Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric

254 Pages·2018·11.63 MB·English

by  Madison Moore

FABULOUS
MADISON MOORE FABULOUS
THE RISE OF THE BEAUTIFUL
ECCENTRIC
Copyright © 2018 by madison moore.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use.
For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).
Designed by Sonia L. Shannon.
Set in Futura type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017957274
ISBN 978-0-300-20470-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO
Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
preface
1.
The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric
“I Don’t Want to Be Boring!”: A Conversation with Alok Vaid-Menon
2.
How to Work a Look
“I Create My Own Space”: A Conversation about Fierceness
3.
Up in the Club
“I Was Born a Queen, I’ve Always Been a Queen”: A Conversation with Shaun
J. Wright
4.
What’s Queer about the Catwalk?
Paris Is Burning: A Conversation with Lasseindra Ninja
“Don’t Hate Us ’Cause We Fabulous”
900 Words on Prince
notes
acknowledgments
index
color illustrations follow p. 128.
PREFACE
the story of fabulousness was on my mind way before I knew it would become
a whole book. It was on my mind when I rushed to Casa Magazines on the
corner of 8th Avenue and 12th Street in New York City every month to get the
latest issues of French and Italian Vogue. It was on my mind when I saw my
grandmother get all dressed up for church or the casino—wigs, broaches,
sequins, and all. And as a teenaged gay boy I locked myself in my bedroom and
plugged into this book as I danced to Prince and Lenny Kravitz, two black men
who fascinated me because they could wear leather pants, fringe, and high heels,
and nobody seemed to mind all that much. “How do they do it?” I wondered.
Almost twenty years later here I am, posing the same question.
There are some books you read that really stick with you over the course
of your lifetime, and for me The Theory of the Leisure Class, a canonical book
by the Yale-trained economist Thorstein Veblen, published in 1899, is one of
those books. It’s a breezy, satirical portrait of the white, straight, new-moneyed
elite of the Gilded Age, the book that birthed the term conspicuous consumption.
Today, Veblen’s little book seems as relevant in Trump’s America as it did more
than a hundred years ago, as the Minnesotan author was primarily interested in,
or more like disgusted by, grotesque displays of wealth. He understood the
conspicuousness of luxury, fancy clothes, big houses, and decadent feasts as
limitless, never-ending examples of power and financial prowess. Sound
familiar? But the story of conspicuousness I’m telling here is much more brown,
much more queer, and a lot more fun. The pursuit of fun and pleasure are
political gestures too. This bedazzled revision of Veblen is about how fashion,
glitter, and sequins, things I can’t get enough of, are not only shiny, conspicuous,
and look great on Instagram, but they underscore the pleasure and power of
creativity for queer and marginalized people and other social outcasts. The story
I’m telling is about fabulousness as a queer aesthetic, an essence that allows
marginalized people and social outcasts to regain their humanity and creativity,
not necessarily to boast about power or influence.
Veblen’s original text is, at its heart, about the wasteful nature of
capitalism and the leisure class that spills out of it. He was curious about how the
conspicuous consumption of goods was used to wield financial prowess over
people of considerably less influence and social value. Think, for instance, of the
nineteenth-century socialite Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the Mrs. Astor, who
threw exclusive parties at her home on Fifth Avenue, ruled the New York social
scene, and was rumored to keep a List of 400—the only four hundred people in
all of the city who mattered. These parties were definitely about performing a
certain kind of conspicuous consumption. But were there any brown people at
the functions?
In revising Veblen’s original ideas about conspicuous consumption and
power I want to tell a different side of the story. I want to talk about how
fabulousness is not about money but about opening doors to brand-new
dimensions, creating a separate space in the here and now. The challenge of
telling the story of fabulousness is that there is no single, traditional archive
specifically dedicated to it. There is no single university or museum that holds
the definitive record on material related to fabulousness as it has spread and been
experienced across time, communities, and space. Fabulousness is everywhere,
but it is not necessarily right in front of us at all times. It flashes before our eyes
for brief moments at a time, seducing us emotionally. That’s what makes it
exciting. It’s a type of creative engagement we can find everywhere: from
Balzac’s realist fiction and writings on fashion, like his 1836 novel Old Goriot
or his 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living, to the more contemporary cultural forms
of performance art, voguing, and club culture.
Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric is not a manifesto. Not
everyone needs to be fabulous all the time, and there are certainly millions of
people who don’t want to or can’t be fabulous for one reason or another. But
what is compelling about fabulousness are the people who consciously chose the
harder route, the risk and the rise of living as a “spectacle,” when it would be so
much easier—though no less toxic—to just follow the rules and blend in. This
book tells their stories.
1.
The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric
i will never forget the day I saw the Juilliard-trained queer virtuoso violinist
Amadéus Leopold (formerly Hahn-Bin) live in concert. It was his first
downtown show, a special performance handpicked by Lou Reed and Laurie
Anderson at a tiny experimental music and performance art venue in New York
called the Stone. At the time, Leopold, who had studied violin with the
legendary Itzhak Perlman at Juilliard, pumped around the classical music,
fashion, and art worlds in New York City, making a splash with his blend of
unquestionable virtuosity, his thrilling sense of performance, his fashion and
creative strangeness. He took classical music from Alice Tully Hall to MoMA
and from the catwalk to the nightclub. I’d been assigned to write a story about
him for Interview magazine, and the fashion diva and classical music nerd in me
was eager to see him in action. It’s hard to convey how much Leopold’s art
spoke to me: I also grew up in the violin world of orchestra, summer music
