Violets and Velvet: Lesbian Art and Fashion History with Dress Historian Eleanor Medhurst

Hi everyone. It's Madison. Before we jump into this episode, I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who's made season one of the Art-O-Log a success. It's been a great couple of months and I took a much-needed break, but now I'm back and I'm bringing you more conversations with people working in the arts around the world. This June, I'll be focusing on queer people working in the arts to celebrate Pride Month. Visibility is so important and I'm so grateful for the opportunities I've had to speak with people candidly about their career experiences as queer people. Just a heads up this episode contains the use of a homophobic slur that has been reclaimed by the guest in the name of her blog. If that's an issue for you, feel free to skip this week's episode. Other than that, there's no profanity. So, without further ado, I'm so excited to introduce this week's guest. I followed her blog and research since about 2021, and it's so exciting to see it now turn into a book.

Eleanor Medhurst is a dress historian from Brighton and is based in Birmingham, where she lives with her wife Lilith. She began dressing dykes after finishing her MA in the History of Design and Material Culture at the University of Brighton. Her studies, both at undergrad and postgrad level, revolve around uncovering and analyzing lesbian history through the lens of clothing, coinciding with her work on Queer Looks and Queer the Pier, both exhibitions at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Since starting the Dressing Dykes blog in 2020, she's given talks and lectures around the virtual globe, spreading the history of lesbian fashion far and wide, from the Tate Modern in London to the Bauhaus University in Berlin or the Sophia University in Tokyo. She's written about lesbian style, craft and activism for journals and edited collections, and on June 1st 2024, which is tomorrow, her first book Unsuitable a History of Lesbian Fashion is being published by Hearst Eleanor. Welcome to the show.

Hello, it's wonderful to be here.

I know I've just given you a bit of a sprawling introduction, but I'm wondering can you introduce yourself for the people listening?

Yeah, I am Eleanor Medhurst and I'm a lesbian fashion historian, or a historian of lesbian fashion, depending on how I like to phrase it. So I focus on lesbian fashion histories, either semi-recently or in the past, 100, 200 years, 100, 200 years and really just focusing on why clothes are important within lesbian history, why lesbians are important within fashion histories and why lesbian fashion is important within any kind of historical study, but particularly through a queer lens.

I think fashion is such an overlooked art form and I'm wondering, as a fashion historian where do you think art and fashion overlap?

I think that art and fashion overlap quite a lot in a lot of different ways.

Really, partly, fashion in itself is an art form. For a lot of people, fashion is definitely an art form. Fashion is definitely an art form and for me, I think that art is a really important way of finding out about fashion in the past and lesbian fashion in the past in particular cases, because it can be like a primary source. So when you're looking at paintings as like an archetypical form of art, in those paintings you've got people who are wearing some of the time, not all of the time clothes. So you can talk about and learn about fashion history through looking at paintings, and that's something that I do in my work, definitely with paintings of people like Anne Lister or Christina, queen of Sweden, who are painted in interesting outfits and outfits that reflect descriptions of them in written words. So art is a really important way to analyze fashion history and to see it from a different lens, because it's not always represented in the same way as clothes are represented in, for example, written work.

Do you have any favourite lesbian or sapphic artworks in particular that you could point to as a good source here?

When it comes to more historical artworks, a lot of the time the artworks themselves won't necessarily be sapphic. They won't be by a sapphic painter. A lot of the time classic arts will be by men, even though there are so many women throughout art history. But, for example, there are two paintings of christina, queen of sweden, who I mentioned, by sebastian bourdon, both from, I think, 1653 or something like that, and they're extraordinary. One of is a portrait and she's got this sort of mishmash of men's and women's fashion, and one is another portrait where she's on horseback and she's this really heroic figure.

