Latest / The Art of Costume Podcast / Bending the Rules: Fashion Beyond the Binary with Camille Benda and Gwyn Conaway

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Bending the Rules: Fashion Beyond the Binary with Camille Benda and Gwyn Conaway · The Art of Costume Podcast

0:13
I am so excited to welcome my two friends, the co-authors of
0:18
Bending the Rules, Fashion Beyond the Binary, Camille Benda
0:23
and Gwen Conaway. Hey team, welcome to the
0:26
podcast. How are you?
0:28
Hey, I'm. Great.
0:29
Good to see you. Yeah, it's been a long time
0:32
coming. We've been trying to make this
0:33
happen for a minute now. So I'm, I'm so glad you're here.
0:37
It's I'm excited. We have a lot to talk about.
0:39
I'm super excited and I'm kind of a big fan of your podcast, so
0:44
I'm really happy to be here. Yeah, stars in our eyes.
0:48
Meeting you, Spencer. Oh gosh, we'll stop it.
0:50
I'm big fans of both of you. I've been following your careers
0:54
for a hot minute now. Camille, I've ran into you at
0:57
parties, so we've been talking about doing this for a minute
1:00
now. So this is long overdue, so
1:04
let's get into it. But first, you both have such a
1:07
wide range of experience, so I would love it if you could both
1:10
introduce yourselves a little bit.
1:11
And how did you end up joining together on this special project
1:14
because it is so exciting. Gwen go first.
1:19
Oh, OK. All right, I can do that.
1:21
I was going to tell you to go first.
1:24
I know we're both like. Go first, I know so well my
1:30
career started in theatre, but it moved progressively more and
1:35
more towards gaming and animation.
1:37
So my background is in theatre and television and film.
1:43
And then I turned towards costume concept art, 3D cloth
1:47
simulation for animation studios and gaming studios.
1:50
And now I also teach concept art at Art Center College Design.
1:55
I met Gwen because we are both educators and so we met at a
2:01
UCLA Educators round table, went and had coffee and found that we
2:07
both started in theatre and we had both done masters.
2:10
So Gwen, UC Irvine and I did Masters in the History of Dress
2:17
at the Courtauld and then did the Yale Theatre design masters,
2:21
and we're both costume designers.
2:22
So Gwen's worked on a million projects.
2:26
I'm currently designing AHBO show in London that will come
2:30
out in the fall, and recently designed Apple TV's two seasons
2:36
of Bad Sisters. And Gwen and I have sort of
2:42
swapped students. We've gone to each other's
2:46
university, so I teach at California Institute of the
2:50
Arts, and then we kind of got into this idea of writing a book
2:55
together, working on a project together, and we had a series of
3:00
lunches, coffees, breakfast, brunches, and we picked places
3:04
all over LA so. We.
3:06
Were thinking yeah that should have been a part of the book
3:10
that listed all the places we went to also.
3:13
I know our menu, we should have added a menu for what we had.
3:19
Bending the rules, Fashion Beyond a Binary is an incredible
3:22
read. I actually, funny enough, I was
3:24
reading it yesterday at a bar, reading through it.
3:27
So you could add that to the list at the Academy Museum
3:30
actually. So shout out.
3:31
Maybe we should get into the gift shop.
3:33
It's an incredible read, full of information.
3:36
It has images, illustrations, 3D renderings, photographs,
3:40
interviews with some incredible voices, which we'll be getting
3:43
into in a second here. People that I look up to, all
3:47
this woven together to help us see beyond the binary.
3:50
And one of the essential lessons I took away of reading through
3:54
the book is that fashion really helps us construct our
3:56
identities. So first I want to start by
3:59
asking the both of you, why did you feel it was important to
4:03
write Bending the Rules and compile all this incredible
4:06
information? I I think that one of the most
4:10
important things that united us in, you know, a passion for the
4:14
subject is that so much of the information is kept behind
4:18
academic walls. It's, you know, there's some
4:22
gatekeeping related to like the language of talking about
4:26
historical costume and fashion that the real, the people that
4:32
benefit from knowing about their own history don't have as much
4:38
access to it. And we really wanted to make a
4:43
public statement about how fashion really supports an
4:48
extremely wide set of identities.
