We’re Entering a Joyful New Era of Lesbian Fashion
Earlier this year, the actress Kristen Stewart appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a pocket-covered black leather vest that looked like it had been swiped from a 1980s lesbian bar. Bare-chested, her hair cut into a squirrelly mullet, she wore only one other garment: a white jock strap into which her hand plunged suggestively past the wrist. The 34-year-old former ingénue — who entered the public eye in 2008 as the teenage star of the “Twilight” movie franchise, before coming out in 2017 — seemed to be reclaiming pleasure exclusively for herself. For other appearances to promote “Love Lies Bleeding,” her A24-produced queer thriller, which was released in March, she channeled a similar spirit, showing up in a sea green Dickies bomber jacket over a stomach-baring crop top at the Sundance Film Festival and a structured black leather blazer with a fishnet bra on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”
The actress Kristen Stewart, photographed in early 2024.Credit…From left: Cassidy Sparrow/Getty Images for Ketel One; Isa Foltin/Getty Images; MediaPunch/Bauer-Griffin, via Getty Images
It was a press-junket wardrobe that showcased a newly joyful, even giddy aesthetic that’s emerging among a generation of lesbians and young queer stars— an approach to dressing centered on mixing overtly sex-forward, often hyper-feminine pieces with tailored, traditionally butch wardrobe staples. “It’s so playful and obnoxiously sexy,” says the New York-based fashion designer Daniella Kallmeyer, 37. “It’s not about a ‘typical’ look. There’s no stereotypical way to dress queer or like a lesbian. It’s about unapologetically owning your identity.” In January, the singer Reneé Rapp wore a hot pink bustier with a silky blazer to the premiere of the “Mean Girls” remake, and the singer Billie Eilish attended the Golden Globes in a bulbous black Willy Chavarria suit jacket. In the March issue of Vogue, there was the actress Ayo Edebiri wearing barely there miniskirts with wildly oversize button-downs.
Even celebrities who don’t identify as queer are experimenting with fashion in similarly gleeful, nonconformistways. See Rihanna’s cropped haircut and black necktie in the April issue of Interview, and Anne Hathaway’s velvet, linebacker-shouldered three-piece suit on the cover of V Magazine’s summer issue, under the headline “His and Hers.” It’s a defiant mood that also showed up on the spring 2024 runways: At Maison Margiela, models walked in disheveled oversize suits, their hair in frizzy nests and, at Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada created a world of rumpled polos and boat shoes, as if the models had raided a British boy’s school.
