Queer author Yelena Moskovich on the rise of the lesbian aesthetic

Female homoeroticism has recurrently been used as a way of giving women’s fashion an edge. From Helmut Newton’s iconic photograph of Yves Saint Laurent’s Le Smoking for French in 1975 (above), to Carolyn Murphy and Angela Lindvall’s sultry embrace in Gucci’s autumn/winter ’97/’98 campaign, or later, Natalia Vodianova and Isabeli Fontana intertwined around a handbag to promote Versace’s autumn/winter ’08/’09 collection. Christian Dior, Moschino, Jean Paul Gaultier; editorials shot by the likes of Steven Meisel or Guy Bourdin – there are few fashion industry behemoths who haven’t depicted sapphic relationships in their work over the years.

While the lesbian aesthetic has long influenced the female silhouette with a sense deviance and self-rule, the lesbian women referenced were historically thought to be the opposite of fashionable. In short, lesbian has been a style of woman, but not a woman with style. As Inge Blackman and Kathryn Perry wrote in their essay in the spring 1990 of : “The contemporary lesbian is considered to be ‘congenitally’ unfashionable.”

Three decades later, however, it seems that this era’s cool, confident, trendsetting woman is indeed lesbian – or at least looks like it, reflected on the runways and in street style. Rain Laurent, editor-in-chief of lesbian fashion magazine agrees that “classic dyke style clues” are now in fashion en masse, evidenced in “the breaking down of the distinction between women’s and menswear and the rise in street and sportswear”. Now, she explains, “women are opting for the less restrictive garments that their male counterparts have been enjoying for hundreds of years.”

Dressing for ourselves

A sense of personal freedom is over-riding gender presentation – and it’s about time! As a 1975 article in stated, lesbians weren’t opting for men’s tailoring to pass as or look like men, they were dressing to feel “free to move, play, run, work, catch the eye of other women, and free to mark themselves as off-limits to men”. While the structured silhouette, durable fabrics and functional design of tailoring once defined a level of male privilege; when adopted by women, androgyny became the expression of accessibility, voice and ownership.

The new Karla Welch x Dockers genderless collection references that minimalist, working-class tomboy that lesbians embodied in the 1990s; think Gina Gershon’s character in the 1996 film and Milla Jovovich in the Versace Jeans couture 1998 campaign. Elsewhere, recent collections have seen allusions to municipal and military uniforms, particularly Vêtement’s dyke security guard look (spring/summer 2020 menswear, pictured above), Sacai’s gender cross-pollinating army-corsets (autumn/winter ’19/’20), Stella McCartney’s khaki boiler suit (autumn/winter ’19/’20) and Celine’s biker-meets-factory-worker leather jumpsuit (spring/summer 2019). Dyke nomenclature is trending because practicality and comfort are becoming staples of sexiness – women are dressing for themselves, rather than the male gaze. Kennah Lau, the lesbian model making her mark on the runway for the likes of Viktor & Rolf, Alexander Wang and Balenciaga, points out that pieces like Carhartt workwear, bumbags, Birkenstock sandals and Dr. Martens boots are now mainstream. “I remember being called a ‘big lesbo’ for wearing that shit in high school,” she says. “I never imagined seeing it all in the audiences at fashion shows.”

Director, photographer and activist Christelle de Castro, who’s shot collections for Telfar, Eckhaus Latta and Acne, is gender non-conforming, so dresses primarily in men’s clothes. “I prefer hiding my curves because to me, that is sexy,” she explains. “I don’t hide them out of shame or because I don’t want them. I love having titties. It’s purely and specifically about how I want my shirt to hang off of my body. I don’t wear men’s clothes so that I can feel like a man or even feel masculine,” she adds. “It’s the opposite: my style makes me feel sexy and confident, which makes me feel like a whole woman.”

What women want

Women using their style to advocate for themselves has has been at the core of the dyke or lesbian aesthetic for decades, as Mary Jean Haley expressed in her article “What Gay Women Wear” published in San Francisco journal, in 1971. “Young gay women want no part of the male-female, oppression-submission roles,” she wrote. “They do want to look like the women they are.” 

