GQ Style: coloniality and camp in fashion for men

Abstract

The South African edition of the American men’s lifestyle magazine, Gentlemen’s Quarterly or GQ, launched in December 1999/January 2000. GQ Style, an aspirational supplementary magazine, sold separately to the parent publication, is evidence of the immense interest of GQ’s readers in sartorial distinction. The situatedness of this publication in a democratic South Africa tremendously sensitive to an intersectional politics has forced it to adapt. Through semiotic analyses of photographic tableaus, it becomes apparent how the magazine uses a Camp performance of masculinity as a marker of playful distinction for a new generation of almost exclusively Black readers. This article argues that in the current fantasy world of GQ Style, Afropolitanism implies a “remix” of the esthetic genealogies of Anglo-America. It also argues that GQ Style is complicit in the maintenance of epistemic coloniality.