So that's one example of sapphic art that sapphic because it's been claimed within sapphic history. But also when it comes to more modern arts and sapphic art that I think is important. I really turn to photographs and photography because that's a really kind of prolific way that lesbian culture, sapphic culture, is represented by artists, and I think of artists like Catherine Opie, who's done some fantastic photographs and fantastic lesbian artwork, and then more documentary photographers like JEB Joan E Byron, who's done, for example, a fantastic book called Eye to Eye Portraits of Lesbians, which is all, just as the title suggests, portraits of lesbians, and there's some beautiful photographs in a more contemporary landscape. I really turn to photographs.

Just for some listener context here, can you tell us a bit about who Christina Queen of Sweden was? Sweden was.

Yes, of course I can. So Christina, queen of Sweden, was, as the sort of moniker suggests, a Queen of Sweden in the 17th century. She came to the throne when she was still a child and she was under a regency, and then she was ruling in her own right for a period of around 10 years right, for a period of around 10 years, and she was really almost controversial at the time because she had her own motives for what she wanted to do. She really wanted to bring French influences into the Swedish court and into Sweden, whether that be fashion, whether that be academic influences, and she was really interested in learning as much as she could.

But from the perspective of lesbian fashion history, she she just dressed however she wanted throughout her life, and when she was on the throne she was sometimes a bit more pared back.

She did wear more traditional feminine clothes that would have been expected to be worn by a woman of her position at the time.

She abdicated because she wanted to live her own life and she moved to Rome and she started dressing in men's clothing a lot of the time, but not all of the time. And she again, like I said earlier in one of her portraits, she, throughout her life she had this mishmash of masculine and feminine clothing and in some times, in historical sources, it was really well received and in other times she was criticized and mocked. Crucially, she was rumored to have had relationships with multiple women throughout her life, or to have had flirtations with multiple women throughout her life. She wrote very loving letters to multiple women and because of all of these reasons, I see her as part of lesbian fashion history, even if she might not have been a lesbian herself. She's been acknowledged as being part of queer history because of the way that she's been received and because of the way that she lived her life with such a sense of independence, so she's a really interesting figure.

What have been some of the best examples of lesbian fashion history you've come across in your research.

Oh, it's interesting because there's just such a diversity of lesbian fashion styles and it's hard to pin anything down just because, depending on the context, depending on the person or the community, fashion can be very distinct. And also it's hard to, within even one community, limit things to one style just because of the lack of sources. A lot of the time, like you piece together a picture through a lot of different things. A lot of the time, like you piece together a picture through a lot of different things. But I don't know if I want to talk about one specific thing. I come to items or styles that are that sort of existed to send a message. For example, in my research I've looked a lot at lesbian slogan t shirts and a prime example within these is the t-shirts worn by the lavender menace activist group. And the lavender. The lavender menace activist group were a group of lesbian feminists.

In 1970. They got their name from the feminist, the famous feminist, betty friedan had called lesbians a lavender menace within the women's movement, implying that they was a threat, and lesbians at this time weren't happy with this comment and they weren't happy with the erasure that they were facing within the wider feminist movement in the 1960s and the 1970s and in may 1970 there was a feminist conference it was the second Congress to Unite Women in New York City and the Lavender Menace activist group. They all made these t-shirts that said the phrase Lavender Menace across them. They hand dyed them themselves. They were purple to lean into the lavender aspect of the phrase and they infiltrated this conference and they managed to turn all the lights off and burst burst in while the lights were off, turn the back on again and they were all just standing there in these lavender menace T-shirts. So for me that's just a really exciting part of lesbian fashion history, because clothes were making such a massive point and made a difference in the feminist movement for a long time afterwards yeah, that's so interesting.

Um, I wonder, could you speak to the sort of reclamation of the pejorative here in queer circles? I know it happens a lot and it's definitely a point of contention for some people. Even with your Instagram account Dressing Dykes, there's that reclamation of the word. So what are your thoughts on that?

Absolutely. That's something that happens a lot in queer communities, even with the word queer itself, with dyke, with lavender, and I think it's something to do with reclaiming the ways that we've been oppressed, reclaiming the words that have been used against us so that it takes the power that they have against us away and gives us that power instead. Um and lavender, for example, it's difficult because it was never really a an insult. It was just used in this instance and in instances like that to mock. Lavender's been used as like a sort of joyful symbol for decades, and then it's the word menace is more of the reclamation in that instance, because it's like you want us to be a menace. We can be a menace, we can disrupt your conference.

