Eleanor Medhurst, fashion historian and author of Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion, visited Lavender Menace Queer Book Archive to talk about researching lesbian fashion and queer history with our volunteer, Georgie and our project coordinator, Keava.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your work?

I refer to myself as a lesbian fashion historian. I started my work with my blog Dressing Dykes and the social medias as well – Instagram and Tik Tok – where I post more bite-sized, accessible snippets of the research that I’ve been sharing online on my blog. This all started after I did a degree and a Master’s in fashion history. A lot of the work that I’d been doing during my Master’s was looking at lesbian fashion and queer fashion in history – being very aware of the sort of gaps there in the research that was available. I started the blog to share the research that I’d already been doing during my studies which included looking at the clothes worn by Anne Lister, the famous historical lesbian, and also looking at lesbian slogan t-shirts so those were some of the first posts. It built from there. I’m very much an independent researcher and that all led to the book and where we are now.

You’re a public historian and an independent scholar. What challenges and freedoms does that bring?

Lots of challenges in terms of stuff like not necessarily getting funding to do research, not having backing behind me a lot of the time. I’ve written some journal articles and often when you’re submitting them there’s like a box saying “affiliation” and I don’t have that. Sometimes there are those issues. People assume that you’re affiliated with a university and that you’re getting support from those avenues so that can be difficult. When it comes to doing research as well so many things are behind paywalls which is part of why it’s been so important to me to make so much of my research accessible for free on the blog and then on social media as well. So many people can’t access it otherwise. Being an independent researcher does mean that I can research whatever I want to which is really nice – I don’t have to do any particular thing, I can just go where my heart takes me.

These are issues that a lot of the researchers who visit the archive have as well – this kind of desire to create queer history for the public or for our own communities but without the resources that academics have access to.

So we are all very excited about Unsuitable. Can you describe your book in three words?

Varied. Fashionable (a nice easy one). Proud. It’s hard to describe a history book in three words!

This is an incredible book. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?

Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion – I really wanted to call it a history because there’s so much that can be said about lesbian fashion in history and in the present. I don’t think that anyone could really fit that all into one book. It’s a start and it’s something that I want to continue doing.

It’s a history. It’s a narrative about lesbian fashion and it’s looking at lesbian history through the lens of fashion and clothes and self-styling. The way that I’ve approached it isn’t as a chronological history – the earliest story is right at the beginning and the latest is at the end but there’s a lot of back and forth in between. It’s in five thematic parts and then there’s eighteen chapters within that each focus on a different person or Community or specific time period. They’re individual stories about aspects of lesbian fashion history which altogether build a larger picture.

Is there a queer book that’s really important to you?

I read a lot of history and theory books for research purposes for work and then the rest of the time I’m reading queer fantasy books so there a big divide between the kind of books that I’m reading. In terms of books that I felt are really important to what I’m doing, some of the work done by Jane Traies in her book Now You See Me: Lesbian Life Stories is fantastic. I think that’s representative of a lot of the books that I found really useful – books made up of interviews with lesbians about their lives. These first-person accounts of what people were doing, how they were living, the clothes that they were wearing in particular. Often that’s research that I wouldn’t be able to do as sometimes the people that they spoke to aren’t even with us anymore. Some of the earlier books, like Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, another great lesbian history book, is research I just wouldn’t have otherwise. Then in my free time I love any queer fantasy. It makes me happy.

We know we know what shelf to point you towards after the interview! So, tell us about some of the archives that you visited when you were doing your research? What material do you really enjoy working with as a fashion historian?

One archive I went to was at Glasgow Women’s Library where they’ve got the Lesbian Archive, originally the Lesbian Archive and Information Centre in London. I went there to look at their t-shirt collection in particular and I have a whole chapter in the book about lesbian slogan t-shirts, activist t-shirts. I’ve done research in the past about craft and crafted fashion like hand-stencilled and painted t-shirts as a way of lesbian messaging and lesbian politics. It’s great to actually see objects in person, to be able to touch them rather than just seeing them on a computer screen.

A lot of the research that I was doing was online. Another archive that was really important to me to the research I was doing is based in Germany, the Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv. They’ve digitized loads of editions of lesbian magazines that were being published in Germany in the 20s. Frauenliebe and Die Freundin were two of the most prominent ones at the time. That was an incredible archival resource for me in terms of getting articles that were written by people in the lesbian and queer community of the time writing about what they were up to, and the clothes that they were wearing, but also just looking at the adverts that were in the magazines as well. The advert that stood out to me the most was advertising a night where every lady gets a monocle for free! I just love it so much.

It was such an interesting chapter as well because so many lesbian histories make an effort to include trans men but completely exclude trans women. Was that a deliberate decision that you made to focus that chapter on trans lesbians?

Yes, definitely. While I was researching lesbian communities in Berlin during the 20s it was apparent to me that there was this overlap between trans communities (they referred to themselves as “transvestites” in that context) and lesbian communities. There was so much communication between them and magazines were catering to the same audiences. Especially in the current political climate I think it’s really important to say that, yes, trans people are part of lesbian history. Trans women are part of lesbian history in particular. A lot of people would not include them in that history even though there’s always been so much communication and overlap. It was a deliberate choice to do that because there’s so much that could be said about just general lesbian fashion during that period.

What was the most interesting object that you encountered in your research?
There’s so many! Something that’s been really interesting to me is going back to people’s firsthand accounts of what they were wearing and often the context in which they were wearing them, like at parties, because it brings the clothes to life. Something that I really enjoyed was Mabel Hampton’s oral histories which are recorded with the Lesbian Herstory Archives which are available online. She was talking about her life in Harlem and in New York in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and talking about the clothes that she was wearing to go to these parties where scandalous things were going on and all the people that she was interacting with. Being able to actually hear her voice telling these stories was fantastic. It’s just nice to have things brought to life – sometimes when you’re looking at history it’s easy to forget that these were actual people living these lives, wearing these clothes so a moment that brought them to life was one of the best parts for me.

Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion is out now. Support your local feminist bookshop or buy it online from Lighthouse Books or Gay’s the Word.