What Is Lesbian Fashion?

A chat with Eleanor Medhurst, the creator of Dressing Dykes

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Le Monocle,Paris, 1932. Paul Thompson/FPG/Getty Images

This week I’m excited to share an interview with Eleanor Medhurst, a lesbian fashion historian who runs the blog and Instagram account Dressing Dykes. Eleanor’s posts about fashion history span continents and time periods, and her work is always wonderfully detailed and well-researched. On her blog, you can find articles on topics like short hair, the color purple, and dungarees (or overalls, for my fellow Americans). I’ve always been fascinated by lesbian fashion because, much like lesbians themselves, it has often been undervalued or even erased from history. It is the kind of thing that is spoken about and understood within these communities but has rarely been recorded or chronicled in the canons of fashion history.

And that’s exactly where Eleanor comes in. I asked her about her unique career path, what she wishes people understood about lesbian fashion history, and how she conducts her fascinating research projects. If you like this interview, why not give Eleanor a follow? (And make sure you’re subscribed to Paging Dr. Lesbian, of course.) Enjoy!

How did you become an expert on lesbian fashion history? What drew you to the field? 

I realised my interest in the history of lesbian fashion while I was doing my BA (in Fashion & Dress History) and my MA (in History of Design & Material Culture) at the University of Brighton. In my research - particularly for my MA, where my dissertation focused on the history of lesbian t-shirts - I found that there was so much potential to uncover and analyse lesbian fashion and style in history, and yet no one was really doing so. There are articles here and there, of course, a brief chapter (or paragraphs) in broader books on lesbian history, but nothing dedicated solely to the topic. I finished my masters, graduated into the global lockdowns of 2020, and spent my time researching any area of lesbian fashion history that I could.

What does your day-to-day work as a lesbian fashion historian look like? What kind of projects are you working on right now?

I spend a lot of my time researching, and a lot writing. There's a lot of answering emails! Usually, I'll be working on lectures, public talks, or research articles. I do a lot of guest lectures for universities, and have spoken about lesbian fashion history at various public institutions, like the Tate Modern in London. I've spent the past year and a half writing a book, and I'm just figuring out what new projects to work on during my spare time! Hopefully I'll be able to share more details about said book soon. That's all I can say for now!

What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of lesbian fashion?

Honestly, I think that the most misunderstood aspect of lesbian fashion is that it doesn't exist. I think that, for a lot of people, "lesbian fashion" is either just normal clothing or particularly un-fashionable clothes. There's a lot of merit in un-fashionability, I think - it's a political statement, a lot of the time - but lesbian fashion has always existed, whether in the form of personal self-styling or lesbians being fashion leaders. Take, for example, Madge Garland and Dorothy Todd, the fashion editor and editor of British Vogue in the 1920s. They were super fashionable, and incredibly influential in fashion history, and yet the influence of their relationship and the lesbian culture that they were part of is rarely analysed.

Is there an overarching takeaway you’ve been able to glean about lesbian fashion from your years of research? In terms of its place in lesbian culture, significance in fashion history more broadly, etc. 

I think that it's important to remember that lesbian fashion can mean many things. Of course, a huge part of lesbian fashion are the things that might spring to mind to those within the lesbian community, the things that are (or are almost) stereotypes, and yet kind of true: Doc Martens, carabiners, dungarees/overalls. But lesbian fashion is integral to fashion history because it is repeatedly an example of people finding themselves through clothing, making their own way in the world through fashion, and finding communities through self-presentation. I think that lesbian fashion is also integral to queer history; because the clothes worn by lesbians are often (though not always) less fun and flamboyant than many of the fashions made popular by many queer men, lesbian fashion seems to pale in comparison, or become a non-existent topic. I hope that through my work, I can make it clear that this is not and shouldn't be the case. 

What is your favorite period (or the period you find most interesting) of lesbian fashion history?

