Excavating Queer Folklores
Three outfits by Lou Croff Blake
A conversation curated by jj rowan
Just Femme & Dandy Volume 06: The Time Travel Issue, Winter 2024
“On Garment Stories
Garment Stories is part of an upcycling project, which the shirt shown with the Story Pants is a part of, and has a process-informing purpose. They’re upcycles where I just kind of let go. I willfully give myself amnesia about everything I learned in fashion school, about what is the right thing to do when you’re making a garment, and just intuitively do whatever destruction and reassemblage needs to happen. Then, I write down the story of that process, print it out, and paste it onto the garment. And a lot of the pieces in this series were about unmascing. Making sites of destruction for masculinities, this absolute obliteration of specifically masculinized garments, especially really loaded sites of masculinity, like the collared shirt, the polo shirt, and the suit jacket.
On time travel
I think time travel is a really important theme for us to consider because queerness also queers time. I think a lot about anarchy, the lack of hierarchies, and the lack of hierarchy between past, present, and future that you tap into – either willfully or accidentally – when you’re queering your identity. An anarchic approach to time is something that feels liberating and exciting: inspiration from the past, the nostalgia of the queer folklores we are piecing together for ourselves, and the speculative future. I’ve been thinking a lot about speculative fashion – what hypotheses about the future can fashion open up? I gave you three outfits that don’t look like they fit particularly in the same series, but the red thread that links all of them is the fact that they’re really asking what if in their own ways – and also, what next?”