4:51
And that has been true consistently across time and
4:54
across mediums. So I think that's one of the
4:57
things that really brought us together at first, don't you
5:00
think, Camille? I think so.
5:01
And one of the things that is really interesting is as I
5:05
delved into the research for bending the rules, one of the
5:10
things that came up over and over was that the time it took
5:15
to find examples of fashion beyond the binary, people living
5:20
across the gender spectrum, was much longer.
5:23
And the access to that, as Gwen said, was much harder.
5:28
And that made me realize that the default in Google searches
5:33
and all kinds of searches and Pinterest and everything is
5:36
tilted toward the binary and tilted toward fashion that
5:40
divides people into men and women.
5:42
And as a result, it kind of made me start thinking about, oh,
5:46
this needs to be out there and we need to celebrate all aspects
5:51
of how we dress and use fashion and costume.
5:54
So throughout the book you walk the audience through 6 themes
5:58
framing the exploration of the binary and the beyond.
6:01
So I was hoping we could walk through them, walk through them
6:04
all. We won't give it all away as I
6:05
want everyone to grab a copy to read through it for themselves
6:08
and also for the sake of the costumers, we might use some
6:12
costume examples because you know, that's what we love to do
6:14
here on the Art of Costume podcast.
6:16
So why don't we start the first theme, which is neutrality,
6:21
which in hindsight, we've probably explored quite a bit on
6:24
this podcast. So I love some of the examples
6:27
you gave in the book as the podcast listeners will probably
6:30
be quite familiar with some of them, Orlando being one of them
6:33
with costumes designed by Sandy Powell, who was just on a
6:36
podcast last year talking about Orlando and The Fifth Element,
6:40
which is my all time favorite film.
6:43
So what? Oh.
6:44
Really. Yeah, it's my favorite.
6:45
I watch it all the time. There's actually a Fifth Element
6:48
poster right behind my computer with the with the bandage dress.
6:52
So or bandage outfit. What can you both tell me about
6:57
neutrality and the first theme? Well, I think I kind of went
7:02
over the book this evening in preparation, just thinking about
7:06
it. And I think the reason we
7:08
started the book with the idea of neutrality was because it
7:13
connected so many themes. So in the book you'll see
7:16
Buddhist monks who are using neutrality in their dress to
7:22
leave their earthly attachments behind.
7:26
But in the Fifth Element, neutrality is used as a way to
7:30
kind of erase or control people. And so Lulu being in the bandage
7:35
dress is a way for sort of a metaphorical way for her to
7:42
escape, but also to take away typical gender markers.
7:48
And the three examples in the book of different pieces that
7:53
are harnesses or straps kind of illustrate how the body is
7:58
really needed to add gender to those garments or remove gender
8:02
from those garments. So in a way neutrality is used
8:07
in a bit of control and escape there.
8:10
But mostly the chapter focuses on the idea of a neutrality to
8:14
erase the binary and liberate. So a lot of fashion designers we
8:19
look at like Rick Owens and Bernard Wilhelm are using non
8:24
binary or neutral dress to show how we can step outside of that
8:31
narrow boundary. Yeah, I think something that so
8:35
neutrality and unisex are two of the sections that we struggled
8:39
with a lot. We went back and forth and back
8:41
and forth for almost almost two years.
8:45
Like we really didn't settle on it until, until very late,
8:50
almost like the the deadline for the publisher.
8:53
And part of that is because we started from a point of view
8:57
that maybe people, you know, want to use neutrality or unisex
9:02
as ways to erase gender or to make a social commentary.
9:06
But what we found was that it was impossible to put neutrality
9:12
in context without a body. And as a result, it, it brought
9:17
up a question for us about like is, is neutrality actually the
9:22
section that we want to have is, you know, like, how do we want
9:26
to frame it? Because it's so subversive, it's
9:28
so political, it's so intentional when we see
9:32
neutrality, that that it was really hard to choose a
9:36
framework, I think. And this is kind of looking at
9:39
neutral and non binary fashion and costume and dress.
9:44
And one of the things that the chapter looks at is how gendered
9:50
clothes behave and then how neutral clothes behave.
9:53
So we have this kind of push and pull constantly that the
9:57
Buddhist monks are trying to erase gender.
9:59
But the minute you add a body to Lilu's costume, it says
10:04
something about the clothes and the body at the same time.
