dapperQ Style: Ungendering Fashion

By Anita Dolce Vita

Photography by The Street Sensei

Foreword by famed genderfluid activist Desmond Is Amazing

From the editor-in-chief of leading queer style magazine dapperQ, a bold, beautiful, and inclusive collection that encourages everyone to be comfortable expressing their own personal style however they choose.

Fashion plays a significant role in the construction of identity. How we style our clothing and adorn our bodies sends a message not only about who we are as individuals, but the norms and values of communities, cultures, and societies across the world. For too long, mainstream Western fashion has promoted unattainable beauty standards and restrictive binaries as a means of social control. As editor-in-chief of leading queer style magazine dapperQ, Anita Dolce Vita has provided a platform that transcends these rigid, exclusionary, and oppressive fashion rules, inspiring people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender presentations to think differently about both queer fashion and beauty as art and visual activism and ultimately have a deeper, more fulfilling relationship with style. She believes that fashion should reflect who we are and values such as visibility, belonging, and liberation. In this refreshing style book, she shows that, no matter your gender identity, race, body size, ability, age, or style, queer fashion is for everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9780062986221

Anita Dolce Vita

Anita Dolce Vita is editor-in-chief of leading queer style magazine dapperQ, a queer style writer, and executive event producer behind some of the world's largest celebrations of queer style, including fashion showcases at the Brooklyn Museum and the first ever queer style panel to be featured at the South by Southwest conference. Anita lives in New York City.

Book preview

Introduction

Queer not as being about who you’re having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.

—bell hooks

In September 2022, dapperQ hosted Bloom, our seventh annual New York Fashion Week (NYFW) show in collaboration with Brooklyn Museum. It was a triumphant comeback after a two-year COVID-19 hiatus and featured eight queer designers and more than seventy models. The show provided an alternative to the traditional binary men’s and women’s shows and was the largest NYFW runway event showcasing queer style.

As I looked around the room, I was especially proud to see a reflection of the rich diversity of not only New York City, but our LGBTQIA+ communities. We curated the show with an all-queer production team, platformed majority LGBTQIA+ and POC designers, and featured models reflecting our ongoing commitment to inclusivity. (Nylon magazine once noted that our shows are probably one of the most diverse during NYFW.)

The joy of queer fashion on display at our NYFW show set against the backdrop of a growing anti-queer sociopolitical climate—and not just in the United States, but globally as well—exemplified the emotional duality of queer life. But it also represented the resilience of LGBTQIA+ communities and the revolutionary heritage of our queer elders.

LGBTQIA+ and POC communities have a rich legacy of being creative visionaries in beauty and fashion. In fact, fashion has been at the core of some of the most pivotal moments in queer history. Throughout the press coverage of the 1836 grand larceny trial of Mary Jones, a Black transgender woman who made history as one of the first-ever trans people documented in the United States, more was made of her attire—a dress, wig, and white earrings—than her alleged crime. As portrayed on contemporary shows such as Gentleman Jack, queer women throughout history have rejected society’s strict definitions of appropriate feminine attire, which later emboldened all women to wear clothing that had once been considered only acceptable for men, including pants as a daily wardrobe staple. And from the late twentieth century until today, the fashions of various LGBTQIA+ subcultures, like the leather scene and the house ballroom community, have become staples of queer iconography, from Tom of Finland to RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Contemporary queer designers are challenging the old rules of fashion on multiple fronts. Transguy Supply creative director Auston Bjorkman and No Sesso head designer Pierre Davis are pioneers for trans representation on the runways of New York Fashion Week; Christian Cowan and Angie Chuang are pushing the boundaries of queer and genderless expression; and Christopher John Rogers centers Black femininity in his collections.

