Wearying the Dead
“Memory and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks and constantly merging. Both escape our will, though we depend on them.” Etel Adnan
“Young people, they don’t have any memories” Yves Saint Laurent declared to Paris Vogue in March of 1971; just a few months before, on January 29, he presented his Spring-Summer haute couture collection to a rapt audience of clients, press, and friends on rue Spontini in Paris. Opening with a simple black and white gingham coat sporting exaggerated peaked lapels, its double-breasted closure laid over a prim crêpe de Chine knee-length dress, the collection slowly unfolded. Following the first exit was a long evening gown in black silk chiffon with a diagonal tired skirt, trailed by a short black and brown printed dress worn with a sleeveless serge jacket featuring the same outsized lapels as the first look. Models in day and evening ensembles passed each other with dark lips, attenuated eyebrows framing glossy lids, while hemlines both long and short appeared side-by-side; more strong tailoring emerged with one wool tuxedo jacket pulled back by the model to reveal crystal body-chains. Two formal dresses, one composed of an earthy naive floral, the other a marbled russet print, with gathered and peaked shoulders, stirred interest. The incongruent presentation, mixing occasion and purpose, long with short, while disruptive for couture at the time would become the least controversial aspect of the presentation, as the slight vintage air to the tailleurs and habillé would soon turn noxious.
Look 11 - a pleated black silk jersey dress with ruffled hem, accented with a spray of red poppies on the thigh, and topped with a black monkey fur bolero; the mood visibly soured. Geometric micro-florals, sporty box pleated skirts, wide mannish trousers, turbans, fox stoles, and platform wedge sandals followed; Saint Laurent was reviving 1940s fashion, particularly styles worn during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, structured as they were through privation, necessity and violence. The older audience, many of whom had lived through the war, were incensed. Furthering the discomfort were claims from journalists,1 gesturing towards the clingy jersey, makeup, and shoes, that ‘horizontal collaborators’ and sex workers2 were as relevant to the inspiration as ordinary civilians, with Eugenia Sheppard noting “what a relief, at last, to write that a fashion collection is frankly, definitely and completely hideous.”3 Daring to glance at a wartime era and see beauty or vitality was scandalous, as was delving into a painful and too recent occurrence and the collection was almost universally derided internationally. Saint Laurent had, in the words of Olivier Saillard “dared to move the nostalgia clock too far ahead, up to the immediate past.”4 The shock felt however soon gave way to the novelty (this collection brought the first instance of the word kitsch in reference to fashion) and young women born in the post-war boom were eager to adopt the look regardless of perceived callousness, with Saint Laurent remaining steadfast in his understanding of the fractured nostalgia of youth. “Young people, they don’t have any memories.” Saint Laurent was perhaps including himself in this comment as he born a scant four years before the Paris Occupation began, in Oran, Algeria, and was thus unable to recall firsthand any details of the time and place, particularly those related to dress. What was clear to him however were the proclivities of chic young women like jewelry designer and friend Paloma Picasso, who frequented Portobello Road vintage stalls, picking up teetering platforms, printed tea dresses, and disused lipsticks on her jaunts to London, inspired by the glamour of 1940s cinema.
Another inspiration for Saint Laurent’s collection was the surrealist work of Italian-born couturier Elsa Schiaparelli, specifically the styles she produced during the inter-war period; her explorations were mirrored in the lurid pink sequinned lips and trompe l’oeil bows detailing evening looks, as well as the aforementioned monkey fur; a texture both human and animal. One of Schiaparelli’s most famous pieces from this time is the skeleton dress, a long sinuous gown with protruding quilted bones on the torso, arms and legs; furnished in an inky matte crêpe - popularized after the death of Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert in 1861, when she donned the fabric in mourning - it magnifies the wearers own frame in a grotesque and beguiling display of body horror, as the interior skeleton appears to mutate outwards, to touch. This particular dress, a collaboration with Salvador Dalí as part of a circus themed collection from 1938 spoke to a sideshow freak ‘skeleton man’, yet its intentional provocation alluded to wider topics like post-war trauma, malnourishment during the Great Depression, and the ominous shadow of encroaching fascism; elucidating fabric’s ability to, in the words of Peter Stallybrass, “receive the human imprint.”5 Saint Laurent left this piece unreferenced in his 1971 collection for what are obvious reasons yet the spectre of death, held at a distance, hangs over the work with such ferocity as he unintentionally signalled a need to return and garner a deeper understanding of the loss experienced during and after the Occupation; a need shared with numerous cultural and political projects taking place throughout the 1970s and 1980s, broadly focused on World War II and the Holocaust, their remembrances and neglects.