10:10
So also I think the use of neutrality and sci-fi is super
10:15
interesting, Shaving people's heads, putting them in the exact
10:19
same, you know, sci-fi prison uniform or the exact same body
10:23
suit to erase any markers, which is sort of the opposite of
10:29
unisex dressing. And just a tease to the
10:31
audience, there's a little bit of commentary there from Sally
10:34
Potter as well, too. Correct, there is and.
10:39
Super cool. Yeah, Sally was amazing.
10:43
I wrote to her because I worked with her on a different film and
10:47
asked her if she would write a little bit about what the
10:51
clothes meant. And she wrote this beautiful
10:55
piece and she talked about the idea of masculinity and
10:59
femininity being learned performance, which I love that
11:04
the idea of performing gender. And she also has a beautiful
11:09
quote in there, which is we are all just humans in drag.
11:12
Right, so cool. I mean, that was such a sweet,
11:15
sweet surprise when he got to that chapter.
11:18
So worth it. Just right there.
11:20
So that one has to check it. Out.
11:23
Moving on to the next theme which Gwen started to talk
11:26
about, which is unisex. An example, The Land With Me,
11:29
which we've seen time and time again on the podcast, just to me
11:33
was the 1920s and how almost unisex appeared was in general,
11:37
and which we've seen through fashion and costume and film and
11:40
television, like I said time and time again on the podcast.
11:42
So what can you tell me about unisex in general in this theme
11:47
in the book? I think it connects a lot with
11:49
politics. So every time, Not every time,
11:54
but I feel like through the 20th century, anytime there's been a
11:58
war, so World War One, World War 2 and the Vietnam War,
12:03
essentially what happens is there's unisex dressing.
12:08
People are putting on jumpsuits or boiler suits or workwear and
12:13
they're working in factories. And women went in World War 2
12:18
and World War One into the factories and suddenly left the
12:21
home. And so there's a lot more unisex
12:24
dressing in times of crisis. And then what we notice is
12:28
there's a lot more gender dressing in other times.
12:33
Like the 1950s were hyper gendered in the West in America
12:37
post war. So that was kind of cool to
12:39
observe. And the same thing happens in
12:44
China. And there's a really great book
12:46
called Changing Clothes in China by Antonia Fanane.
12:50
And she talks about the idea of Mao suits and other things that
12:56
kind of reduce the gender of the population and made everybody
13:00
sort of quote, UN quote, equal. And then Western dress was
13:05
adopted in at different points in China, and women were in
13:09
dresses and men were in Western suits.
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And Gwen found a really great example of this as well in
13:15
Japan. Yeah, the I think one of the
13:18
interesting things about unisex in general is that it really
13:24
requires like a a larger social effort.
13:28
It often comes propagandized it it requires a larger group to
13:37
strive towards something. Often unisex is I, I see unisex
13:42
not necessarily as a way to equalize bodies, but to make
13:46
people into a productive investment or a productive prop
13:53
of society. And I think that we see this a
13:55
lot in sci-fi as well, right? When we have like for example,
14:00
equilibrium is a good example of that Sean being an equilibrium
14:05
where we have this, Oh, another really good one is Metropolis.
14:09
Of course, when the workforce is marching into Malik's mouth and
14:14
you see them go willingly, right.
14:17
It, it's a, it's sort of a form of acceptance of what is or what
14:26
society wants you to be, maybe a little like brainwashing.
14:32
Oh, am I allowed to say that? Is that too hot a topic?
14:35
I don't know. I find unisex to have that
14:37
element to it very propagandized.
14:40
I love that I gotta go watch Metropolis again now.
14:45
Oh, it's such a chilling moment because all of the Egyptians are
14:49
forced into Moloch's mouth and the modern worker, the 20th
14:54
century striver, walks in willingly.
14:58
And it's such a commentary on what industrial progress means
15:02
for society and the shift towards technological utopia and
15:08
how it erases our free will, Right.
15:11
It's it's basically saying unisex erases free will.
15:14
Very interesting. Yeah.
15:16
Wow. And the last thing we kind of
15:18
figured out with unisex, which was interesting, is that a lot
15:21
of the examples in the book kind of show how when you put two
15:25
people in the same outfit, but they're different biological
15:28
genders, they immediately look different.