This is a hard one, because lesbian fashion can't really be defined by periods of time in the way that we might imagine more mainstream fashion divided into (1920s fashion, 1950s fashion, etc.). The fashions that are favoured by any given community/person at any given point are often a direct result of that community's needs. I do love, however, the various lesbian fashions that thrived during the "long 1920s" (a bit before to a bit after the decade itself). At the time, many women were finding new freedoms because of the trailing influence of WW1 as well as some women gaining the right to vote. There was a trend for "boyish" clothing among women, and lesbians took this to the extreme - in Europe, for example, some upper-class lesbians began wearing monocles, and would often think of them as a kind of lesbian signal (though non-lesbians did wear them, too!). Concurrently in Harlem, in New York City, the Harlem Renaissance was thriving. Black lesbians were forming exciting new communities, and new fashion cultures were forming at "rent parties" attended by queer women and on the stages where "B.D. women" ('bulldagger women') Blues singers performed. There was a lot of lesbian potential in and around the '20s.

Can you talk a little bit about the idea of the butch/femme fashion dichotomy and the origins of that as both a fashion trend and a cultural practice? I feel like butch and femme identities are some of the most misunderstood (and even maligned!) aspects of lesbian culture, and I'd love your perspective on that as a fashion historian. 

Butch and femme are identities that have an incredibly rich and diverse history. They can be misunderstood, and certainly have been in the past - in the 1970s and '80s, in particular, lesbian feminists were very critical of butch and femme, as were middle-class lesbians who weren't necessarily activists themselves. Butch and femme were often seen as performing heterosexual gender roles and a heterosexual relationship dynamic, but this was never the case. The identities (and the relationship dynamic) has always been distinctly lesbian, rooted in lesbian community spaces. Though at times, and for some people, butch and femme have been very strictly defined, for others they were identities that could be worn or switched at will in order to attract a particular partner or fit into a certain space. I think that both identities - and them both together in a pair - are more complicated than I can describe in a short answer, but butch and femme weren't ever just about 'masculine' or 'feminine' self-presentation; they were (and remain) about an individual's role in their community, the way that they express themselves sexually, the way that they want to be seen by other lesbians, the way that they break free from or re-interpret the social roles that a heteronormative society expects them to play. In many instances, they are irremovably tied to experiences of class and/or race. Butch and femme are masculinity and femininity interpreted on lesbian bodies who have lived complicated lives.  

I loved your recent piece about coconut thumb rings in Brazil. Could you share a bit about how that article came about and how you went about researching that particular fashion trend? One of the things I find so interesting about lesbian fashion is that it is often kind of unspoken or at least not visible as such to the broader public, which means it's not necessarily something you can just Google. 

I've done a lot of research about lesbian rings in the past, mostly focused on the UK and the US. This includes pinky rings, wedding rings, and thumb rings. Whenever I've posted about this research online, I've had lesbians from Brazil comment to tell me about the coconut thumb ring, and how it's a Brazilian lesbian staple. Because of these comments, coconut rings are something that I've wanted to find out more about for a while! It was tricky finding information - they're certainly not widely researched, and even when searching in Portuguese there was hardly anything to find. It's the in-between of being a universal truth for so many lesbians (and sapphics) in Brazil and yet not valued or recognised by wider society - writing about them, or recording their significance, is very much an afterthought. This is the case with a lot of lesbian fashion! I wouldn't have been able to write my article without the incredibly generous assistance of all the Brazilian lesbians and queer women who reached out to me and told me about their experiences. 

You touched upon this briefly when you mentioned the editors of British Vogue in the 1920s, but I was wondering if you could share a bit more about how you see lesbian fashion having influenced fashion/culture more broadly over the years. It seems to me that lesbian contributions in all realms of culture aren't often recognized because of how under the radar the community tends to be. 

I think that lesbian contributions to fashion aren't recognised in part because of the community not being recognised or respected, but also because lesbian fashion is just assumed to be non-existent. However, I think we can see lesbian contributions to fashion all around us today. Doc Martens, for example, have been a lesbian favourite for decades (worn by many a lesbian activist in the late twentieth century, alongside other kinds of 'sensible' footwear), and now they're everywhere! Dungarees (or overalls) used to be derided almost universally when worn by women, and in the early 2000s were a persevering stereotype of lesbian identity - yet now they're high fashion, worn by people seeking style as well as comfort. Many lesbians see these changes in fashion as frustrating, and as almost appropriative. I understand this feeling, of course, but I'm always of the opinion that we're just going to keep being ahead of the trends, because we always have been! Plus, if heterosexual women are finally wearing comfortable clothes, who are we to stop them?