The specific fashions and women he was reviving are their own form of pointed remembrance and neglect as those who were brought back, via sartorial flourish, were not those explicitly lost through concentration camps, pogroms, displacement, and death, but those who were able to through chance, opportunity, or perversion, remain, and, more importantly, to have their clothing remain and regenerate, acting as “a kind of memory.”6 When fashion changes - as it must to sustain itself - it frequently glances back, sidestepping its own memory to unearth elements that may be unfamiliar in shape yet contain remnants of meaning. It’s through these glances that moments left unrealized and unfulfilled can return and offer a second chance (in the words of Walter Benjamin, ”fight for the oppressed past”7), or alternately the opportunity to forget all over again. Caroline Evans notes that “fashion activates the past in the present by rewriting its own themes and motifs through historical quotation”8 and fashion is so perfect a form to relive memories that seem unpossessed or shared; here Saint Laurent managed to edge ever closer to the trauma of others without the need press firmly against it himself, instead rendering an unconscious proximity to emotion and death through dress, the closeness of fabric against the body revitalizing memories lost in the distance of time. The reticence shown reveals an understanding that a full descent into the period would be too painful, for the wearer and audience, yet the desire to feel abstracted distress remains.
Fashion and death have long conversed - in 1824 Giacomo Leopardi wrote a fictional dialogue between the two, speaking to each other as sisters; fashion asks “do you not remember we are both born of Decay?”9 - and this is not simply fashion vis à vis death, circling each other, the signal of death brought through particular fashion items, but a certain death structured thorough the passage of fashion time, as silhouettes, motifs and distinct looks fall out of step, pass on, and lie in wait, ready to emerge and signal their return, carrying ghosts of fashion past. Hussein Chalayan’s Spring-Summer 2007 collection, entitled One Hundred & Eleven, allowed these ghosts to reemerge, reconstructed as mechanical dresses that transform and mutate, encompassing multiple eras in one garment that morphs, truncates and expands; the call and response of history compounding into composite dress, a nostalgia, inseparable in a constant merge pattern. The finale of the show featured six models, each exiting solo and standing stationary on an elevated runway while clock arms filled with glittering Swarovski crystals slowly rotate behind them; a soundtrack of frenetic hand-claps echo as each ensemble slowly begins to flutter and move on its own: hemlines rise and fall, bodices separate and break open, fringe descends, and a fashion history of one hundred and eleven years is unveiled as hidden mechanical structures control the garments. One model exits in a stark white panelled smock that first balloons into a version of the full-skirted nipped-waist silhouette of Christian Dior’s ‘La Ligne Corolle’10 from 1947, then shrinks back on itself, the hemline sucked up in a vacuum as Paco Rabanne’s mid 1960’s paillette shift descends from invisible horizontal channels; simultaneously a wide-brimmed platter hat slowly reduces into a miniature cloche and a clear plastic visor shields the eyes. As the crystal hourglass sands continue to mark the passage of time, each subsequent look revealing then obscuring the new and the old, the final model in a breezy white dress steps out into darkness, a UFO shaped hat illuminating her body; slowly the diaphanous fabric splits and is subsumed into the brim, leaving her naked.
This ending, a nude model perhaps signalling a return to a less compromised corporeal form, now untouched by the abrasion of time and the boundless exigencies of fashion, sits in contrast to how clothing and the body interact and who in fact is left standing at the end - as Stallybrass notes “bodies come and go, the clothes that have received those bodies survive.”11 Viewing the now un-embodied dresses from Chalayan’s collection on display at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, Lianne Toussaint and Anneke Smelik noted “the material traces of that one-time event: the dresses showed discolored spots from the models’ perspiration as well as some creases and deformations.”12 These traces, common when fabric brushes the body if only for a moment, are their own complex status, both minor and substantive, that mark the previous body and, if one wishes, tell a version of that body through remains. Speaking of old clothes, Toussaint and Smelik explain that “they betray a most intimate relation to the private body of the wearer because they materialize memories of the wearer’s body—a lingering scent of perfume, creases, stains, and wear and tear”13
Vintage clothing, whether in actual provenance or mood, becomes the materialization of nostalgia and sublimates the crisis into the garment itself, the semblance of pain now imbricated in the new wearer, floating over and flowing through. The latter part of the 20th-century seized with near constant fashion revivals, at first following a straightforward 30-40 year cycle, as seen with Saint Laurent delving into the late 1930s and early 1940s in 1971. Later decades foreshortened the distance, and fused multiple moments into a single revival - as Chalayan did with his 2007 collection - highlighting the churn of history and the chronological distance, or lack thereof, between the current moment and the just shuttered past. Currently, these revivals have become so constant, so labyrinthian that the only aspect of note is how quickly they cycle back, displacing any greater understanding of ancestry, place, or connection, in favour of horror triggered by the knowledge of lost youth and soon, impending death.