15:31
And the unisex look actually enhances the fact that they're
15:35
not the same. Well, our next theme is Binary,
15:39
and some iconic characters we all know and love were actually
15:42
your examples for this theme. Sandy and Danny, Zuko and Grease
15:47
even spoke to a legendary costume designer, Albert Wolski.
15:52
Tell me about this theme and what it means.
15:55
Yeah, I think the binary came about.
15:58
My dad's a mathematician, so the 0/1 or the use of 0 and one for
16:05
binary numbers in programming was something he talked about
16:09
because he was in computer science.
16:11
And so when the binary came up, this idea, we thought of the the
16:18
way to do the table of contents where it was numbers or symbols,
16:23
which would maybe take away from us trying to contain things too
16:27
much because we never wanted anyone to feel that they were
16:31
put in a box or put in a chapter.
16:33
It was more just to suggest. So the binaries really looking
16:39
at the fact that you cannot have one without the other.
16:42
You have to have masculine and feminine to make the binary
16:46
construct work. And I think the the most
16:50
fascinating thing we figured out some way into researching the
16:54
book is that the binary actually comes into human history quite
16:59
late, that it's a Western concept typically, and it's very
17:05
zero and one. It's either one or the other.
17:07
While most traditional cultures all the way back to Egypt.
17:12
And Gwen did a beautiful illustration of Hadchepsut.
17:16
Basically, there was space in most of those cultures for
17:19
gender fluidity. So we came to this understanding
17:23
or like this discovery for ourselves, not that we
17:27
discovered it, but for ourselves that we figured out, oh, wow,
17:32
the binary really is super late to the game.
17:34
And that's why it's sort of in the middle of the book as well,
17:38
that the book starts with neutral and ends with sort of
17:41
third gender or an expansive gender.
17:45
And the binary is really there to talk about how it's one
17:51
specific period of history but not everything.
17:54
Yeah, I think the the one of the things about binary to consider
17:59
this was actually from a conversation we had with Charles
18:01
Frazier about his geography. So when we were talking to him
18:06
about his his own experiences going to many other cultures,
18:12
some of them quite remote, who at the time did not have access
18:16
reliable access to things like smartphones.
18:19
Is that the expression of gender and self-expression, like
18:25
personal identity was hyper localized.
18:28
And so you could go from 1 village to the next and have
18:31
different terms, different ways that people express themselves.
18:35
You know, that there weren't necessarily limitations like
18:37
what we think of as you are a man who wears men's clothes or
18:41
you're a man who wears drag, right?
18:43
Like these very rigid things that we have in the West right
18:47
now. But as soon as they got access
18:50
to cell phones and to social media, those local groups
18:54
started to started to divide themselves based on our own
19:00
acronyms. So they started to wonder like
19:03
which letter am I am IL, GB, TQIA, to S, you know, whatever,
19:07
so on so forth. And, and then they, they really
19:11
started to adopt A more global and rigid system for expression.
19:16
And I think that a lot of binary ideas, they're, they're actually
19:21
way younger than people would expect.
19:24
A lot of the ideas we have about the binary are only from really
19:29
the end of the 19th century. So basically the Industrial
19:32
Revolution onwards, when the world became a lot smaller and a
19:36
lot more homogenized, right, where we had to unify things
19:39
like calendars and time, we ended up having to unify words
19:43
for identity to on this more global stage.
19:48
Yeah, it's, it was shockingly young for us to see that before
19:52
that there is a lot more flexibility even within our
19:55
Western concepts. Definitely with Greece, I just
20:00
wanted to mention that Albert talked about the idea.
20:03
I asked him about gender and he said for him it was more about
20:07
respectability versus provocative Ness.
20:11
And so he was thinking much more about.
20:14
These cool ideas of how do you rebel and how do you subvert.
20:20
So it was it was really fun to talk to him.
20:22
And he said that Olivia Newton John was just desperate to get
20:26
out of her girly early Sandy phase into her like rocker rebel
20:32
phase. So and also in the binary
20:37
chapter, there's the movie Carrie and talking about the
20:39
exact same thing. And I loved the idea of prom
20:43
being this American archetype of binary behavior.
20:48
That was another good one I want to mention with Rosanna Norton,
20:51
who actually designed the costumes for that one.
20:54
Loved that film as well. Our next theme would be singular
20:57
identities and I actually found this one quite fascinating.