For his autumn/winter ’19/’20 collection, Thom Browne emblazoned several of his androgynous designs with portraits by Romaine Brooks of the British sculptor Lady Una Troubridge – lesbian partner of author Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall. Elswhere, Givenchy’s spring/summer 2019 muse was the 20th century non-binary lesbian travel writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach (above). Balenciaga’s collections over the past couple of years have accentuated hips, broadened shoulders, revived chaste-like one pieces (shirts with gloves, pants with shoes), and extended high collars for anonymity, reclaiming both the priestess and spinster (traditional lesbian slurs) as sexual prowess. Both the homebody and the Amazon (another set of lesbian stereotypes) became kinky apocalyptic survivors; see Marine Serre’s autumn/winter ’19/’20 mini-dresses made from re-constructed plaid scarves, and head-to-toe cosmic bodysuits with matching face masks. Vêtements revamped the modern woman as an intrepid menace to society’s branding, revelling in the meta-irony of her own cultural criticism by re-appropriating capitalist merch. Viktor & Rolf’s spring/summer 2019 couture princess dresses with slogans like “I’m not shy I just don’t like you” and just plain “NO” also pushed back against the so-called female legacy of submission. And Gucci’s autumn/winter ’17/’18 collaboration with Spanish artist Coco Capitán scrawled over the Gucci logo on vintage pieces in black, with revisionist aphorisms like “Common sense is not common” and “Tomorrow is now (overlapped with) yesterday”.

Mainstream feminist sentiment as T-shirt typeface has also become sensation, from “The Future is Female” T-shirts that everyone went wild for in 2015, to Dior’s spring/summer 2017 collaboration with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “We should all be feminists”. The overlooked origin of this trend is a 1975 snapshot by dyke activist and photographer Liza Cowan for her series What The Well Dressed Dyke Will Wear, taken of her girlfriend at the time, musician Alix Dobkin wearing a T-shirt with the now infamous slogan

Bridging the lesbian paradox

“We are seen, paradoxically, as both prudes in the queer world [in comparison to “hyper-sexual” gay men] and as nymphomaniacs in the heterosexual world,” writer JoAnn Loulan explains in the essay collection , edited by Karla Jay. Queer female expression has long been reforming these binary stereotypes, and re-focusing sexuality away from male governance. 

New queer brands are celebrating the fluidity, too. NYC label Vaquera’s trousers cut from chintzy floral fabric, Gauntlett Cheng’s gender-fluid knits, and Luar’s “fierce fatales of whatever gender making a glorious mess of the old a male power structure codes” (as self-proclaimed on their Instagram) are just some of the examples.

Chromat’s spring/summer 2019 Saturation Collection (above) is another case in point, featuring garments that re-imagined the wet T-Shirt look as a motif of empowerment. “Being a queer femme to me is being punk, being a non-conformist and that’s how I think of dyke fashion,” Chromat’s founding designer Becca McCharen-Tran explains. “We don’t care about appealing to men, only to ourselves and each other. In the past, that was considered not fashionable because fashion was about being considered desirable within a patriarchal system. Fuck that!”

Putting the lesbian aesthetic on the fashion map

Still, fashion is widely seen as created by and for gay men and straight women – despite a considerable number of gay models and queer women designing, styling and shooting these looks. As queer model Elsa Sjökvist (who’s walked for Maison Margiela, Marni and Ann Demeulemeester – pictured above) confirms: “I meet more lesbian models than straight ones.” editor-in-chief Laurent echoes her sentiment: “People have a blind filter towards lesbians, as soon as it looks good, it’s ‘fashion’ or ‘a straight girl’.”

This “trap of the visual field”, as feminist scholar Peggy Phelan puts it in , confuses depiction with agency. “If representational visibility equals power,” she explains, “then almost-naked young white women should be running the world.” 

Holli Smith, the hairstylist behind some of the most quintessential dyke cuts of the past decade (as worn by Kim Ann Foxman, Stine Omar, Freja Beha Erichsen), notes that “[dyke] haircuts that show signals of the ‘other’ and give visibility to the person wearing it [as being a lesbian]” don’t have the same impact once they become part of mainstream style. “There are trendy straight girls with shaved heads everywhere, it doesn’t mean what it used to,” Smith continues, though she doesn’t see this as a negative. “So many expressions of sexuality are now going beyond ‘feminine and masculine’ and I’m so grateful for this.”

Female queer presence is not just being referenced, it is also being earnestly voiced. Balenciaga’s latest autumn/winter ’19/’20 Parisian couples campaign shows a series of real couples sharing a moment of intimacy. Three of those couples were queer women, including Sjökvist and her girlfriend Asta Stensson; Dorothy Sing Zhang and Di Lan, and Laura Suazo and Ysaunny Brito.

The very real concern is that the fashion industry and society at large is still profiting from lesbian invisibility. In her essay “Can Lesbian Identity Survive The Gender Revolution?”, Shannon Keating asserts that “lesbianism in the 21st century lacks a coherent cultural definition”. Giving attention and recognition to the lesbian aesthetic is important in order to preserve its cultural history. In the same way that Hal Fischer’s put aesthetic identity on the map for gay men, gay women need acknowledgement of their codes – particularly in an era when they are undeniably becoming the role models for women at large. As Kennah Lau summarises: “Maybe a push for dyke style on all kinds of women can remind men that we aren’t here for you, we are here for us, and always have been.” 

The NatashasVirtuoso

Click Here: Pandora Jewelry