The vintage fashion eras referenced by Chalayan and Saint Laurent are known and known well through, in part, the conservation efforts of museums, costume institutes and archives who remove or attempt to revoke the, in the words of Toussaint and Smelik, ‘stains’ and preserve the integrity of historical garments and allow their continued influence. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York maintains an extensive dress archive, housed in the basement of its cavernous building on Fifth Avenue. Since 2014 the institute has been officially named the Anna Wintour Costume Center, though its history dates back to 1937 when it was a separate Museum of Costume Art, before being acquired by the Met in 1946, and shepherded through decades of expansions, directors, and curators to where it now sits as a global authority on historical dress. In a series of videos for the Met’s website several costume conservators explain the work: in one a pale silvered-sage House of Worth ball gown is lying inert on a pristine white table with Glenn Petersen, dressed in a similarly hued cotton smock, hovering over the piece. He’s describing the reluctance, in conservation efforts, to restore aspects of a garment that have deteriorated over time and the simultaneous need to represent archived pieces as they were originally created. The Worth gown had a ribbon effect appliqué covering the centre front and side seams which has, in the almost 120 year period since it was first made, become worn and in need of repair, with Petersen explaining “we want the public to see the garment as a cohesive whole, rather than a damaged object.” In a second video associate conservator Laura Mina shows the interior edge of a jacket, part of an 18th-century court suit, that has been delicately overlaid with sheer tulle to halt any future wear on the original materials, and still allow subsequent conservators to see the gently fraying and deteriorating fibres beneath. The delicate work of historical costume preservation is the removal or covering of this ‘damage’ or the physical mark left by the human form.
Damage, stain, tear; as Claire Wilcox, senior curator of fashion at the Victoria & Albert Museum, wrote in her memoir the langue of conservation “is frequently of devastation and disintegration.”14 The simple act of wearing a garment can enact irreparable detrition as dead skin, perspiration, hair follicles, blood, and excrement all imbed themselves deep in textiles and over time enact a slow and irreversible decomposition of the garment, consuming it from the inside out. Preservation can be achieved in multiple ways, from gentle cleaning and treatments to the aforementioned minimal repairs. The ultimate goal of prolonging the life of a garment after the body that inhabited it has passed is to preserve a history: of the wearer, the society and culture in which they lived and, in a sense, a memory, or a specific version of one. This clothing speaks for and in place of the dead with costume institutes acting as curatorial embalmers, and the museums that house them serving as mortuaries. Often historical archives are seen as unfeeling - monuments to cold unflinching data - precise in their records, made possible through excavation, unimpeded by incongruent bacterial rot. Dress archives differ: a garment is valuable for preservation precisely because it has been touched, worn; simultaneously it is valuable because of who wore it and what they can communicate to an audience about the wearer and, crucially, themselves. The embalming practice, to preserve dress from further decay, is a drive not to return the garment to its pre-contact form, a futile endeavour, but rather to gently suffocate the remaining lifeforms in order for the garment to continue it’s future communicative lives, or as Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick note “the body dies, as dress takes over in its enunciative role.”15
Funding for the Met’s Costume Center comes largely via the Met Gala, an annual event coinciding with each year’s focused exhibition; on September 12, 2021 actor Dan Levy attended the event wearing a tribute to artist David Wojnarowicz, created by Spanish fashion and leather goods house Loewe.16 Rendered in mottled hues of pink, green, and blue, the centre motif of Wojnarowicz’s Fuck You Faggot Fucker is embroidered on the chest; the outline of two anonymous stencilled men joined in a kiss over Levy’s pecs.17 The printed map motif, a recurring element in Wojnarowicz’s work, is highlighted with crystals on the sleeves, and rivulets of deep blue sequins and bugle beads encircle the waist, topping a further rendition of the map on the trousers. The sleeves are imposing: an Elizabethan-era vertical shoulder protrusion topping an inflated and gathered funnel, pushing and pulling against a gigot sleeve shape, the volume misplaced, and edged with drawstring channels that pucker and pull the fabric. Fascinating in its lack of cohesion and direct historical fashion citation as all of this is laid onto a sportive polo shirt - it creates such a misshapen and stretched upper body, arms bifurcated by embroidery and glittering seeds, that Levy resembles an angel, or “gay superhero” in the words of Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson and there is something of a costume about it, not just in grandiosity. The top is a recreation from the Loewe Spring/Summer 2021 women’s collection, then shown in all black, with a velour texture to the body; Anderson spoke of the past, present and future and how they could “communicate without having disregard for the other.” as an inspiration for the collection.
