XXX
— Queer Bodies, Queer Futures

Queering the (eastern european) male body

The fashion industry typically looks at bodies as surfaces onto which visual images, immaterial concepts, or marketable products can be projected—when subjected to a fashion-driven discourse, the body becomes a conditioned form of aesthetics. It is the male body in particular that embodies a minefield charged both erotically and politically, being endowed with a paradoxical status in the fact that it constitutes a symbol of empowerment and contestation alike. On the one hand, it is an official genre formally embedded in the art canon (e.g. public sculptures), and, on the other, it is obscene, pornographic, taboo; on the one hand, it is conservative and connected to nationalist hubris, on the other, it is progressive, radical, and taps into emancipatory possibilities. 

The potential to decolonise the male body from its toxic connotations is compellingly exercised by Romanian fashion designer Lucian Varvaroi in his debut collection entitled XXX, visually interpreted by the creative duo behind Carnation Studio (Raya al Souliman and Horațiu Șovăială). The collection locates memory at material surface, rendering the body into a site of memory that bridges the gap between a traumatic past and a hopeful future. It also challenges the rigidity of the fashion system and reveals the possibilities of a more fluid approach to fashion: through the materiality of its garments as well as through the emphasis placed on the post-socialist masculine body caught in the limbo between capitalist productivity, politics of memory, and queer subjectivity in Eastern Europe. That is, firstly, because fashion is both fertile for rhizomatic and counter-hegemonic practices and emblematic for its focus placed on the materiality of things, and, secondly, because at the center of this emerging grid of significations, one finds the body: readily gazed at and always ready to be consumed. By engaging with the collection’s capacity of de-territorialisation, XXX appears as a subversion site, a platform for queer renegotiation that explores aesthetic sensibilities.

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Through its vision of a queer utopia of the future, Varvaroi’s collection becomes increasingly relevant in the context of its geopolitical space of existence. According to Bojana Pejić, after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, nationalist and religious values not only proliferated but were preeminently run to a large extent by men, alerting some feminists to call the new system ‘democracy with the male face.’¹ Post-communist societies of the 1990s (otherwise referenced in XXX) seemed more phallocentric—dominated by heteronormative and toxic masculinity—than the societies of Western Europe. For Pejić, this conflation of nationalism and masculinity was especially regressive and destructive for the post-1989 regimes.² With clothing as a means, XXX’s critical engagement with the notion of masculinity is even more pertinent in a still mostly homophobic and patriarchal society. Clothes, paradoxically, hold the potential to liberate the male body not just from the conventional canon of the male nude in art history, but also from its stereotypical heteronormative filter in contemporaneity. 
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At the same time, within the power dynamics that characterise the region, the post-socialist body has come to inhabit a new stage in its existence. With a new mode of biopolitics emerging since the advent of capitalism, the role of the body ceased to be centered on its reproductive and emancipatory goals as it used to be during communism. The contemporary male body is preeminently preoccupied with being equipped with physical proficiency and corporate productivity, losing its corporeal agency (or, rather, never retrieving it in the first place). The rise of late capitalism, as seen through the lens of the masculine body, is therefore connected with the image of muscle-bound masculinity, moulded upon the dictum of capital and its manifold manifestations. The post-socialist capitalist human body has become subordinate to the laws of value creation, a new logic unfamiliar to its subjects before the communist fall: the body is now ontologically driven by productivity, privatisation, and commodification.

De-territorialising the fashion industry

The fashion industry has continuously been exploited as the supreme expression of consumer culture—clothes have been rendered into profit-oriented objectives by a self-perpetuating industry based on linear, hierarchical, self-sustaining norms and principles; a system that is undergoing constant redefinitions of what it actually means, where a permanent desire for the new is steadily cultivated. The logic of ‘make, use, dispose’ has become untenable. Instead of persisting in such exhaustion of the planet and its resources, the need for de-growth, sustainability, and ecological responsibility en masse came forth as a necessary condition for a more habitable future. 

Up against the system’s troubling overproduction and overconsumption, the notion of reusing discarded or disposed clothing items — an approach that is also part of Lucian Varvaroi’s practice —is not a new phenomenon. Innovative ways of incorporating the past and the already used (and worn) back into the rigidity of the fashion industry have witnessed a significant surge in the last years. When critically referring to subject matters like transparency and ecology in contemporary society, we must, however, be aware of the ongoing processes of co-opting sustainability into the system. Such practices too readily succumb to the status quo’s neoliberal claws, being swallowed up by big brands as mechanisms of profit-making in the name of guilt riddance. Besides the implied privilege that being sustainable entails, the biopolitics dynamics of a green kind of capitalism consistently tell us that the individual is responsible for everything.³ Yet, individual citizens/consumers cannot, and should not, be expected to be the sole custodian of the planet, as its wellbeing cannot be dictated by consumerist strategies decided by PR firms and corporate ‘social responsibility’ campaigns. Just as the planet’s wellbeing cannot ever be part of an ethical strategy that aims to control and influence and profit from consumer choice and behaviour. Entering the realm of necropolitics, the slogan ‘consume ethically or die’ is an increasingly emblematic theme for the fashion system as well.⁴ While aiming for sustainability is not bad, hijacking sustainability to the benefit of profit is. After all, is there even such a thing as ethical consumption under capitalism?