21:00
The example that I was taken to. Which prize isn't the one you
21:03
all thought I was going to bring up?
21:06
I was actually taken with this example of Superman and a
21:08
correlation actually between the business suit and the Super
21:13
suit. Yeah, I think the singular
21:14
chapter is much more about people or circumstances or
21:20
periods of time where someone is consciously choosing one or the
21:25
other. And so the chapter opens with
21:29
Janelle Monáe in Durant Lantink's vagina pants.
21:37
And it's kind of this idea of the the biological markers that
21:44
are most stereotypical or archetypical.
21:48
But one of the things that was really fun to think about with
21:53
Singular is the idea of that uniforms, military uniforms,
21:58
western dress suits, super suits all function in the same way.
22:02
They're armor, they create a template of uniformity, and they
22:08
also fix, change, or sort of homogenize the human form.
22:16
Yeah, I think there's also, I think there's also in some of
22:19
the singular chapter, in looking through it, there is a sense of
22:25
rage. In the.
22:27
Singular chapter and and it I just realized that in looking
22:32
over it before we talked that a lot of the difference between
22:37
binary is that there is like an acceptance of a role where is in
22:42
singularity. It's often that one person or
22:47
one identity assumes a more whole vision of what the
22:54
gendered clothing is. So, you know, approaching like
22:59
hyper masculinity, like a Koteka.
23:01
Koteka is like a, it's basically a penis sheath, right?
23:05
So you use it in order to cover the genitals of a man, but
23:09
they're also personal expression.
23:11
So using it as a way of addressing things like trauma
23:15
and telling your personal story and the emotional self and a
23:20
sense of pride, right, Which a lot of those ideas are in our
23:24
current society are more usually packaged in a more feminine way.
23:29
And so it's it's like it's really nice to actually see in
23:32
singular that people express themselves in a more holistic
23:37
way, right. They're really aggressive
23:39
elements of feminine dress. They're really emotional
23:43
elements in men's dress. They're very round elements in
23:46
men's stress. Yeah, I find that to be pretty
23:49
interesting about it. And the next theme, we are
23:52
discussing duality. And you mentioned some iconic
23:54
figures that we've discussed on this podcast many, many times,
23:57
such as the incomparable Josephine Baker, Billy Porter,
24:01
or even the Goji Warriors, which I chatted with Gershwa Phillips
24:05
on this podcast several years ago when she designed the
24:08
costumes for the Woman King. So I felt like there's a lot in.
24:12
This brilliant film. That's a great 1 and I just feel
24:14
like there's a lot to this chapter that for us to be able
24:17
to talk about, so I would love to get into this one as well.
24:20
I mean, this one is really fun because it's talking about what
24:24
happens if you consciously choose to hold two things at the
24:30
same time. So Josephine Baker being
24:33
incredibly feminine at times, wearing makeup, owning, being a
24:38
woman and a strong woman, but then putting on a men's tuxedo
24:43
and creating this sort of feminine twist on a tuxedo and
24:48
able to sort of hold both of those together at the same time.
24:54
So another great example in the duality chapter is the Chevalier
24:58
Dion or Mademoiselle Charlotte and this individual, and maybe
25:06
now they would be called they, but in the 18th century, they
25:11
started out as a he and started out as a male military commander
25:17
spy and became a fencing master. And somewhere in the middle of
25:23
their lives became a she. And so Gwen and I talked a lot
25:28
about the idea of pronouns and how to represent them in the
25:31
book. And the Chevalier became
25:36
essentially a person that always dressed in women's dress at that
25:41
time, which would have been very controversial, but interestingly
25:45
was banished to the UK from France after and during the the
25:53
lead up to the French Revolution and was required in their exile
26:00
in England to only wear women's dress.
26:03
So it's a really fascinating story.
26:06
And Gwen did a beautiful rendering of what their fencing
26:10
look would have looked like. And then there are a couple
26:13
examples of pictures where caricatures divide the Chevalier
26:17
down the middle and one side is wearing feminine dress and the
26:21
other side is wearing masculine dress.
26:24
And when men, Wiselle Charlotte passed away, there was an
26:28
examination and an autopsy in the British Museum has all the
26:32
documents. And they were all super
26:35
surprised to find out that there were biologically male parts.
