heard, the power of social media and all that exists as a result of its existence can be credited at least in part for initiating fashion’s recent push towards a more inclusive agenda. Making the jump from IRL to URL, Dark Matter are the art duo hailing from New York using poetry and performance to dismantle our society enforced gender binaries and restrictions. Their latest project, ctrl/alt/gender (made in collaboration with Ace Hotel) uses the Squarespace platform to combine multiple formats such as poetry, imagery and ‘behind the scenes’ style tidbits, creating an online zine examining the perceived artifice in constructing a gender fluid fashion image, vs the lived experience of those who lie outside of the gender binary. We caught up with the duo just after the zine release to discuss fashion as a political tool, the gender restrictions wwithin the industry, and how online life has opened up new possibilities for queer and gender nonconforming people.
How did the idea for a digital zine come about? Dark Matter: We were approached by the Ace Hotel to work on something together for New York Fashion Week. A lot of people think of our work as primarily poetry but we do also have a strong commitment to style. We thought this would be a great opportunity to actually produce images together that reflect many of the aesthetic and political aspirations we pursue in our work. As young, gender non-conforming artists, a lot of our work relies on the digital sphere--because traditional/formal media and arts spaces have been hyper-saturated with more normative (read: white, cis, hetero) bodies. So a zine it was! What ideas did you want to explore with ctrl/alt/gender? Dark Matter: We wanted to challenge the idea that there is something inherently gendered about fashion. More broadly, we wanted to push back on the idea that gender is what we look like to begin with. So much of the dialogue about gender and fashion erases trans (and especially gender nonconforming people), so we wanted to see what would happen when we were present. We also wanted to experience and think about what it felt like to ‘stage’ gender nonconformity for a fashion shoot when we both dress like this in our daily lives. What is it about the camera, about the pose, about the shoot that gives greater permissibility to gender transgression than the public more generally? What happens when the camera stops but everyone still thinks we are still dressing up? Was the decision to time the production of the zine during New York Fashion Week a conscious one? Dark Matter: We thought it’d be a neat interruption in the usual parade of bodies and aesthetics that occupy fashion week. It’s frequently the case that gender nonconformity and ‘androgyny’ are valued as ideas in fashion week, but trans politics/issues have little appearance in how those concepts are laid out or presented. The representation of trans aesthetics in mainstream fashion often renders trans people as spectacles or tokens. What do you want people to take away from the project after engaging with ctrl/alt/gender? Dark Matter: Recognise the expansive aesthetic possibilities of a world where people can dress the ways that represent them – and recognise that we currently live in a world where that is not yet possible. There are tremendous stakes for all kinds of people in something as simple as the clothes they wear. Additionally, recognise that we all have a stake in dismantling the gender binary and that doing so creates new ways of being and existing in the world for all of us (regardless of how we identify) So much of our art practice is about destabilising the binary of the URL & the IRL. Both of us grew up in the internet. The internet gave us access to aesthetics, ideas, and politics that we weren’t able to see IRL and those ‘images’ helped produce the ‘real’ selves we embody today. Something happens at the molecular level when you see an image shared on the internet of something you have never witnessed before. A new horizon or possibility is born for way more people who ‘stumble upon’ it. How effective do you believe fashion is as a tool for sociopolitical change? Dark Matter: Any artistic medium can be an effective political tool. It’s not the end game, but it is a strategy. Fashion happens to be one medium which contains broader structural/societal containment of gender. Destabilising fashion’s commitment to gendering clothing is one strategy, as is transforming the supply and labour chain through which clothes are produced (so people are paid living wages!), but it’s only one part of an overall vision of justice.
