Queering the stitch: Fashion, masculinity and the postsocialist subject

Abstract

In my article, I analyse some of the ways in which Gosha Rubchinskiy, Demna Gvasalia and Lotta Volkova might be said to ‘queer’ masculinity. I draw parallels between their work and the modernist, utopian, Constructivist project of Soviet fashion designers of the 1920s such as Varvara Stepanova and Lyubov’ Popova. Most importantly, both groups of artists share a desire to organize their fashion practice within a broader ideological project. At the heart of their respective projects is a fundamental challenge to conventional notions of gender in fashion, and in the fashion industry. In both cases, the ‘queering’ of gender norms, distinctions and hierarchies, both on and off the catwalk, is designed to produce a radical transformation of the relationship between the fashioned object and the fashionable, consuming subject. As far as today’s post-Soviet fashion designers are concerned, by the way in which they either queer masculinity or perform their own, queer brand of masculinity, they produce a new, utopian subject. Far from being the antithesis of the Constructivist project, then, this post-socialist utopian body can be seen as constituting perhaps its most spectacular realization to date.