For centuries, our creative talents have shaped culture and our innovations have inspired movements, and where queer fashion goes, the world follows. Nevertheless, our ideas have often been co-opted by mainstream society without any credit or visibility.

dapperQ has helped fight that problem. What started as a personal blog focused on masculine style over a decade ago has helped me challenge my own assumptions rooted in gendered fashion, unlearn the parts that no longer served me, and embrace the components that led to my femme liberation. For a period, as a feminine-presenting lesbian, I felt invisible while running dapperQ, particularly when I felt pressured to present a stereotypical narrative that masculinity was the only gold standard for queer women to aspire to and that femmes were (supposedly) already represented by cisgender, heteronormative, fatphobic, transphobic, ableist, and white-centered fashion media. Both of these ideas are rooted in the binary, and both are wholly untrue. As a result of my personal evolution and journey, the brand has expanded to be inclusive of the full spectrum of queer style and has grown into a multichannel media company with a comprehensive digital magazine, event production team, and thriving social media presence.

Along the way, dapperQ has become a preeminent voice in queer fashion and beauty that serves to prompt unlearning and relearning around gender presentation. It is one of the most widely read digital queer style magazines in the world, and I’m proud to think of my team and me inspiring people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender presentations to think differently about how they show up in the world and how fashion and beauty inform that.

This book is a beautiful next step in that mission. Like life in general, birthing dapperQ Style has been filled with highs and lows. It has taken numerous paths and multiple iterations, and I embarked upon this journey during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic while serving as a frontline worker. There were so many times when I thought this book would never see the light of day. But what kept me going was the inspiration I received from the over three dozen prominent queer folks I was privileged to interview—from artists to designers to activists—about their relationships with fashion and how it has informed, influenced, and even agitated their lives.

As ever, the magic of queer fashion sustained and uplifted me.

"Part I: Visibility explores the ways in which queer fashion informs how the world sees us, how we see each other, and—perhaps most importantly—how we see ourselves. Part II: Belonging delves into the ways in which queer fashion fosters community and provides safe spaces. Part III: Liberation" celebrates the emancipatory effects of queer fashion, from how gender-affirming attire can free people to live in their truth to how nonbinary fashion can free us from the bonds of gender altogether.

The goal of queer style is not to make everything and everyone gender neutral—which often equates to masculine or androgynous aesthetics—but to free us from the societal construct that clothing items have to be assigned to specific genders at all.

Queer fashion can be loud and it can be quiet. It can be expressive and it can be practical. It can be individual and collective; political and artistic; camp and commercial. Queer style can be a portal to the past and a window to the future. It can—as bell hooks said about queerness itself—empower you to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.

In these pages, I hope you find the joy, inspiration, and affirmation that queer fashion can bring. I hope it challenges your assumptions and empowers you to come to your own definition of queer style. I hope this book brings you closer to your people and to yourself.

Part I: Visibility

Top row, left: Model: Ariel Pierre Louis; Designer: TomboyX; Show: dapperQ x Brooklyn Museum New York Fashion Week (NYFW) show; Year: 2019. Top row, middle: Model: Marcia Alvarado; Designer: Sharpe Suiting; Show: dapperQ x Brooklyn Museum NYFW show; Year: 2019. Top row, right: Model: Dr. Van Bailey; Designer: Stuzo; Show: dapperQ x Brooklyn Museum NYFW show; Year: 2019. Middle row, left: Model: Jazmine Boatman; Designer: Hesta by Hester Sunshine; Show: dapperQ x Brooklyn Museum NYFW show; Year: 2022. Middle row, right: Model: Pariss Roman; Designer: Hesta by Hester Sunshine; Show: dapperQ x Brooklyn Museum NYFW show; Year: 2022. Bottom row, left: Model/designer: Travis Oestreich ; Designer: His own collection; Show: dapperQ x Brooklyn Museum NYFW show; Year: 2019. Bottom row, middle: Model: Milly DuBouchet; Designer: Jag & Co.; Show: dapperQ x Brooklyn Museum NYFW show; Year: 2018. Bottom row, right: Model: Jeremy Moineau; Designer: Phluid Project; Show: dapperQ x Brooklyn Museum NYFW show; Year: 2018.