In proposing more transparent ways of producing and consuming, British cultural theorist Simon O’Sullivan has a Deleuzian take on how the fixed structures of fashion can be undone (or de-territorialised): by arguing for a return to ethico-aesthetics, or forms of art that embrace ethical and aesthetic dimensions, “a subjective creativity which traverses the generations.”⁵ According to French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, de-territorialisation represents one critical method through which fixed territories, as well as forms and systems of governance—like the fashion industry—can be opened up.⁶ De-territorialising the fashion system means allowing it to move beyond fixed representations, anchored arrangements of meaning, and, above all, beyond rigid rules and norms, beyond the dos and don’ts that the fashion industry abounds in. In this manner, fashion can reclaim its lost human dimension, but not in an anthropocentric way. Human exceptionalism has already proved its limitations to the extent that it has led to profound climate issues, burnout, and depletion of resources.  Focusing on the de-territorialisation function of art, the dominant norm (that is, the profit-oriented measure) can be dissolved and new ways of doing and thinking about fashion can be put forward.⁷

If, as is the case for painting, it’s the materiality (the paint on the canvas) that—in Deleuze and Guattari’s view—has the power to render visible the sensations traversing the human being and connecting it to the world; in fashion’s case, it is the materiality of cloth that disincarnates the body and de-territorialises the fashion system. As a ‘coming undone’, the postures of corporeality in fashion are engaged with more or less fixed reconfigurations and instances that disarticulate previously stable territories.⁸ From this perspective, Lucian Varvaroi’s XXX engages in a continuous process of disassembling and assembling, of undoing and doing, therefore constructing endless material connections of becoming: the cloth is turned into clothes, the fabric is turned into garment. In his experimental method—a sort of intuitive ecology applied to fashion—, second-hand sneakers retrieved from local flea markets are incorporated into leather jackets and sweatshirts, second-hand ties are turned into dresses and harnesses, whereas pre-used sportswear debris (such as waterproof nylon and cotton) becomes jackets. Varvaroi turns pre-worn clothes into an assemblage of material chunks, dissecting existing garments and reconstructing new clothing objects from the acquired pieces, sectioning second-hand items along their original seam only to reassemble them in novel ways. Departing from the premise that fashion is a circular economy—a restorative and regenerative frame of ideas and material manifestations of those ideas—, XXX undoes that fixed form of fashion, crumbles the dominant norm, and proposes new ways of thinking about fashion and its materiality.

What is certain in this context is that interrogating the system does not suffice, just as maintaining a critical stance concerning its flaws and frailties is not enough either; practical alternatives are still required, solutions are mandatory. This is why we needn’t solely talk about garments and their political or social implication, but we need to reconfigure how garments are made and thought of and conceptualised in the first place.

We are not talking here only about better working conditions for peripheral factory workers that earn fortunes to big fashion companies around the world (Romanian factories are manufacturing clothes for Max Mara, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Prada, etc.); but more flagrantly about a subversive new way of making and thinking about clothes. In this way, the very product of the system, the garment, can become the very fissure in the working of the system itself. For this to happen, alternative understandings of what radical fashion means are needed: moving the focus from profits towards materiality and sourcing materials, repurposing apparently obsolete pieces of textile, and finally maintaining the ethico-aesthetic dimension delineated above. Yet despite this overt emphasis placed on materiality in the context of untenable business models, the materiality we keep referring to is a future-oriented one, well aware of environmental ethics and ready to turn away from and dislocate the anthropocentrist and the business-driven face of fashion. By engaging in a new conception of materialism, it becomes increasingly clear that the materiality of fashion is not a sheer carrier of meanings, as structuralist semioticians would argue. A focus on the materiality of things from a phenomenological perspective can emphasise the immanent properties of materials and the consequent interweaving of forces that make up our surrounding world. This approach replaces the focus on ‘objects’ with one on ‘materiality’ as a sensorially based unfolding of individuals’ relations to their clothes, where tactility and palpability are key components of making clothes.⁹ The garments’ fabric affects the articulations of the body and the self, as well as experiences of time and place, shaping up new social relations. The surface (be it abrasive or soft, inflexible, or fluid) is crucial since it helps develop an understanding of the many materialities of fashion, debunking thus the dominant Western ontology which treats surfaces as unimportant, as a mere layer, both superficial and transitory.¹⁰ Shifting the focus on materiality, the fabric’s fixed position in a garment (its standardised, institutionalised, and widely accepted form) is thus made fluid. 

It is worth noting here that materials do have agency, meaning that materials are not altogether passive and inanimate objects; they are not raw or inert matter, but active agents, composed of living flows which sensorially interact with the body that wears them. As feminist theorist Karen Barad argues, matter is not “a blank slate, surface, or site passively awaiting signification”, but rather “matter and meaning are mutually articulated.”¹¹

XXX stands proof for the power of material critique, as it has the ability to transform clothes into a proactive and affirmative alternative that is able to reference the past and the future alike. 

