Hello! I’ve got a massive announcement for Dressing Dykes today… My first book, ‘Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion’ is coming out in June 2024, and is available to pre-order NOW! “From Sappho and Suffragettes to t-shirts and TikTok, a fascinating journey through the culture, politics and social history of lesbian clothing.” I’ve poured my heart into this book – it’s the first ever written about lesbian fashion history, but hopefully not the last. If you’re a long-time reader of the blog, you’ll recognise some of the people, places and communities that are featured, but there are many ..read more

30 years ago, lesbian chic leapt into the world. As unexpected as it was provocative, lesbian chic cemented lesbianism firmly into the zeitgeist of the early-to-mid-’90s  – if only in its ‘chicest’ guise. Lesbian fashionability has its boundaries, and the kinds of lesbians that could be described as ‘lesbian chic’ were very different from most (if not all) of the lesbians whose style choices I’ve been celebrating for years here on Dressing Dykes. In many ways lesbian chic was never real, a media-fueled smokescreen used to commodify a population whose existence had always been appalling. Y ..read more

A couple of years ago, I posted an article about rings as lesbian fashion signals, particularly those worn on the little finger and the thumb. The response to this article by Brazilian lesbians exposed me to a lesbian fashion signal that I hadn’t previously encountered, and that has lingered in my consciousness ever since: the coconut thumb ring. In comments and messages I’ve been told repeatedly that a coconut ring, usually worn on the thumb, is an established symbol of lesbian identity in Brazil. Yet, there’s very little written about it either in English or Portuguese, and its significance ..read more

Appearance is more than just clothing. It is our skin, our nails, the tilt of our mouths or the furrows of our brows, the tattoos that may adorn us and the hair on our heads – or our legs, or our armpits. Of course, most of my work culminates in a study of garments, as garments are what cover our bodies, something that can be easily swapped and changed at will. Clothing may signify lesbian possibility most often, but there are times when it is hairstyles that lead the way. I’ve recently been working on a lecture about queer women’s hairstyles throughout history, and this article is based on pa ..read more

The sailor aesthetic is irrevocably intertwined with queer culture. The job description of “sailor” has a straggeringly gay history and the aesthetic has been used time and time again in gay fashion, media, music and more; think Tom of Finland or Pierre et Gilles. I use the word “gay” because, more often than not, these representations are of gay or otherwise male-loving men. The sailor aesthetic, at least in pop-culture, is hardly associated with lesbians at all. Sailor Uranus and Neptune (the lesbian couple from 1990s manga and anime Sailor Moon) are the closest example – but in their case ..read more

Dungarees – or overalls – have lived many lives. The word “dungarees” originally referred to the fabric that was first used for them, which came from the Indian village of Dongri and was named “dungri.” When, necessitated by the industrial revolution and enabled by the British Empire, the fabric was exported to England to be made into workwear, the name “dungaree” evolved. At this point, the dungarees/overalls that we picture today were still a thing of fantasy; the garments being made from dungaree fabric were instead sturdy working trousers.1 The addition of the bib was designed for practica ..read more

I recently came across the term “Roots”, or more specifically, “Roots lesbians.” It was while I was researching for my article on lesbian feminist dress codes, and I made a note to come back to the term and find out more about it. However, once I got around to doing this, I found it to be a much harder task than I’d anticipated. I gathered that “Roots” referred to Black British lesbians who would wear clothing from their respective cultures, sometimes entirely, sometimes combined with more typically “Western” fashions. This would partly be in order to connect with their Black identity and part ..read more

When studying the history of lesbian fashion, someone who I come back to again and again is Anne Lister. This is because of the wealth of evidence that she left behind, not just of the clothes that she wore but how she felt about them, from the perspective of a woman who we know loved and desired women. Her diaries are treasure troves, the place where she explored her anxieties about clothing, her triumphs, the way her outfits were received. As such, this is the third post in the ‘From Anne Lister’s Closet’ series on Dressing Dykes – the first can be found here and the second here.   ..read more

A confession: This article was never meant to be about cross-dressing dykes as an eighteenth century spectacle at all. In fact, it started out as an analysis of the fashion of one cross-dressing dyke of the eighteenth century, Mademoiselle de Raucourt (1756-1815). I will be writing about Raucourt, in all her theatrical, French, lesbian glory, but as I researched I realised that there was nowhere near enough description of her clothing to warrant a blog post all about her. It’s hard, sometimes, being a historian of lesbian fashion – the specific clothes that people wore were often seen as not w ..read more

How many times, in the history of lesbian fashion, is purple on the periphery? Within this blog, it crops up repeatedly, an Easter egg for the eagle eyed. There’s the hand-made t-shirts of the Lavender Menace, lavender in colour as well as in lettering, at once an insult and a rebuttal. There’s the bright purple background of the labrys lesbian flag, a reflection of the colour’s popularity in lesbian feminist imagery. There’s the alleged lesbian dress codes of the 1920s, where not just monocles but “sprigs of violets” reigned supreme and signalled a woman’s love for other women. There is, of c ..read more