Queer Style Takes on New York Fashion Week

Dapper Q teamed up with other LGBTQ brands to showcase queer style during New York Fashion Week.

Held at the Brooklyn Museum, Verge was the largest queer Fashion Week show. Several designers, including Project Runway star Fabio Costa, showed off their spring-summer 2016 collections. Some might wonder, Why have a queer fashion show when gays run fashion?

"Q​ueer style is not simply about white cis gay male fashion designers creating binary, gender-normative, heteronormative collections to fit the fashion industry's unattainable beauty ideals," says A​nita Dolce Vita, DapperQ editor ­in­ chief. "It's about inclusion and dismantling everything we've been taught about beauty norms rooted in ableism, classism, fatphobia, ageism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, and self­-hate. Queer style is a social movement.”

Photos: K​atya Moorman/Karen L. Dunn

"Dressing in whatever makes you feel comfortable, regardless of any society's expectations toward what people assigned female should be wearing."
www.kqk.ca

“Queer style is owning your own unique style. Being fearless, majestic, comfortable and confident with what you wear. It’s layers, patterns, colors, experimental, real, mash ups, different and cool. It’s wearing what ever you want because you want to. It’s looking fresh and royal.”
www.sunsuncreative.tumblr.com

“Queer style is what we see everyday on and off the runway. It is the mixing of patterns and textures with an assortment of colors that satisfies that individual's template. It is the notion of daring to be different while just being your self. Queer style is not a trend.”
www.jaguarandcompany.com

"Queer style for me is simply embracing a nonconformist future. Gender neutrality is freedom"
fony.me

“Queer style is hard to define because being queer is a rejection of a dualistic thinking that would place a person into a category of being this or that; it is more about the disintegration of definitions and therefore has quite a large range of what it can actually look like. I think queer style is a deeply personal way of dressing
that comes from a search and exploration of the self – one that complicates and questions gender norms and societal expectations.”
www.lacticincorporated.com

"Queer style is empowerment through clothing. Allowing the individual to express their true self, independent of the social paradigms of gender."
www.notequal.co

“To me queer style is being free as an individual to express my inner nature. I’m talking about a human that is aware of their masculine and feminine energies. Energy ebbs and flows, therefore I don’t see how we can be so fixed in our genders. With queer style societal expectations and conventionality kind of go out the window. It’s more of a gender­bender. It’s freeing!”
www.saganyc.com