Levy stated on Instagram in a now deleted post “we wanted to celebrate queer love and visibility — acknowledging how hard artists like Wojnarovicz (sic) had to fight, while also presenting the imagery in a way that offered a hopeful message.” Removed from the look is the remainder of Wojnarowicz’s art piece: black and white images of naked men, and the crude hand drawn comic, found by him, that gives the piece its title; the removal is aesthetic and practical, and still disrupts intimacy with Wojnarowicz, as does the inconsistent historical quotation occurring. While the particular time period holding his final years (he passed from AIDS-related complications in 1992, at age 37) has been continually mined, outside of him, for art and fashion, with countless cultural productions both archiving and referencing the period’s ephemeral detritus, this turn eschews 1980s and early 1990s fashion - both street and runway - and instead proposes a fractured history and understanding; how hard he had to fight, for what?
This archiving and referring of Wojnarowicz, his tender and eviscerating insights, the tenor of his gravel voice, stoking a fire in his belly, is to maintain his presence, his scene of intimacy, his communicative lives. Yet too often, as here, as with other gay men who were marked by AIDS and revived through fashion (Keith Haring at Converse, H&M, Levi’s; Antonio Lopez at Fendi; Robert Mapplethorpe at Ann Demeulemeester, Raf Simons, Chrome Hearts etc.) the suffocation remains paramount. The art created becomes in time little more than a visual signifier of taste, perhaps empathy, a sophisticated political frame. The continued desire to understand AIDS as the defining force that fractured modern gay and transgender history is often in tension with how many are afraid of acknowledging it as anything other than history, a tragic occurrence in a post-PrEP world, and not a current and expanding health crisis. If queerness is, in the words of José Esteban Muñoz, “always in the horizon”18 it’s worth asking here which direction the horizon lies upon. The drive to look back in remembrance, even if the original memories are not in direct possession, through a protracted exposure reinforces the distance to both past and present, and instead highlights the un-relation, the unbridgeable crevasse on the map, the oceans between islands of experience and history. When Saint Laurent dove into the past he intentionally side-stepped pain in favour of delivering a chic proposition, jettisoning depth for glamour and shrugging off any association with misery. He knew who to recall and who to leave in the archives, who will be remembered and who better left forgotten, who can be made beautiful in death, and who remains hideous. Here with Levy the distance doesn’t lie between him and Wojnarowicz, but rather between him and the present.
Beauty influencer Nikkie de Jager (NikkieTutorials) also attended the 2021 Met Gala, her head ringed with flowers both silk and 18k gold (by Digna Gorkovoi) accented with oorijzer or ‘ear irons’ originally worn to hold lace caps to the head in de Jager’s native Netherlands. Marsha P. Johnson is directly referenced in the floral head piece, and her presence is also felt in the gown, designed by Edwin Oudshoorn; vibrant teal draping over a rigid understructure of semi-visible boning. The form is immediately reminiscent of a Pierre Balmain gown from 1957 currently in the Met’s archive, though not on view; there are shades of Jeanne Margaine-Lacroix’s shocking and sadly forgotten Belle Epoque-era robes-tanagréennes in the shape as well, but ossified and brittle, relinquishing suppleness. The shape is a clear quote of a quote of a translation and de Jager’s version finishes with a majestic show ribbon emblazoned with Pay It No Mind, a phrase used frequently by Johnson, in reference to her gender, at times claiming it was what the ‘P’ in her name symbolized. The entire look is full of direct and concise historical fashion references - contrasted with Levy - uncomplicated in both the unattributed citational practice, and wealth via restrained taste on display; the drape of the tulle, the hourglass torso, and scattered florals are all aspirational and more importantly comprehensible.
