The closet allowed a certain amount of freedom in the performance of gender. In the 1920s, one could be queer and chic. Why were some fashionable people fascinated with freakishness? Janes also uses fashion photographer and designer Cecil Beaton as an example of how gay men shaped an era’s sense of what is fashionable despite the legal and social restrictions on gay men.
In the process, he explores how “queer” in the sense of freakish morphed into meaning sexual ambiguity and homosexual.
His subtitle promises a focus on gay men, but his overall topic is really the ways in which queerness-gender ambiguity as well as homosexuality-became fashionable for a brief period after World War II. Dominic Janes takes on a number of topics in this wide-ranging book, Freak to Chic.
