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"Thou art to me a delicious torment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Delicious Corsets With collections named Anais, Baudelaire, Cocteau, DeSade, and others... What's not ta smile about? Erotic literary and artistic inspirations carry over into a sensual and provocative fashion design. This is fashion that may just come between you an' your Calvins!

Lady Cynthia Millinery Providing unique millinery for special occasion or everyday wear. Most often, best of all ... Hats, Hats Hats... Just because!

The possibilities for bad jokes about lesbians and fashion are endless. Clothing and closets... you get the picture. In all seriousness, though (or as serious as we would ever want to be), lesbian fashion is a way for us to understand our herstory, our community, and for many of us, it is a huge part of the way we define ourselves. Arlene Stein observed, writing about lesbian style in the late eighties and early nineties for OUT/Look: "To tell whether she is really one of us, your radar must be finely tuned." Fashion and style tell us who we are, who she is, and whether she would want to date us. Lesbians (perhaps queers in general) are obsessed with the question - how can we tell? Is she? Are they?

Whether we are walking down the street or digging through the archives photo and poster collections, style tells us almost as much as �that look� - the one the femme on the street offers you in recognition or the one the girls in the photograph share. "Looking this way," writes a woman in an article called S/M Aesthetic in OUT/Look, �is the simplest way I know to locate other women like me."

Sometimes, though, lesbian fashion is not just about picking up girls or finding your herstory. In bars of the fifties, whether she was sporting two items of women's clothing often determined whether a butch was arrested in a raid or not. The fashion police sometimes come from our side as well. Liza Cowan's 1970s column, "What the Well-Dressed Dyke Will Wear," in Cowrie documents current opinion on fashion choices of the day: "Makeup, long hair, dresses, stockings, high heels, etc. are the basic uniforms of women. I refuse to wear feminine clothes... I would just as soon wear a ball and chain... to pretend that one can transcend the meaning and effect of these clothes is bullshit. Fashions do not happen by accident. Clothes have a function and a meaning. Long hair usually indicates that a Dyke is trying to pass... It is liberating, in fact and symbolic, to have short hair." She worries that women will grow tired of "the Dyke Schlepp Uniform" and emphasizes the importance of a "true Dyke fashion" evolving.

So the images, links, and text that we have arranged here are not absolute in terms of defining who you are, or absolute in terms of being �in� for lesbian fashion. Who knows whether some of the women depicted on this site would be more excited or appalled by the word lesbian, the word fashion, or the combination of the two. The key is to recognize the evolution of the fashions we wear, from the femme fashions of the turn of the century or some tough butch look of the fifties, and to than create you own identifiable sense of fashion with the knowledge of the influences from which it evolved. And, gurlfriend, let us learn from past style errors and keep our history and our style fabulous.

Fashion, like everything else, is political - always has been. From the anti-fashion of 1970s lesbians who were striking out against the Hollywood-Madison Avenue-Playboy norm and the objectification of women that it promoted, to the Butch-Femme 1950s lesbians who found dress to be not only an expression of sexual style and desire, but an expression of their true nature, to the Amazons of 1700 BC who, quite literally, dressed to kill in red leather boots (!) and armor, we've never taken our fashion statements too lightly. Contrary to popular belief, we didn't start talking about fashion when Lesbian Chic burst on the scene a few years ago. And although we claim to not give a hoot about Lesbian Chic, someone must because we haven't stopped talking about it since. What we wear and how we present and represent ourselves is part of a much largerdebate in the history of our sexuality.

Lesbian sense of style and fashion has never been monolithic, as it has always reflected and encompassed a multicolored and politically diverse people. Flannel shirts, drawstring pants, leather jackets, spandex, bustiers, corsets, dredlocks, black jeans/white T-shirt, stiletto heels, birkenstocks, boxer shorts, BVDs, thongs, garters, black slips and boots-- from the 1950s butch/femme eroticism, to the 1970s lesbian/feminist politics to the new eroticism of the 1990s, a lesbian style continues to present itself. It's different and the same; been there, doing that. Who among us doesn't have a flannel shirt tucked away somewhere? Tribes within tribes, we dress to find our people-- whatever they may look like.