Queer fashion practice and the camp tactics of Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY. Issue 1 (1st December 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hitchcock, Fenella; Bowstead, Jay McCauley
• Is Part Of: Critical studies in men's fashion. Volume 7:Issue 1(2020)
• Page Start: 27
• Page End: 49
• Publication Date: 2020-12-01
• Subjects: Fashion design -- Periodicals; 391.1
• DOI: 10.1386/csmf_00016_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2050-070X

Abstract

This article focuses on the collections of London-based, Glaswegian designer Charles Jeffrey who has won plaudits for his spectacular, subversive, theatrical and highly camp catwalk shows. His label LOVERBOY ‐ having grown out of an East London club night of the same name ‐ brings together eclectic historical references with the stylistic bricolage of the queer scene from which it emerged. Using a combination of image analysis and a semi-structured interview with Jeffrey, this article investigates how he has blurred the boundaries between the nightclub and the runway, the collective and the named designer to formulate a distinctly queer mode of fashion practice. At LOVERBOY the transformative possibilities of the nightclub; the heightened emotion of the dance floor; and the embodied, affective, temporal qualities of 'queer sociality' are transposed onto the catwalk, revealing the role of fashion and clothing in practices of queer world-making. Camp aesthetics and queer nightlife have played a crucial role in the history of fashion ‐ perhaps most notably during the 1980s when designers like Bodymap, Jean Paul Gaultier and Stephen Linard drew extensively on queer signifiers in their work. However, the success of LOVERBOY marks a shift in contemporary cultures of gender as discourses of queerness and performativity reach a new point of amplification. After the seriousness, refinement and minimalism of millennial fashion, the liminality, polysemy and exuberance of camp has again reasserted its transgressive potential.