Clothing Cultures - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2015

‘Dressing-up’ has often been seen as a gendered activity. In particular, costuming – the design and creation of costumes – has been viewed as a female pursuit. However, contemporary events and artefacts, particularly those related to fandom, frame dressing-up in contexts that are more acceptable to male audiences. Via cosplay, historical re-enactment, and the personalization of characters in online games such as World of Warcraft, a new generation of men are becoming more engaged with costume. This article will identify contemporary influences on the perception of the wearing and construction of costume, particularly with regards to costume as an expression of masculine ideals. It will discuss the costume as a marker of hypermasculinity, authority or preparedness, and identify how traditionally feminine domestic spaces and activities have been coopted by a new generation of males. It will present domestic activities such as sewing as rights-of-passage on the path towards masculinity.

High heels represent femininity, seduction – a binary gender system, in which the wearer longs for the recognition of the gazer. Once connoted as signifiers of power, high heels have been transformed in a gendered fashion accessory designed for women. The singer and songwriter Prince has continuously worn them for almost four decades. His anti-normative dressing and gender expression techniques evoked an audience, which consist of a majority of fans who define themselves as heterosexual and male. The starting point for my research was the hypothesis that the artist’s non-normativity led to an anti-normative desire angle: a heterosexual male fan desiring his heterosexual male fan-object by fetishizing the artist’s high heels.

This article considers glam rock’s rejection of the humdrum, spontaneity and the ‘natural’, and its embrace of costuming, camp and artificiality. With particular reference to Roxy Music, it will examine the band’s iconography, fashion and contexts during glam’s golden years – 1972 to 1974 – as well as the implications of glam style for gender and sexuality in popular music. Though some of glam’s exponents were undoubtedly much more traditional in their performance of gender identities, we can read bands like Roxy Music, within certain limits, as ‘queering’ their more meat-and-potatoes predecessors and providing an important source of identification for later pop music gender and style dissidents. The fashion and music scenes in which Roxy Music emerged are inseparable from the milieux of experimentation and innovation associated with British art and fashion schools in the 1960s onwards. To this extent, the band exemplifies the vital pathway of art school students into popular music outlined by Simon Frith and Howard Horne in Art into Pop. Through Keir Keightley’s conception of romantic and modernist authenticity in popular music and Joanne Entwhistle’s genealogy of the romantic and the dandy in fashion, we will explore how glam traces a line from the dandy via New Edwardian fashion, in which questions of gender and artifice are in a process of perpetual renegotiation.

David Bowie’s Glam transformation between 1969 and 1972 was a personal reinvention that saw his music move away from psychedelic folk and the show tunes of his first two albums to the staging of his alter ego Ziggy Stardust on the album Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Music was only one ingredient in this transformation. In this period, Bowie’s image also changed radically. His 1969 stage persona of a bubble-perm haircut and hippie psychedelic shirts was replaced by the space-alien imagery of the character Ziggy Stardust: a sequinned onesie, platform-heeled boots, dyed red spiky hair, foundation, rouge and lipstick, which helped to shift Rock music in a theatrical direction. The years under consideration, 1969 to 1972, are important because Bowie’s metamorphosis from hippie love-child to alien, Glam rocker epitomize the cultural shift in popular music fashion from the 1960s to the 1970s. Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars along with Roxy Music’s eponymous first album are the death-knell for 1960s popular cultural fashion. The 1960s look of love-beads, kaftans, denim and long hair was replaced with a more self-consciously theatrical look in the 1970s: Bowie’s performativity in 1972 was a dressing-up in flamboyant costumes in stark contrast to the 1960s street fashion of dressing-down in faded denim and corduroy.

Appearance has long been of concern to gay men, whether manifested as an identifiable visibility, an intentional invisibility or a conscious playing with gendered and social signifiers. This ties to Judith Butler’s propositions that gendered identities are performed in relation to external societal and internal personal pressures and considerations, as well as being regulated by cultural discourses. The notions of gay male femininity and the authenticity of a ‘real’ masculinity, that can be presented through choices of clothing and behavioural traits, have traditionally been a perennial concern within the urban gay male communities of Britain and America. However, perhaps given the changes in social, moral and legal conditions for, and attitudes towards, gay people that have manifested in the twenty-first century, the negotiation of this oppositional binary is no longer of such importance. Thus the question of a contemporary gay male visual identity and appearance is interesting to consider. Based on a series of interviews conducted with gay men between the ages of 19 and 46 in 2012–2013, this article will articulate some of the ways in which these British and American gay men have negotiated concerns with their sexual identity and personal appearance. It will consider the ways in which style and dress can signify meanings about the multitude of aspects that make up an individual’s identity, with a particular focus on how the acceptance and articulation of their own sexual orientation has varied between operating as a key motivator and an incidental component of the style and dress of these young gay men.

This article offers a set of preliminary and necessarily incomplete notes on the subculture of African dandies, who re-appropriate the styling trends of past generations of Afro-diasporic gentlemen to new aims. While dandyism has a long and respected tradition across many African states, it remains an under-investigated phenomenon, save for the bibliography of Congolese sapologie. Furthermore, this topic has found little to no space in the literature on black self-styling, in monographic studies on Afro-diasporic dandyism, and in the journalistic and artistic production on the ‘New Age’ ‘dappers’. I engage with this lack of scholarship and with the challenge of looking for the elements and stories that make African dandyism, indeed, African, rather than generally ‘black’, paying attention to the ways in which this aesthetic vocation weaves together a concern with memory and cultural pride, with professional ambitions and self-promotion.