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125 4 Unfashionability say a fashion prayer every night before falling asleep, lest you wake up without a style. —Wayne Koestenbaum, Cleavage Steel Boots of Leather We are each fashion’s victims. Take but two anecdotes from the previous decade. The first belongs to self-identified genderqueer crip activist Eli Clare who, in 1999, was “still learning the habits and manners of urban dykes” after she left her predominantly working-class hometown of Port Orford, Oregon, for the greener pastures of the Bay Area (135).1 Settling uneasily in the lesbian communities of Oakland, California, she deemed herself an “exile,” alienated from the “urban, middle-class queer activists” that surrounded her (30), unfamiliar with their “trust funds, new cars, designer clothes, [and] trips to Paris” (37–8), and often treated “like a country hick” (39). One day, at a moving party full of “friends, lovers, and ex-lovers, butch dykes, femme dykes, androgynous dykes,” Clare cruises a woman named Leslie. More accurately, she cruises Leslie’s steel-toed black leather boots, which trigger an involuntary memory that casts Clare back to a summer when she “was 15 working in the woods” at an Oregon lumber factory (135). Hungry for connection, nostalgic for Port Orford, and isolated from urbanized dykes, Clare strikes up a conversation with Leslie and inquires about her shoes after assuming a shared non-urbanized, nonmiddle -class upbringing.2 To Clare’s dismay, however, the conversation is over before it starts once Leslie admits that “I just bought them as a fashion statement.” Horrified, Clare “felt as if I’d been exposed as a hick yet again, caught assuming she was someone I might have grown up with. A fashion statement. What did I have in common with Leslie?” (135). The second anecdote belongs to literary and film theorist D. A. Miller, who, in 1992, penned a generous criticism of Roland Barthes’ oeuvre, Bringing Out Roland Barthes. In the middle of this literary love letter to the 126 Unfashionability French critic, Miller slips in a lengthy paean to the proverbial “young man from the provinces” “familiar to readers of the nineteenth-century novel” (29).3 A paragraph later, Miller then links this provincial figure to “those practices of post-Stonewall gay male culture whose explicit aim, uncompromised by the vicissitudes of weather or fashion, is to make the male body visible to desire” (30). I wrote “love letter,” but I might just as well have typed “fashion statement.” Miller’s ode to gay urbanity continues: “The men of the Muscle System [in the Castro] or the Chelsea Gym, who valuing tone and definition over mass give as much attention to the abs and glutes as to pecs and lats; who array their bodies in tanks and polos, purchased when necessary in the boys’ department, in Spandex and Speedos , in preshrunk, reshrunk, and, with artisanal care, perhaps even sandpapered 501s—let us hail these men” (30). To embellish his imperative, on the East Coast and the West, let us hail these metropolitan-based men their fashionability. Will do. But before I get there I ask a not-so-obvious question: despite profound differences in sexual, socioeconomic, geographic, and gender identifications, what commonalities might Clare’s self-professed “country hick” share with Miller’s “young man from the provinces”? To the best of my limited knowledge, Clare and Miller have never shared the same page or party or exercise facility. Nevertheless, they are each intrigued with the vital role that fashion chic plays in contemporary urbanized U.S. queer cultures. Both might agree, as Clare elsewhere puts it, that “queer identity, at least as I know it, is largely urban” (37). And both are preoccupied with how this urbanized queer identity manifests itself via sartorial stylistics, how this group identity can function as a disciplinary regime that operates as identification, as communality, and, sometimes, as geographic stigma. For Clare, the Oakland dyke fashion of someone like Leslie reinforces a consumerist homonormativity that disavows the occupational styles of working-class queer regionality. Leslie’s aesthetic sophistication makes her feel more like a hick, and less like a young woman fleeing the Oregon provinces. Hence it’s all about the damaging shame factor of queer excess (the manual labor function of the boot forgotten by hip dyke couture) that clothing demands in a moment marked by the popularizing of lesbian chic. For Miller, by contrast, urban gay male fashion in Chelsea and in the Castro is nothing but celebratory. It’s all...

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