Moderator: Abigail Lindo, The Ohio State University
Kwame Ocran, “The Queer Aesthetics of Dionne Warwick: A Fashionable Analysis”
Inducted into the 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at 83, Dionne Warwick is recognized for her popularity as a celebrity and musician. Her musical contributions make her long overdue her academic flowers. Several disciplines including fashion studies stand to benefit from a theorization of Warwick's celebrity; her alternative performances of blackness, interiority, and pop vocalizations immediately come to mind.
While Warwick’s success as an artist refused genre, this paper investigates her style as a queer refusal of overt sexuality. Her sartorial and performative choices demonstrate an opaque interiority existing largely unfettered by the demand for intimate details of our celebrated. Thus, I necessarily turn to Warwick’s peculiar style of dress to listen to her silences.
My work uncovers the queerness of Warwick’s styling as a corollary to the striking quality of her music to transcend genre categorization and artistic performance. Warwick’s refusal to yield to sex to sell is reflected in her wardrobe. Though beautiful, she has never effused the sexual appeal of Diana Ross or Aretha Franklin—a fact that has garnered attention from critics. This study of style examines Warwick's relationships as fashion inspirations throughout her life. It is known that confidants like Marlene Dietrich informed her style evolution; this paper elucidates the extent to which Warwick's kinship ties developed her presentation.
Archives of film, documentary, criticism and text help reveal the sartorial implications of Warwick's image: the sophisticated, romantic grand dame in couture who stops short of the boudoir. Dionne Warwick’s fashion evolution reveals more about her queerness than she may be willing to divulge. Her fashions speak volumes—the meaning of which, when deciphered, address an otherwise opaque interiority that refuses to be laid bare.
Lucretia Tye Jasmine, “Groupie Glamour of the Golden Era: 1965-1978”
This is a paper about glamour from the golden era of groupies, 1965-1978. My original research is based on interviews from my mixtape zine, The Groupie Gospels.
Groupies emerged on the cusp of Second Wave Feminism as the avant-garde of the sexual revolution, embodying the intersection of feminism and music. Colorful companions to the new counterculture royalty, groupies accompanied or followed musicians from city to city, becoming almost as famous as the musicians.
Groupies stood out with their experimental style. Satin hot pants and platform shoes! Feather boas! Flowers in their hair! Trailing gossamer and gauze and lace-trimmed handkerchiefs, groupies created a style based on thrift store finds, a living history in fashion that endures today.
When Rolling Stone photographer, Baron Wolman, was backstage one night after a concert in the late 1960s, he noticed the stylish groupies, and decided to photograph them. He told me he wanted to take “celebratory portraits of people I admired.” Rolling Stone was going bankrupt, but the 1969 issue devoted to groupies saved the magazine. Groupies, since then fetishized as sex objects for use with their clothes off, actually commanded attention with their clothes on. Musicians wrote songs about them.
Groupie glamour determined the look of music stars. The carnival couture of the GTO’s - known as a "groupie" group - influenced the Alice Cooper Band; GTO, Pamela Des Barres, made shirts for Jimmy Page and Gram Parsons; Betty Davis advised Miles Davis how to dress; Sable Starr and Iggy Pop shared clothes.
Groupies from the golden era challenged convention with their nonconformist fashion. Female fans, navigating patriarchy, expressed their own agency through fashion. They were "stomping down the street with a girl-power vibe", as Holly George-Warren told me. Groupie glamour might well be activism that we need.
Ma'Chell Duma, “Bangs, Bras, and Bags- Pop's High Femme Aesthetics”
The symbiotic relationship between fashion and music is as creative as it is consumptive. Using the visual markers of hairstyles, statement bras, and designer bags we can journey through feminine expression in popular music’s lineage. Though fashion is often dismissed as vapid, there are instances where the seemingly surface is in fact a much deeper story. One such example are Aretha Franklin’s famous oversized luxury bags, always on stage, readily at her side. In my recent 33 ⅓ on Cardi B, I exploded this story, learning that the bags were not a flex, but a sad function of an industry that marginalizes Black women. Having been cheated and stolen from so many times, Aretha insisted on being paid in cash, held in the vast sums in her Louis Vuitton right on stage and in her sight line- Or as I put it in the book “It is out
of necessity, disrespect, and exceedingly good taste that Aretha Franklin invents the proverbial “Money Bag” femme rappers boast of now.
Florence Blackwell, “Baddies…Pose for Me: …”
Baddies are everywhere — in music, television, art, fashion, social media, and on the street — embodying a movement and aesthetic that, as Jillian Hernandez describes, embraces an “aesthetic excess” of hypersexuality and hyperfemininity as a personal and political refusal of white, cis-hetero, middle-class, and ableist norms. These racialized and gendered aesthetics are saturated into our audiovisual cultural landscape, yet the working-class Black and Brown trans femmes and queers who originated these looks remain marginalized, even as mainstream society appropriates their cultural contributions. Without the involvement of trans and queer people of color, contemporary visual and sonic culture would lack its defining glamour and swag. However,their absence has led to the perception of “baddie aesthetics” as inherently anti-trans and anti-queer. This research seeks to illuminate how “baddie aesthetics” is a distinctly trans and queer of color aesthetic praxis.
In this paper, I will trace the evolution of the “baddie” figure through a critical analysis of audiovisual media, focusing on the oft-overlooked role of trans and queer of color innovators who work behind the scenes to shape the aesthetics of famous heterosexual celebrities. I will also examine how historical narratives have erased queer and trans cultural producers and how these artists continue to challenge the cis-hetero sensibilities embedded in “baddie aesthetics.”
When stars like Beyoncé, Cardi B, and Nicki Minaj post selfies, their looks and sense of individuality are often praised, yet little attention is paid to how they’ve constructed their “baddie” personas. Lyrics like Beyoncé’s “I woke up like this,” reinforce the notion that celebrities effortlessly achieve their “flawless” appearance, sidelining the Black and Brown queer and trans artists who help form that aesthetic. While the widespread appropriation of “baddie aesthetics” has generated a polyvocal discourse, it also normalizes the marginalization of the trans and queer cultural producers central to it.
