Orations Worth Ovations – The one where Alok Vaid-Menon proclaims fashion’s degendered future
In the first half of 2020, I was an intern at West Wing Writers, a leading American strategic communications firm serving clients in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors. While there, I wrote a segment for a joint piece on Medium for their "Orations Worth Ovations" column. To commemorate Pride Month, the other writers and I appraised queer speeches that we admire. I chose to write about Alok Vaid-Menon's powerful keynote about fashion's genderless future: about its brilliance and what it meant to me personally.
Every day, an infinite amount of rebellions transpire around the planet. Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people everywhere are constantly defying a world defined by the gender binary. They are breaking free of the arbitrary distinctions of “man” and “woman” to live as their truly diverse, authentic selves. Alok Vaid-Menon, better known as Alok, is an artist and designer whose voice speaks to the heart of this uprising. On December 5, 2019, Alok highlighted the importance of this struggle at the Business of Fashion’s annual fashion gathering, and declared a vision of gender liberation for all people.
Drawing from the struggles of their trancestors, Alok powerfully indicted the fashion world for being complicit in societal oppression of TGNC people. They talked about how colors, fabrics, scents, and more have been arbitrarily assigned one of two rigid genders, and how those who attempt to break free of the Western gender binary are viciously attacked. As Alok knows well, TGNC folks have always been a part of the story of fashion (as stylists, for example) but their labor and creativity get exploited, and they are denied opportunities to take center stage. Alok charts the course for a better future where clothes can be so much more than merely masculine or feminine. “Fashion,” Alok emphatically states, “should proliferate possibility, not constrain it.”
Fashion is such a powerful mode of expression, not only because it lets us be who we want to be, but also see who we want to be. In being their genuine self, Alok represented a path forward, and in being my genuine self, I hope to do the same for others. After coming to terms with my identity, I found myself in a society where TGNC representation is dominated by white people, and in industries like fashion, cisgender heterosexual people are often the ones modelling “gender neutral” bodies. I could never see myself truly escaping the binary walls that had long since enclosed around me. But through the smallest opening, I finally saw and heard someone like me making the impossible seem possible, and I found a way out.
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