Excavating Queer Folklores:
Three Outfits by Lou Croff Blake

a conversation curated by jj rowan

On practice, mythologies, and naming

A lot of my creative practice is and has been rooted in a DIY mythos: I really have the most fun with the work when it's all feeding into some greater kind of handcrafted lore that goes along with it. I think that, especially as queer and trans folks, building our own mythologies, our own background stories, our own fairy tales, our own folktales is something that we’re severely lacking. And so to do that for ourselves can become this incredibly exciting and generative act. Because I’m working with textiles (and also being a millennial) I can’t get out of my head this memory of shopping in the Delia’s catalog when I was 11 or 12 years old: they named every single one of their styles with these very appropriate-for-the-time girls’ names. I think I started having crushes on clothes based on the fact that they had girls’ names. I was, you know, a dykey little middle schooler who had no idea what was going on. I don’t always name them super well or conventionally, but I do name my pieces. Naming pieces feels important because when you don it: you embody something that it carries with it. I’m a big believer in animism. I think part of the naming process is that when you merge with the garment there’s a conversation happening. There’s a little bit of a possession happening. I fully lean into that and want to help facilitate that.

On circles and semiotics

I got the opportunity this past year, in combination with a research grant with a dear friend, to start a queer needlework circle here in Berlin. We meet up weekly. We’ve been meeting for almost a year now. There’s another branch in the Netherlands that has been going for longer. Our circle was in tandem with a research project on the history of queer semiotic dress: we were cataloging and databaseing different queer semiotics from history. As queer people, the reason that mythologizing is so important is that we don’t receive the folklore from ancestors: we have to excavate it. We have to go research for it. Queer communities are so rarely intergenerational that you have to do this archaeological process to figure out what your history as a queer person even is. 

Meet the Gundam Suit

This really crazy patchwork piece is honestly like my magnum opus from the past year. I don’t think I’ve ever created a piece that I’ve felt this way about. It was very much a heart project, and a friend started very affectionately calling it the Gundam Suit (like the anime), which feels oddly appropriate. This piece is a collage of relevant semiotics, deeply informed by my research and the needlework circle, all of which led to a fashion show that we did in October. The theme of the show was power suits. A power suit is an outfit that facilitates gender euphoria. So we were doing all of this skill sharing in the circle, people who had never sewn before learning to sew, I learned how to crochet, working for months and using what we learned to co-create these outfits that made us feel like our most empowered selves. And then we walked down the runway. I styled the Gundam Suit even more skimpishly than you see in the photos: I had just a jock strap that says babes across the band in front of a couple hundred strangers. And I just flaunted this wild, marionette design that is a patchwork of an NFL Steelers jersey, some basketball jerseys, bandanas, and a really gnarly, garish lace grandma tablecloth. It’s mirroring this jock persona that feels super gender euphoric, a high femme aesthetic that I used to have in my early twenties that was equally gender euphoric at the time, and has this reference to hanky code. It also nods to cowboy culture and this nostalgia for queer semiotic communication from the past. 

On alchemy

I read this amazing occult zine, an edition called Solve et Coagula, which are the key principles of alchemy: to dissolve and to reassemble is one of these principles. And they were saying that all collage work is alchemy because you’re boiling things down from their original parts and you’re putting them back together into something new. Whether it’s shit or gold is to be left undecided. But the Gundam Suit, this marionette, this little pony boy confused tablecloth, whatever it is, is a form of gender alchemy for me. Collage…it’s kind of like being nonbinary. You’re piecing together these parts that you’re pulling from your environment and a modular approach allows you to position them in the way that actually feels autonomous and right, and then you can switch it around again later.

Meet the Story Pants

This is actually a combination of two different collections that I’m currently working on: the first is Garment Stories and the second is Story Garments. I’ve been calling the pants the Story Pants, and they’re the first finished piece in Story Garments. They are really leaning deep into this idea of semiotic dress. Wearing words can also be a form of semiotic communication. It’s a more direct symbology, but written text is still symbols. So the question here is what could the verbally loudest semiotics possibly be? How can your clothes actually tell your story? And going back to this process of gender euphoria and power suits: these pants tell the story of designing pants that A) can tell a story and B) can engage in this dual semantic and semiotic process to create a self-perpetuating loop of embodiment and empowerment. And this is all written on these legs! It will go between being like “these things make my leg hair feel like this” and tying into this Robin Wall Kimmerer theory, etc. So it goes between being very nerdy and theoretical and very “ok, it's kind of drafty because they’re wide legged,” merging body and prefrontal cortex in the story that they tell. 

On Garment Stories

Garment Stories is part of an upcycling project, which the shirt shown with the Story Pants is a part of, and has a process-informing purpose. They’re upcycles where I just kind of let go. I willfully give myself amnesia about everything I learned in fashion school, about what is the right thing to do when you’re making a garment, and just intuitively do whatever destruction and reassemblage needs to happen. Then, I write down the story of that process, print it out, and paste it onto the garment. And a lot of the pieces in this series were about unmascing. Making sites of destruction for masculinities, this absolute obliteration of specifically masculinized garments, especially really loaded sites of masculinity, like the collared shirt, the polo shirt, and the suit jacket. 

Meet the Baby Clown Suit

I usually just call this one the Baby Clown Suit. To be fair, the pants are actually the one piece in this photo shoot that I did not make, they’re thrifted. But the Baby Clown Suit, which is this orange and plaid garish top get-up, is another part of the Garment Stories, another in a series of upcycles. I love this piece because when I was making it, it was one of those experiences where I was just chuckling like an evil little creature to myself the whole time because it was so stupid. I think humor is one of the best fucking survival tactics in this god-forsaken reality we’ve been forced into, and I think it is the most successful humor hack in terms of fashion and aesthetics. I had this boxy, eighties sort of David Byrne big suit jacket in my closet and there was no way I could style it that felt gender-resonant. I had also impulsively bought a really cheapo sweater that was way too small, something that was actually quite femme, a little bit Fifth Element feeling, but I was never gonna wear it. These two things felt like really polarized genders, like maybe they just needed to come together. And I remember the first time I put on the whole thing, I put on some loud music and was just strutting back and forth in front of a full body mirror for maybe fifteen minutes. Like when you talk about being possessed by the garments that you make: this was one of those moments.

On time travel

I think time travel is a really important theme for us to consider because queerness also queers time. I think a lot about anarchy, the lack of hierarchies, and the lack of hierarchy between past, present, and future that you tap into – either willfully or accidentally – when you’re queering your identity. An anarchic approach to time is something that feels liberating and exciting: inspiration from the past, the nostalgia of the queer folklores we are piecing together for ourselves, and the speculative future. I’ve been thinking a lot about speculative fashion – what hypotheses about the future can fashion open up? I gave you three outfits that don’t look like they fit particularly in the same series, but the red thread that links all of them is the fact that they’re really asking what if in their own ways – and also, what next?