The need to reference Johnson is now constant with her ever widening spectred field across a plethora of mediums (a state park, monument, murals, a bronze bust, commemorative plaque, competing documentaries, posthumous obituary, soon a properly researched biography, a Google homepage doodle) along with numerous citations, references and tributes since her re-emergence in the preceding decade all strengthening her stature. What may or may not be correct about her life and contribution to Black, transgender and gay liberation is unclear, cast off in favour of what she represents. Her mysterious and violent death in 1992 has, in some ways, strengthened her prominence, and made her all the more important as a figure - joined with Wojnarowicz - especially as one who can no longer speak.
Here both de Jager and Levy avoid specifically referencing the time of their subjects through their outfits, and sidestep a complex depiction by proposing a revival of Johnson and Wojnarowicz through the status of French haute couture and sartorial refinement (de Jager) and pseudo-masculine streetwear and archives of elegance (Levy). This isn’t simply a matter of the lack of proper fashion history on display, instead it is the (sub)conscious decision to soften the tragedy of their subjects and compose them as ghosty parvenus rather than vengeful figures stalking the steps of the Met, out for revenge. They are not unearthing time capsules of abuse and neglect, filled with desecrated carcasses, instead both wearers circumferentially reference the tragedy and invocation of tragedy via mourning cloth, without stepping fully into the sphere. An avowed honouring of history requires not just a careful knowledge of said history and what has changed in the present, but crucially what has not. The need to mark history as a constant march towards progress, linear and clean, denies the present its own honesty and refuses to wade into the depth of betrayals and failures. What Johnson and Wojnarowicz would have done themselves and what carrying their bodies thus demands is violent disruption not capitulation. How effective misremembering can be, in practice, in service of fragmentation and how fascinating to witness this at the Met Gala, the preeminent fundraising event for the concurrent séance and exorcism constructing fashion history.
Two years prior to the 2021 Met Gala a similar call and response of history was documented when model and actor Indya Moore attended The Daily Front Row Fashion Media Awards on September 6, 2019 wearing a dramatic pair of waist length earrings by Beads Byaree (designed by Areeayl Goodwin), repeating picture frames housing the faces of the 16 Black transgender women who had been murdered that year to date.19 The frames are baroque, each depression catching the light, calling to mind a funeral service portrait typically encircled with crowns of flowers, here surrounding Moore’s body which is draped in a rose gown shot through with gilded flowers by Oscar de la Renta. One face missing from the earrings is 17 year old Baltimore resident Bailey Reeves; she had been killed just three days before the event and was quickly commiserated in a small gold frame clutch carried by Moore, an instantaneous memento mori in the hand. Aside from the obvious stylistic differences, this example is also markedly dissimilar in tone and urgency, and is not a celebration - one week after the event the number would climb to 18 murdered women - and can’t be considered a revival attempt; Moore was asking for a current moment to change, in the words of Liam Hess at Vogue, “to spotlight an urgent political issue—and chose to tell this story through the medium of fashion.” In the majority of the ensuing media coverage of these earrings the names of the 17 dead women were not mentioned, nor any of the circumstances surrounding their individual murders. In many of the photographs from that evening their faces are not visible, instead they are small and out of focus, a reflective glare obscuring the details. Like Marsha P. Johnson, they may in time become the subject of monuments and films, and like her they are silent.
Suspended taut between Moore in 2019 and de Jager and Levy in 2021 sits the summer of 2020, where the wanton police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, amongst countless others, activated long simmering tensions and sparked a global uprising in protest of police brutality and government inaction. Fashion and beauty brands were quick to ‘listen’ and ‘learn’ posting black squares on Instagram and making placatory donations and pledges to do better in their own treatment of Black employees. One result was the 15% Pledge, a program that encourages retailers to match the percentage of the US Black population with equal shelf space for Black-owned brands, and additionally support Black employees in the workplace. How quickly rage and large scale political action, pushing against centuries of anti-Black violence, could be supplanted by the opportunity to purchase a $25 lipstick from a Black-owned brand at Sephora, as if the latter was at all congruent and not dichotomous with the former. This obfuscation may seem like solely the work of fashion as a capitalist industry, yet it also speaks to fashion’s ability to deploy illusion and enact its most suffocating tendencies, without reproach, as it controls and obscures memories, traumas; as Elizabeth Wilson notes “the daring of fashion speaks dread as well as desire; the shell of chic, the aura of glamour, always hides a wound.”20
Moore also attended the 2021 Met Gala, wearing an innocuous black & white Saint Laurent look designed by Anthony Vaccarello. Afterwards they shared their reticence to continue with the tradition writing in part on Instagram -
“I think it is possible to be an artist and a creative and simeltaneously (sic) not invest in make-believe during a time make believe is weaponzed (sic) against the truth, during a time where honesty and transparency is more important than ever. Being at the Met this year was cognitive dissonance.”
