Lea T (second from right) in the Givenchy AW10 campaign – Givenchy
This is an advertisement from Givenchy’s Autumn-Winter 2010 campaign. It features Lea T, who is a transgender fashion model and a muse of Givenchy’s creative director at that time – Riccardo Tisci. Being a pop culture icon of transgender advocacy,[1] Lea T appearing in an advertorial like this sent a powerful message to the Fashion industry and beyond. Visually, upon first glance, one would see that there are two women and three men in this picture. However, Lea seems to be wearing what the other three men are wearing, with only one woman with obvious feminine womenswear. Lea is portrayed as a woman, but supposedly dressed in menswear. This is visually interesting because when judging from the picture alone, it blurs the boundaries between “unisex”, “androgyny” and “gender”, which can all be very different terms with different meanings, but not mutually exclusive. One can sense the portrayed gender fluidity and the presence of choice, that a consumer of that advertisement can be whoever they want, and wear whatever they want, regardless of gender. Susan B. Kaiser mentioned in her book, Fashion and Cultural Studies (2012), that “by performing gender in an iterative way between our bodies and the social worlds we inhabit, we continually “map” both old and new ways of becoming.” She is saying that gender is not an essential make-up of who we are, but rather, how we perform (in this case, adorning clothes) in a cultural context. The above picture by Givenchy symbolized this meaning and created an intriguing dichotomy between masculinity and femininity. It subverts “traditional” gender norms. It is not obvious what the advertisement was trying to define and perhaps that was the intention of it – to portray the notion that gender cannot necessarily be strictly and narrowly defined.