[Fe]male
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When writers and filmmakers depict the future, they often include one strange detail: men and women dressing alike. From the leather coats and sunglasses of The Matrix to the faded blue coveralls of Nineteen Eighty-Four, one of the characteristics of the imagined future is a break from gendered clothing, which is replaced by something more functional and utilitarian. It’s a world of zippered jumpsuits, where a corset or tie is as exotic an artifact as a fossil from the Pleistocene Era. Gender, these futurists seem to be saying, is an artifact of a less-progressive past. But is the future now? Recently, fashion designers like Gucci and hip boutiques have begun selling what’s being called gender-neutral or gender-free clothing: clothes that can be worn by either men or women. (Both The New York Times style section and The Guardian have recently covered this trend.) Then there was Target’s announcement in August that the retail giant would be eliminating gendered language in its children’s toys and bedding, transgender celebrity Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair cover and singer Miley Cyrus’ self-identification as gender-fluid. But before we raise a toast to a world of post-gender fashion, it’s important to differentiate between marketing and actual progress towards gender equality. To be sure, fashion can advocate for social change. But just as often, fashion will exploit social movements, aestheticizing them as a way to seem edgy and turn a profit. Subcultures, fashion and subversion To understand what fashion means, we have to place it into its historical context. Likewise, we can’t understand clothes outside of the society that gives them meaning -- or apart from the industry that makes and markets them. In my research, I’ve studied how subcultures in the United States have used clothing to create communities that are critical of mainstream values. And there’s a long history of gender lines being blurred in clothing as a way to demonstrate equality of the sexes or freedom from sexual roles. Founded in 1824, the New Harmony socialist utopian community let men and women both wear trousers. It was borderline-scandalous for the era, but representative of their vision of gender equality. In the late 19th century, women’s rights advocate Amelia Bloomer famously argued for the right of women to wear pants -- called bloomers -- under their shortened dresses. In less political subtexts, like the counterculture of the 1960s, unisex styles differentiated hippies from middle-class society. While this allowed hippies to recognize one another as people with similar values, looking different could also be dangerous. During filming for the countercultural road movie Easy Rider in parts of the South, actors Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper discovered that men who grew their hair long were often asked whether they were a boy or a girl -- and not in a friendly way. These real-life experiences were incorporated into the film’s violent ending. But before we raise a toast to a world of post-gender fashion, it’s important to differentiate between marketing and actual progress towards gender equality. When hip-hop became a nationwide cultural phenomenon in the 1980s, male and female breakdancers -- also known as b-boys and b-girls -- wore tracksuits and other athletic clothing while they performed, blurring gender roles for a shared physical ability. All of these examples happened organically, outside of the fashion industry. They show how people -- especially those on the margins -- adapt and remix the clothes that are available to them, fashioning new styles and new meanings in a process that anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has called “bricolage.”
The motives of the fashion industry On the other hand, when the fashion industry promotes unisex styles -- like the Peacock Revolution of the late 1960s or the groovy styles of the 1970s -- it’s always tied to making money. So while today’s unisex fashions may seem like another benchmark for equality, it’s rarely progressive when you look at it through the lens of a lucrative fashion industry that’s looking to turn a profit. Fashion, ultimately, is an industry that trades on notions of exoticism and aesthetics; to achieve these twin ideals, designers have historically exploited the oppressed or downtrodden. For example, in 2010, haute couture company Rodarte released a line of clothes and cosmetics inspired by the women who work in the maquiladoras, or factories, along the Mexico-US border. Poorly paid and often the victims of gender-based violence, these women’s lives became the source material for expensive clothes they could never afford and lipsticks with names like “Factory.” Equally repugnant was model and fashion designer Erin Wasson’s claim in 2008 that “The people with the best style for me are the people that are the poorest. Like, when I go down to Venice Beach and I see the homeless, like, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, they’re pulling out, like, crazy looks and they, like, pulled shit out of like garbage cans.’” African Americans have long been used by the fashion industry in this way. Posing Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen in the arms of screaming basketball player LeBron James on the cover of Vogue in 2008 was a not-so-subtle echo of racist images that depicted vulnerable white women threatened by animalistic black men. In the case of Taylor Swift’s colonial fantasy video for “Wildest Dreams,” blacks are entirely absent from its African locale. And fashion magazines have been known to “black up” white models rather than hire black ones. In all of these instances, racial differences, poverty and violence are repackaged as “exotic.” Aestheticized to appeal to our eyes, they create a clear distinction: there is us (the mainstream consumers) and them (the outsiders we are fascinated, disgusted or thrilled by). The fashion industry’s current attraction to unisex or gender-free clothing may be similar. While transgender models like Andreja Pejic and Hari Nef walk the runway and appear in fashion magazines, the real difficulties facing transgender individuals are often ignored. This is doubly true for transgender women of color who are the victims of shocking amounts of violence. Given the fashion industry’s historically poor record of including African Americans as models or designers (outside of the urban fashion niche), it’s unlikely that it will be any more progressive when it comes to portraying the reality of the lives of transgender people of color -- or in employing them behind the scenes. Probably more than any other daily act we engage in, clothes are how we convey our identity to the world. For that reason, they are important. They can be used in radical, subversive ways. But before we congratulate the fashion industry for making gender distinction a thing of the past,
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