Chloe Willison

That’s why like the song ‘Dark Ballet’, I could dress like a boy, I could dress like a girl, After the release of “Justify My Love”, Madonna’s queer icon status reached another level as lesbians began to see her as glamorously seductive. (Dandy: name for a man who pays great attention to dress and fashion and often dresses with a flamboyant style) evoking “an image of a mythological half-man half-woman demi-god whilst simultaneously alluding to the power invested in the phallic woman” (201). The way she exhibited androgyny, by mixing a very traditional men’s suit and accessories and such a feminine basque, proves how gender is nothing more than something we created; it’s a social construct.

For reference, Gladys Bentley was an African American blues singer, pianist, and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance who exerted a ‘black female masculinity’ that troubled the distinctions between masculine and feminine. Tall and broad shouldered, wearing a black cutaway coat flecked with gold, black pants, her favourite steeled-toed black rubber shit-kicker work boots, she looks more like a cowboy”. The pinstriped suit of dapper men and Madonna struck once again, this time on the cover of the August issue of Vanity Fair in 1993. With her was (straight) supermodel Cindy Crawford dressed as a maillot in a tight black leotard with a halter neck, black booties with bows, red lipstick, and perfectly blow dried, voluminous hair.

Now, let’s tackle why women’s suits are sapphic because of the blurring of the line between menswear and womenswear with the guidance of Madonna and k. d. lang. This statement, which is a key artifact for Black and lesbian feminism and the developement of identity politics, made clear the concerns of Black lesbians who felt they were being ignored by mainstream feminists as well as the civil rights movement. ’s fashion, it wasn’t until the 1980s and the wedge that lesbian women embraced this style as a powerful political force. Professor at the Center for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University in Sweden, Patrizia Calefato, wrote “Fashion and music are two intimately connected forms of worldliness, two social practices that go hand in hand, sustaining one another in the medium of mass communication and drawing on a common sensibility, which translates to “taste”’.