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UAL Research Online

Queer fashion practice and the camp tactics of Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY

Hitchcock, Fenella and McCauley Bowstead, Jay (2020) Queer fashion practice and the camp tactics of Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY. Critical Studies in Men's Fashion, 7 (1). pp. 27-49. ISSN 2050-070X

Type of Research: Article
Creators: Hitchcock, Fenella and McCauley Bowstead, Jay
Description:

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 His label LOVERBOY – having grown out of an East London club night of the same name – brings together eclectic historical references with the stylistic bricolage of the queer scene from which it emerged.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.

Official Website: https://www.intellectbooks.com/critical-studies-in-mens-fashion
Additional Information (Publicly available):

Please see https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/16188 for the updated version of this paper.

Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: Queer Fashion Practice, Nightlife, Dance Floor, Camp
Publisher/Broadcaster/Company: Intellect
Your affiliations with UAL: Colleges > London College of Fashion
Date: 14 April 2020
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1386/csmf_00016_1
Date Deposited: 17 Nov 2020 16:16
Last Modified: 31 Aug 2021 08:34
Item ID: 16188
URI: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/16188

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