Style is such an integral part of queerness because I think it’s how we find each other; how we tell the world who we are in lieu of predetermined boxes to fit in. It’s about inventing and claiming your place in a world that has failed to imagine the possibility of you.

—Gabrielle Korn

In various interviews over the years, transgender actress and advocate Laverne Cox has shared how another trans actress changed the course of her life and career. In 2007, Candis Cayne made history as the first openly transgender actress to have a recurring role on a prime-time television show. Cox has said that Cayne’s visibility as Carmelita on ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money served as a possibility model for her own career––an example that it is possible to have an acting career as an openly trans woman. Twelve years later, Cox became the first transgender model featured on the cover of British Vogue.

Queer fashion can enable the construction of self-identity and self-expression. It can be a form of self-acceptance and self-care. Queer style helps us see ourselves as we are and, in its own way, can serve as a possibility model for who we can become.

But none of us exist in a bubble. Thus, queer fashion is also a way for us to communicate with the world and others within LGBTQIA+ communities. Whether loud and flamboyant like the fashions of ballroom culture or silent and subtle like carabiners and the hanky code, queer style and fashion helps LGBTQIA+ folks find each other.

For queer folks, visibility can provide a window of hope, connection, and community. But it can also come with consequences.

Fashion is one of the most visible markers of gender constructs, and thus our status in society’s hierarchies. But when one visibly zigs against the zags of mainstream society’s gender norms, that can lead to danger and discrimination. For example, despite transgender people being more visible today than ever, hundreds of bills were introduced in state legislatures in 2022 that specifically target trans people and their families, and more are slated for 2023.

But queer folks in the past and present have used fashion as a form of revolt against systemic oppression, and in that way queer style can be a form of visual activism. From the symbolic political resistance of the flapper dress and zoot suit to the baggy pants of ’90s hip-hop culture, queer style is at the forefront of dismantling oppressive gender binaries and beauty norms.

How does our attire help us feel seen? In what ways do our clothes signal to the world who we are—or who we wish to be? These twelve visionaries offer some answers.

Miss Mojo

I think the visibility of queer fashion is truly shaping the world. And for some, they see it as stepping on their necks. but for me, I see it as the world finally catching up.

Queer Femme fashion is transgressive. Even when we are bombarded by images of cis heteronormative folk, we still have to imagine ourselves in fashion that not only affirms us but leads to our progress toward liberation. In the Black community, we have this saying: You have to wake up a little bit earlier. You have to be that one step ahead because of so many stigmas that police queer trans and Femme bodies. When you think about award season, most of the masc-presenting folk are just wearing suits, where the Femme-presenting folk have to really go to a place. There’s more work to that. The most Femme-presenting people I know can do a suit, but with that comes ungendering what the suit is expected to be. We have to really transcend stigmas, boundaries, discomfort. I don’t think Femme folk have the luxury of just being the look.

The big buzzwords here are equality versus equity. With equality you still don’t lose the social and economic advance of the oppressor. Equity teaches us No, I cannot be treated equal to you because I am under you on the hierarchy, so there are more steps I need in order for us to truly see eye to eye. I think people who choose to embrace that feminine side are brave, because indirectly patriarchy has taught us femininity will always come second. The refusal of the feminine in mainstream fashion’s definition of gender neutrality is purposeful and by design: Even in our progressive way, we’re reminding you that masculinity is the standard. And not only is it gender, but size too. The bodies that companies select as representative of our communities are not neutral. That says, Hey, we’re going to say ‘inclusive’ because we want to be lazy and we know you are so underrepresented that you’ll eat it right on up. You’ll even sing its praises. So, it goes to us saying, No, this is not acceptable. You want our money? Do better. Hold these brands to the fire because their missions depend on the public.

Until a Black trans woman who is disabled