They continue by questioning the fundraising efforts of the Met’s Costume Center, and the purpose of funding such an institution at all when purposeful structured inequity thrives throughout the city. Just outside the event a protest against the NYPD and their ever ballooning and rapacious $11 billion annual budget, in tension with the city’s lack of thoughtful response to the also ever ballooning and violently displaced houseless population, lead to nine arrests. The long slow death of neglect not worthy of being revived, worn. Peter Stallybrass again, “clothes, then, as memory, but also as the stepping-stones by which one walks away from the unbearable present.”21
“One mannequin in bright rouged cheeks and lips looked like Lili Marlene waiting under a lamp post near a red light district in a bright green chiffon gown with short puffed sleeves covered with artificial flowers.” Aline Mosby, “Designer Yves Saint-Laurent Draws Fire in Fashion World”, Lorain Journal, January 30, 1971, in Yves Saint Laurent: The Scandal Collection 1971 (New York, Abrams, 2015) p. 49
Tom Ford would reference this collection and Saint Laurent’s larger surrealist explorations for his own work at the house for both Spring and Fall 2003, noting at the onset of the Iraq war “these are surreal times we're living in” The psycho-sexual body horror (painted nipples, vulva draping, trapunto belly buttons, claw torn silk) of the Spring show in particular is fascinating as not simply Ford qua Ford but an explicit exploration of the sublimation of terror and death back into a civilized form: the female body.
Eugenia Sheppard, “Saint-Laurent: Truly Hideous” International Herald Tribune, January 30, 1971 in Yves Saint Laurent: The Scandal Collection 1971 (New York, Abrams, 2015) p. 40
Olivier Saillard, “The Collection That Created A Scandal” in Yves Saint Laurent: The Scandal Collection 1971 (New York, Abrams, 2015) p. 20
Peter Stallybrass, Worn Worlds: Clothes And Mourning, in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, edited by Dan Ben-Amos and Lilliane Weissberg (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1999) p. 29
Stallybrass, Worn Worlds, p. 30
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938 - 1940, edited by Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003) p. 396
Caroline Evans, Fashion At The Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness (London, Yale University Press, 2003) p. 35
Giacomo Leopardi, Dialogue Between Fashion and Death (London, Penguin Books, 2010)
later unofficially and officially called the ‘New Look’
Stallybrass, Worn Worlds, p. 29
Lianne Toussaint and Anneke Smelik, Memory and Materiality in Hussein Chalayan’s Techno-Fashion, in Materializing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, edited by László Munteán, Liedke Plate, and Anneke Smelik (New York, Routledge, 2017) p. 92-93
Toussaint and Smelik, Memory and Materiality, p. 92
Claire Wilcox, Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes (London, Bloomsbury, 2020) pg. 4
Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body (Oxford, Berg, 1998) p. 42
Current Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson has previously mined Wojnarowicz’s work with a line of t-shirts for the house and through the Loewe Foundation launched a series of exhibitions featuring a plethora of dead gay artists, with Minor White, Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead), Hervé Guibert, and Peter Hujar (in a joint exhibit with Wojnarowicz) all serving as subjects in recent years.
“Maybe I just want to shove my face underneath his shirt and kiss his chest, or plunge my head through his chest and kiss his heart. Maybe just kiss his heart.” - David Wojnarowicz, Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz (South Pasadena, Semiotext(e), 2018) p. 146
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York, New York University Press, 2009) p. 11
this figure is based on reported murders in the United States and thus a gross understatement of the actual violence occurring.
Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, 2nd edition (London, Bloomsbury, 2003) p. 246
Stallybrass, Worn Worlds, p. 40