camps, recitals, and competitions, even earning a full ride to a school of music
for violin performance. But in my two decades of studying violin I always felt
something wasn’t quite right. Where was the diversity? America’s homegrown
heartthrob virtuoso Joshua Bell is great, and so are other star performers like
Midori and Anne-Sophie Mutter. But where was the fabulous brown queen
behind the violin?
As soon as I learned about Amadéus Leopold I exhaled. At last, an
unapologetically queer classical violin virtuoso! What drew me to Leopold
wasn’t just that he had studied with Perlman at Juilliard, so he must be good. It
was that he really knows how to work a look. Take one glance at Leopold and
you’ll see that fashion is just as much a part of his art as the music he plays.
When I got to meet him for the Interview story, I asked if it was difficult to play
sixty-fourth notes—some of the fastest notes on the violin—in gravity-defying
high heels. “It’s a struggle,” he told me, “but the shoes and everything I wear is
really part of the art. It’s not an option for me to take them off.”1 Now that’s a
balancing act.
That evening at the Stone, Leopold was a breath of fresh air. Not only
were his interpretations of standard violin concert pieces like Pablo de Sarasate’s
Zigeunerweisen remarkable, but his creatively strange looks—the dramatic
makeup, particularly around the eyes, the tight leopard-print pants, red ankle
boots, and hair piled atop his head like a swirl of black ice cream—added an
extra surge of creativity to the spectacle. In a 2011 Today Show interview
Leopold described himself as a “performance artist who speaks through the
language of the violin,” welding together theater, fashion, dance, and classical
music. When asked how he’s received by traditional classical music audiences
Leopold remarked, somewhat humorously, “I think that the classical music
world has sort of been taking a nap, and I’m here to wake them up! People said,
‘You can’t go to Carnegie Hall looking like this!’” But when you are queer, of
color, and gender nonconforming, what does it mean to look like “this”? Queer
and gender-nonconforming people are often reduced to “this” or “that” by haters,
homophobes, and transmisogynists while simply walking down the street: “What
is that?” they’ll say. Not even human—a “thing.” The moment Leopold steps
out onstage, perhaps the only “safe” space, audiences typically respond with an
audible gasp, he noted, and for him that gasp circles the way fabulousness
changes the energy in a room. That’s when the real performance begins.2
“My parents—everybody—would tell me that I’m a boy, I have to act this
way, you can’t wear these things,” he told me. “You can’t put on makeup. And
so for me, fashion and the visual expression of myself became a way to claim
self-love. Every time I put on lipstick, every time I drape myself, I become my
own self rather than what everybody else would rather have me be.”3 Leopold’s
art pinpoints in no uncertain terms that fabulousness is something embodied and
queer—an aesthetic—one rooted in certain kinds of creative agency, where
extravagant self-expression is a dangerous political gesture.
Nearly every story about fabulousness I’ve learned in the course of writing
this book begins with such a turning point, a shedding of a past way of living in
favor of living for oneself in another dimension in the here and now.
Fabulousness may look great on the outside, and beautiful eccentrics may seem
confident and well put together, but underneath the surface lurks a story of
struggle, survival, and resistance, even if the story is still being written. The
watershed moment of fabulousness occurs when marginalized people and other
social outcasts get fed up with the pressures to conform to norms that never had
them in mind in the first place and respond to that suffering and exhaustion by
taking the risk to live exactly the way they see fit. This is what Francesca
Royster encourages us to think of as “the freedom to be strange.”4 “I don’t think
I would have gone the length to find the truest form of visual identity,” Leopold
remembers, “had I not suffered through the boundaries that had been present in
my former environments.”5 With all its pomp and circumstance, fabulousness
sees norms and resists them, twists them and makes them abstract, taking them
on face-to-face, no holds barred. Perhaps one of the greatest creative gifts of
marginalized people and social outcasts is that power of abstraction—the ability
to see through the here and now and to live dangerously through radical style,
art, music, and ideas.
“This kid is FABULOUS!”
“WERRRRKKKKKK hahahah”
“LOVES it!!!! SO CREATIVE!!”
“Send that boy some eyelashes!!!!!!!”
“That’s a lot of talent with little resources.”
“Just stepped out the mini fridge, feeling gorgeous. Werk.”6
They’re talking about Apichet “Madaew Fashionista” Atirattana, a
teenager from the Khon Kaen province of northeastern Thailand who became a
viral Internet sensation in 2015 by posting creative photos of himself on
Instagram and Facebook. But these are not just any photos or selfies. They are
creatively strange. “Newest Fashionista Famous for WTF Factor,” one Thai blog
wrote.7 The “WTF Factor” of Madaew’s photos is that he creates his looks out of
everyday—but unusual—materials, things that are just lying around his family’s
market stall, like chicken wire, concrete blocks, or dyed cabbage leaves. In a
2016 Time magazine profile, Atirattana expressed that he wants “people to see
that ugly things that don’t seem to go together can become something beautiful .
. . and that looking good doesn’t depend on money.”8 In one look, for instance,
“liked” by nearly sixty thousand people on Facebook, Madaew stands unusually
tall because he’s wearing three sheets of corrugated metal that he has arranged
just so, working the metal pieces as a “dress” and posing to eternity. In another
shot he stands barefoot, out in an open field, wearing a look made entirely of
toilet paper. The camera is positioned in a way that dramatizes the toilet
paperness of the look, just in case we didn’t get it. And in one of my favorite
looks Madaew poses at the top of a highway overpass—the photo is shot from
the bottom of the stairs—wearing a dress made of a reddish-pink Thai checkered
cloth with a train that must be at least thirty feet long. The train, his ponytail,
cascades dramatically all the way down the stairs. It’s fabulous.
In 2015 Indonesian-American drag queen Raja Gemini, winner of season
3 of RuPaul’s Drag Race, shared a video on Facebook of Madaew posing
outdoors. “I’m obsessed with this!” he said. “Basically this is me everyday.”9 In
the clip Madaew poses in the flawless self-made looks we’re used to seeing him