Taste and Transgression: Gender and Sexuality in the Contemporary Avant–Garde Fashion of Bernhard Willhelm

Abstract

This article examines the avant-garde fashion of Los Angeles-based designer Bernhard Willhelm and how it simultaneously traverses the border between bourgeois respectability and “bad” taste, and challenges codes of heteronormative dress. Through analyses of specific collections and their representations, it demonstrates how Willhelm and his business partner Jutta Kraus interrogate and trouble fashion industry norms of beauty, gender, sexuality and race. Past menswear collections have featured traditionally feminine garments—skimpy body tanks, revealing hot pants, frilly peplums or “super mini-skirts”—while corresponding womenswear collections have comprised in part similar, if not identical garments. This crossover reflects Willhelm and Kraus’s desire to diversify menswear and challenge the fashion system’s divisions between gendered dress. Their decorative, feminine forms dispute notions of propriety and directly contravene interpretations of modern (read: masculine) design as stripped of ornamentation. This article also considers the transgressions enacted when such garments are modeled by gay, pornographic and black male bodies. In so doing, Bernhard Willhelm actively refuses to perpetuate homogeneity by supporting diversity in its various forms.