And that's very similar to me with words like dyke, because dyke has this sort of violence attached to it, because it's been used to harm so many lesbians or queer women or even people who aren't queer but have dressed or presented themselves or acted in a way that didn't like or that doesn't line up with how a acceptable heterosexual woman is supposed to act.

So to reclaim the word dyke for me is partly it's partly that taking back the violence and the power that people might have over us and claiming it for ourselves. It's also bringing attention to the ways that we've been oppressed, because if we're using that word, for instance, in visual culture, in things like slogan t-shirts, it makes people have to stop and think about it and go oh, people are being called bad names, people are being treated horribly for who they are, and I think that using words like the reclamation of slurs and using them as a sort of identity label means that we're not letting our sort of oppression slip away and be ignored yeah, I think that's a great point and it's it's got me thinking a lot about gender transgression in lesbian fashion specifically, and that sense of wearing traditionally masculine clothing as a signifier.

But also there's that aspect of the femme identity where wearing hyper feminine clothing is also a signifier. Can you speak to that or tell me a bit more about the history of those kinds of gender transgressions within the lesbian community?

Yeah, so I think that hyper femininity within queer communities, and queer women's communities especially, can be a really interesting kind of tool in like an activist tool, because femininity is assumed to mean that you're doing everything right, you're being acceptable, you're not being queer, you're not being deviant.

It has all these associations that people who have been raised and socialized as women growing up.

Femininity can often be stifling, especially if you're a queer woman and you've had the association of femininity be something that really belong to you or be embraced by you, if you're also queer, because those things allegedly don't go together, whereas to be a hyper feminine lesbian or a hyper feminine queer person, for example, to just embrace things that are stereotypically feminine while being queer, shows that femininity and gender as a whole are socially constructed.

Because if you can take things like pink and makeup and I don't know a love of barbie, for instance, with barbie being like such a hot topic at the moment, if you can take those things and remove the stereotypical meanings attached to them and be like actually, these are all about being gay, these are all about being queer as all hell, this is they. These things don't mean what you think they mean. I think that can be a really powerful message and can mean a lot to the people who use hyper femininity as a tool or just as a way to express joy in their life so, on the topic of signaling, can you tell us a bit more about specific symbols within lesbian fashion history that have been used as a way to convey messages to other queer people?

yeah, symbolism is such a huge thing within lesbian fashion history, within within lesbian history, queer history in general, just because queer communities of all kinds have have have had to hide or code themselves or be subtle in specific situations for such a long time, for hundreds, thousands of years. So symbolism has a massive place in lesbian fashion history. For example, there are things like violets, there are things like lavender, which I already mentioned, both of which are under the umbrella of purple, as a lesbian signal, as a lesbian symbol, and violets appeared first in the poetry of Sappho, who was an ancient Greek poet who wrote about her love for women and often included violet imagery. It's something that was reclaimed in the early 20th century, particularly in Paris, which had such a thriving lesbian community that it became known as Paris Lesbos lesbian community that it became known as Paris Lesbos, going back to that Sappho from Lesbos connotation, and during that time period, from sort of 1900 to around the 1920s, violets were used a lot of the time just to express friendship and express relationships between women, and one of the most significant examples is there was a play in 1926 that was put on in Paris and also New York called the Captive, and in that play there's a relationship between women, although I believe only one of them's ever actually on the stage, but the lover is. She shows her presence in the two women's relationship by sharing bunches of violets and allegedly members of the audience would wear violets on their lapels to go and see the play. So violets became a massive lesbian symbol and has been reclaimed more recently because of this history and because people resonate with it.

