Unsuitable
What lesbian fashion history teaches us about who we are
BY ELEANOR MEDHURST
Fashion history is about people. Clothing is made by people, worn by people, tucked carefully into drawers or thrown across the floor by people. Fashion is what those clothes become when they are situated within a culture – when they mean something, whether trendiness or the lack of it, age, heritage, class, status, gender or sexuality. Often, these meanings are not clear-cut, the boundary lines between them blurred or purposefully challenged. Other times, the categories that encompass fashion help us illustrate who we are (or who we are not). For lesbians, whose very existence subverts the categories of gender and sexuality, fashion can be a conscious statement, a deliberate veil or an everyday expression of a reality that is not the social norm.