Are men who are into fashion gay

Hi Caftaners. He actually published in a book called and how could it not be called this? Even just coming off a personal loss in his family, Shaun generously agreed to talk to me, and we did, for about two hours, on Wed Jan I want to have another Caftan conversation on this topic at another point, maybe with someone who works in fashion or images.

Do you have a favorite fashion decade? Hands-down, mine is the seventies. I love how women, especially working women, dressed in that decade cue Mary Tyler Moore and Diane Keaton in Manhattan …. The only thing is that a lot of seventies clothes look heavy, itchy and unbreathable because of all the synthetic fabrics.

Here is a clip of Shaun and I talking about the meaning s of the gay clone that emerged in the s:. I hope you enjoy. Shaun, thank you so much for talking to Caftan today about the history of gay men's style. How did you become a scholar of this?

Are All Fashion Designers Gay?

In the early nineties, I was working at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the prints and drawings department, where I looked after the fashion-related materials. Also for the exhibit, I wrote up a report on Kinky Gerlinky, which was a roaming nightclub in the late eighties and early nineties that was all about dressing up outrageously, including a lot of drag.

And that report was basically about gay styles, which I started doing research on—only to realize that while quite a lot had been written on the history of lesbian styles, there was nothing comprehensive about gay men. So I wrote this report, which led to Don We Now And that's how you became the gay men's fashion history expert.

Do you still follow gay men's fashion? Not so much. As a man of a certain age 58I go out much less than I used to. But I'm often invited to universities to talk about this, so I meet young queer people who are still out on the scene. And I'm constantly still looking at what people are wearing and asking myself, "Am I reading this man as gay?

What is the through-line of the book? That we have always dressed in a kind of code to recognize one another? What is gay style? Is there such a thing? Is there only one gay style? All the men I asked had slightly different answers. Some said that gay men wear things in a particular way, or they wear particular types of clothing.

Others would say it's more about an attention to detail. And a lot of men would say it's harder and harder to tell [gay men's from straight men's style] these days. But I think that there's a certain segment of the gay male and the broader queer community that is interested in pushing the boundary about what is conventional to wear.