There's other lesbian symbols, like rings. Rings have often been used as a subtle lesbian signal, to signal yes, I'm one of you, you can come and talk to me or whatever. Sometimes I'll be used in conjunction with other things, like a whole outfit or other signals. For example, the pinky ring has been recorded as being used by lesbians intentionally from the interwar period, from the period between the two world wars. It crops up again in like the 1950s, with like butchers and femmes and lesbian bars wearing pinky rings as part of their lesbian self-fashioning.

And things like the thumb ring are more recent. There's less kind of records about it, but there's definitely people saying, oh yeah, I wear the thumb ring are more recent. There's less kind of records about it, but there's definitely people saying, oh yeah, I wear a thumb ring. I'm a lesbian and I wear a thumb ring, so there's so many lesbian signals that are interwoven into wider lesbian fashion, whether really intentionally or just through more repetition and coincidence, and people just doing these things because the people around them are doing them. And yeah, lesbian signaling, especially with like accessories, is just a massive thing.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I think understanding these symbols is so important to understanding queer art. So using queer art as a uh, what do you call it in history a first person source, I want to say it's been so long since I did history or a primary source, that's what it is a primary source. Understanding these symbols within these primary sources is a way to reconstruct our history that people have tried to erase it. When we understand that, then we can understand our history and kind of commune with these elders. And when you talked about Paris Lesbos, I immediately started thinking about those iconic Brassai pictures of Le Monocle in Paris and the clothing that's worn in those photos, because I think that's part of what makes it so iconic.

Something that I think is just so beautiful about it all is that the gender transgression has kind of stayed with the art. So, like the Catherine Opie pictures that you mentioned in her drag series that she did back in the 90s, where she had her friends in like male drag, there's that continuation, or like a lesbian continuum, as it were, where the gender transgression within the art is fundamental to the signaling, not only to other queer people, as a way to say like, look, I'm one of you, but almost differentiating queer people from almost differentiating queer people from non-queer viewers? I think yeah. But I guess my next question would be since so much of the history is coded, where do you begin researching lesbian fashion history?

It's often really difficult just because lesbian fashion history has been so under-researched. Sometimes, depending on the area, there are some sort of secondary sources, things that other people have written about lesbian history. That might include clothing, or sometimes particularly about lesbian or queer women's fashion. It's really rare to find things like that, though, and it will normally be if I'm looking up like butch and femme in the mid-century. That's the most prolific area of lesbian research, lesbian historical research.

So a lot of the time when I'm researching I have to find something that I want to learn about, find a person or have heard about a person or a community, and then try and research around that topic and find out as much as I can, and sometimes nestled into either primary texts or other people's work about something.

There'll be something about clothes that whoever that writer is perhaps hasn't deemed important, but then you start making the connections between everything, and that's how lesbian fashion history as a written kind of process forms. But even within that, a lot of the time I have to be quite deliberate with what I'm doing and quite considered with what I'm including in lesbian fashion history, because you can't call everyone in the past who might be part of lesbian fashion history necessarily a lesbian, whether because they didn't use that terminology or you just don't know enough about their life to be able to label them. But within that I can still say but there's enough connections to other parts of lesbian fashion history, there's enough influence in later lesbian styles that it's still part of the same lineage. Yeah, it's about digging around and making connections and painting a larger picture making connections and painting a larger picture.

Okay, I see From start to finish. How long did it take you to write Unsuitable? So it's been a long time coming. The work in Unsuitable started really as soon as I started working on lesbian fashion history, so all the way back when I was at university. But it really started while I was, when I began writing articles and researching for my blog, dressingdykescom, which began in 2020. I finished my master's and then it was 2020, so I had some time on my hands, but I started writing it in earnest in early 2022 and it's, as I'm speaking now, it's November 2023 and I've just finished revisions. So, yeah, it's been a long process but a really interesting one, and I've definitely learned so much throughout this time.

Yeah, yeah, that does sound like an amazing process and something that's so desperately needed right now. What was the most interesting or surprising part of your research for the book?

