As seen in our Spring issue!
Despite fashion and marketing being primarily geared toward women, and women comprising the majority of the consumer base, women are the least represented in the actual business of fashion, from designer representation at Fashion Week to leadership roles at top design houses. Fashion is a boys’ club—yet another club that tells women what is beautiful and how we should express ourselves.
In response to America’s latest “menswear renaissance,” New York added a separate Men’s Fashion Week in line with their London, Milan, and Paris counterparts. However, this move has been viewed by some who are less concerned with markets and more concerned with equality as contributing to rigid gender binaries.
Through fashion shows, editorials, and opinion pieces, queer style platforms like dapperQ and Qwear have long amplified the voices and bodies of those who are leveraging fashion as radical resistance against gendered clothing, with the knowledge that freedom of expression through personal style comes with emancipatory potential that extends far beyond LGBTQAI+ communities and beyond fashion.
Indie label Krammer & Stoudt opened February 2018 New York Men’s Fashion Week with a cast of all women models, making a mark on the fashion industry that is not often seen outside queer spaces. Mike Rubin and Courtenay Nearburg, the married couple behind Krammer & Stoudt, enlisted Jahn Hall, a New York City photographer, stylist, and casting director, to scout models for the show. Hall was able to land some prominent queer women models, including Rain Dove, Merika Palmiste, and Madison Paige to name a few. Hall, aware that queer style magazines and production companies have been styling and featuring models across a wide gender spectrum in clothing that best affirms their identity, reached out to dapperQ for casting recommendations. dapperQ attended the show and was inspired to see that women of all sexual orientations were taking over a space that is traditionally reserved for men.
Krammer & Stoudt want their clothing to be without restrictions based on sexual orientation or gender.