‘Starved for pleasure’: the fashion magazine as a desirous queer archive

Abstract

ABSTRACT Bringing queer affect theory to bear on the history of fashion magazines, I track how in the 1990s Dutch – an independent fashion publication which became increasingly popular across Europe and the United States at the turn of the century – began to interrogate the visual ideologies of the fashion system. In a historical moment in which the sense of relief brought to the LGBTQ community by the effectiveness of antiretroviral therapy coincided with the deflation of radical energies within gay activism and the partial integration of the community into mainstream state systems, a coterie of gay fashion editors and photographers reconceived of the fashion magazine as a platform for gay erotica and collective identification, beyond a heteronormative economy of consumption. Through its photographic spreads and feature articles, Dutch disidentified with the conventional genre of the fashion magazine, typically a mediator of fantasies of glamour and upward mobility. This article argues that Dutch was a covert archive of queer feelings that, by attuning its readership to a counter-mood of hope and pleasure, initiated the formation of fashion magazine counterpublics, ultimately reshaping the fashion mediascape for years to come.