Something that I found really interesting during my research in an area that I hadn't looked at in depth before looking at it consciously for the book was looking at the possibility of trans lesbians in interwar Berlin, so Berlin in the sort of 20s and 30s, and this was something that I've got a whole chapter about it in the book. So if you'd like to, if you'd like to find out more about it, pre-order unsuitable, but this was something that I looked at with largely archival lesbian magazines that were published in Germany during that period, in the 20s and 30s, and a lot of these are digitalized and available online, which was really useful because obviously otherwise I'd be having to take myself to Germany and I don't speak German either, so having it digitalized means it's easier to try and translate things. It does help that I've got a wife who speaks some German. But, yeah, I was looking at these archival digitalized lesbian magazines from the 20s and 30s and they're just such a fascinating resource because it's not only they're not only full of articles written by lesbians and there's transvestite they're called transvestite supplements.

Um were published within these lesbian magazines that would talk about like tips for how to dress and stuff like that, but there's also um adverts for lesbian clubs and lesbian events and trans events and stuff like that. During that period my favourite was there was a lesbian club called Violetta and they were advertising a night called Monocle Fest where every woman gets a monocle for free, which is just so much fun. Get some monocle for free, which is just so much fun. And yeah, that research was a really exciting thing to do and making the connections between the transvestite communities, as they were called during that period, and the lesbian communities, and particularly how they overlapped in the space of magazines at the time, was just such a fascinating thing to do.

That sounds like an amazing chapter. Oh my gosh, I can't wait to read it. But now that the book's finished, and maybe this is too soon to ask, but where do you see your research going forward?

I really just want to keep researching. I want to keep finding out things that I don't know. I want to find out. I want to find out about things that I can't even say know. I want to find out. I want to find out about things that I can't even say that I want to find out about because I don't know about them yet. Something that's really important to me is that I would like to have a much more global approach to lesbian fashion history.

Unsuitable is, a lot of the time, very focused on Western Europe and North America, just because those are the locations that there are the most sources about lesbian history in general, and also I only speak English. Obviously, it's easier to look at English speaking countries, but something that I'd really like to do moving forward is to work with other academics or historians and to try and figure out lesbian fashion histories in other cultures, countries, communities throughout the world. Yeah, and that's a long project. Obviously it takes time, it takes money, but yeah, that's the end goal is to make lesbian fashion history something that is like a global field that is entirely inclusive, that looks at places that are often not included within lesbian history for one reason or another, and consider how we. There are commonalities between all of us, no matter like where we're looking so how does one become a researcher?

how do you make a living becoming a researcher, if someone wants to be one?

it's. I think the most important thing is to do research because you're interested in something and to love whatever you're researching it. Whatever you're researching, because it's not always. You don't become a researcher, you don't become a historian because you want to I don't know make loads of money or be really successful in a field straight away, because that's not really the case. But if you're really passionate about something and if you care about something, there are going to be other people who care about it too and want to, who want to read what you have to say, who want to find out what you're learning. Yeah, it's just like finding out about things that you know in your heart other people want to find out about as well, because then you can share that and you can work towards writing these histories and sharing these stories what advice would you have for budding historians?

again, just like to look at things that you really love and that you really care about. I would also say that it's important to connect with other people who are working on similar things, even if they're not massively similar, just because you can really learn from one another, and it's always useful to be able to ask people for advice or to ask people like oh what, do you have a source about this? And stuff like that. I think it's important recently to um connect with people on stuff like social media. Even though social media can be tedious sometimes, it can also be a force for good. Just because you're, you can meet people and connect with people who are just as interested in whatever you're looking at as you are, and I think that can be a super positive thing.

I think that's such great advice. Is there anything that you'd like to let us know about?

the only thing I would like to plug is just my book, again Unsuitable. A History of Lesbian Fashion comes out in June, published by Hearst, and in the meantime, if you can't wait until then, I have a whole back catalogue of articles on dressingdykescom, all about various areas of lesbian fashion history. So do go and check those out yes, order unsuitable.

Eleanor, thank you so much for being on the podcast. This has been such an incredible conversation and I'm so glad to finally sit down and talk to you yeah, my pleasure.

It's been great to talk to you.