Going back to Deleuze and Guattari, the collection is evocative of the rhizomatic practices the French philosophers have written about extensively: as images of thought that welcome multiplicities, the rhizome is a direct reference to the botanical world, representing underground stems of plants capable of producing intricate and horizontal networks of roots. Deleuze and Guattari understand them as non-linear, non-hierarchical systems with no beginning, middle or end, that are forming “in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch.”¹³ Following this rhizomatic capability extended in clothes, the dynamism of XXX springs out not only from the collection’s complex materiality, but also from the fact that its existence itself stems from the margin: not just at Europe’s periphery, but from within the periphery of the periphery, from what even the periphery discarded as too peripheral (from flea markets and rubble and waste). According to O’Sullivan, “it is within—or at the margins of—hierarchical, centered systems like capitalism that new rhizomes may arise. These may be captured by the logic of capitalism again, but even in that case, new lines of flight, new possibilities of movement, will emerge in a constant process of opening and closure.”¹⁴

Rethinking the materiality of garments in an ethical dimension offers alternative understandings to the way fashion collections are usually perceived, as well as to their production practices, or to their relationship to the body. Subversions may be minor, disruptions may be subtle, but such events, indeed small but potentially invaluable, are capable of voiding the set of arrangements that had been holding together the status-quo up until that very moment.¹⁵ Escaping the dominant system—at least temporarily—, XXX affirms new ways of doing and undoing fashion, if only through subtle experiments. When paired with the potential given by the concept of de-territorialisation, such disruptive practices are capable of opening up the fixed order. Through this new grid of connections and relations, this fissure grants the opportunity for new alternative systems of thinking to be produced and salvage the radical potential of fashion. It shows, like a glimmering ray of light suddenly visible, that alternatives are possible. And this realisation is a powerful moment in times of crisis. 

Retrofuturism: Imagining the queer memory

For French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, the cultural evolution of mankind has been founded (substantially although not exclusively) on a history of media that directly permitted the formation, recording, and dissemination of a ‘social memory.’¹⁶ In a similar vein, Dutch historian Douwe Draaisma shows how strongly related the connection between memory and the evolution of technology is: with the proliferation of increasingly material forms of expression (such as photography for instance), remembering has become easier. For Draaisma, the human memory “became a photographic plate, prepared for the recording and reproduction of visual experience.”¹⁷ Applying this hypothesis to Varvaroi’s practice, the garment becomes an improved (or, if anything, an experimental) materialisation of the maker’s capacity to remember, capturing lived experiences and fleeting sensations, recalling collective memories, denouncing stereotypes, and empowering subjectivities.

Of course, XXX does not seek to present any sort of historical accuracy, nor does it seek to comply with any sort of representational mode of existence. Instead, it reminisces about personal experiences, about everyday life in post-socialist capitalism in Eastern Europe. In this case, the clothes are both the subject that voices this process of reminiscing and the method through which the voicing takes place.

Following a cognitive taxonomy of collective flashbacks, XXX is an embodied memory. Retracing the intimacy of the marginalised, rather than on using over-politicised and disputed narratives of official history, XXX turns visions of manhood and masculinity into forms of counter-memory: a way of remembering and forgetting that starts with the local, the immediate, and the personal. Such instances of counter-memory tend to look to the not-so-distant past in search of hidden histories that have been traditionally withdrawn from dominant narratives. Along these lines, Varvaroi discards the totality of historical narratives and emphasises intimate subjectivities of under-represented groups in contemporary mainstream media. This focus does not feel intrusive or revisionist in any sense; it supplies new perspectives, it ultimately empowers subjectivities by relying on counter-hegemonic modes of thinking and repression.

In the context of 1990s Eastern Europe specifically, it is vital to reconsider Eastern Europe as a lieu de memoire, as a space of memory embedded in paradoxes. With its abundance of conflicting memories, Eastern Europe has “too much memory, too many pasts on which people can draw.”¹⁸ To add to the complexity of the situation, an excessive commemoration of nationalist ideals has coexisted with a deafening atrophy of memory. The erasure of uncomfortable memories has become an almost universal phenomenon across the region, because of which marginal histories have remained marginal, the suffering of groups (Roma, homosexual, queer, ethnic minorities) addressed only recently and with customary hesitation.¹⁹ To a certain extent, an official queer memory doesn’t exist, as the queer past mostly exists through personal recollections. 

Faced with the impossibility to remember what was not documented, the future becomes more graspable than the buried past. By leaning on the past in order to imagine a queer future, Lucian Varvaroi prompts us to question the reality through unreality; after all, fashion itself has always been time-sensitive, reprising pasts and shaping futures. Perhaps also because of this ambivalence (the past is ripe with mythological frames, amnesia, collective neglect), XXX makes use of the past as a bridge toward the future. Engaging with a sort of temporal ambiguity (is the collection launched in 1999 or in 2047?), XXX’s subjects inhabit a contradictory realm, a retrofuturist one that infuses past narratives with future promises.