26:41
And so that's detailed in the autopsy.
26:44
And there's kind of detailed anatomical drawings and
26:49
watercolors as well. So the story's super, super
26:52
fascinating. Yeah.
26:54
I think the most interesting thing for me, so most of my
26:59
research was centered on the duality and Trinity for the
27:04
book. I would say that that's where
27:06
most of my research was. I don't know, maybe it just
27:08
feels that way because it was the heaviest lift.
27:11
But that something that I don't think that we really talk a lot
27:16
about when we talk about gender and more social settings or, you
27:21
know, things like that or in costume design even.
27:24
Is that the way of thinking about somebody's gender was
27:29
often associated with their social role, not their body.
27:34
So in Africa, when I was looking at King Ajinga in, in Angola,
27:42
they are, well, I'm going to say she, she was first woman and
27:50
then became a king. And when she became a king, the
27:56
Portuguese tried to call her a queen and she corrected them
28:00
every time and said, no, I am a king.
28:02
And there's this tradition of, for example, the Goji warriors
28:07
and others where they would assume these what they
28:11
considered to be men's roles, but the word men and women were
28:16
more related to their role in society.
28:19
So they could end up going backwards and forward.
28:21
There's a lot of research on the idea of boy wives and female
28:25
husbands. The idea that if you were a
28:29
woman of a warrior class that you could be somebody'd husband
28:33
and then your lion would be continued through your brother,
28:38
for example, with your wife. There are a lot of examples of
28:42
this sort of way of thinking and it became very obvious in
28:46
duality where many of our subjects like Queen Elizabeth,
28:50
Hot Shep, Suit King and Jinga, they all used the male gender to
29:00
assume power, which is not really a modern construct.
29:04
So I was very that part to me was really fascinating and
29:08
extremely eye opening. And our final theme, which this
29:12
one you all clearly left for, left for last.
29:16
It was 1. I wanted to dive deep into with
29:19
the both of you because there's a lot of great information
29:22
there. Triad theme.
29:23
Tell me a little bit more about this one.
29:25
But I definitely want the audience to dive deep into it
29:27
when they grab the book. Just tease it a little bit about
29:31
it, Gwen, because you said you did some research into that one.
29:35
I did this is my thought. These last two sections were so
29:39
rich for me. I I I wish that we our book
29:43
could have been like twice as long because we had to cut so
29:45
many of my research subjects. And the publisher actually
29:49
extended the book by 24 or more pages.
29:54
Yep, because when we delivered it, it was already over in Word
29:58
count pictures. But our editor, Jennifer
30:02
Thompson, she advocated for another chunk of pages to be
30:06
added. So I have to thank her for doing
30:08
that because that was incredible.
30:10
So a big part of triad or Trinity is this idea of gender
30:16
and expression being transcendent.
30:18
A lot of people that in, you know, sort of a pre colonial
30:23
setting were of 1/3 gender were people who had one sex of a body
30:30
but the spirit of something else or going back and forth in
30:34
between. And these people were
30:36
overwhelmingly considered to be wise people.
30:40
They were priests, yes. They are priests, shamans,
30:45
military advisors, sex educators.
30:48
Because they are considered in between and therefore a neutral
30:51
party. They are considered to be
30:53
princesses within some of their cultures or Princess really a
30:58
really incredible breadth of influence, social influence,
31:03
spiritual influence, historical influence and education.
31:09
It's really, it's really incredible what the role of
31:13
these people still are today in their communities and what they
31:17
have been historically, even if we don't learn about them very
31:21
much here in the historical record.
31:24
So for me, it was one of the most.
31:29
The most difficult illustration in the book is in this section,
31:36
the most difficult one. Because it takes so long to
31:40
breakdown that research, find people just for that
31:44
illustration alone. We read so many sources,
31:47
articles, we spoke to a expert on African culture who talked to
31:52
us about that particular dress. So it really was in a way like a
31:57
costume design way of researching that you would delve
32:01
in to something deeply, like you said for The Woman King.
32:05
You would dive so deeply into it to to do like a full set of
32:11
research for your director to be able to then move on and speak
32:16
with your actors about the costumes.
32:18
This section in terms of illustration was the heaviest
32:21
lift for just one illustration. It took about six months of
32:24
research in order to do and you wouldn't expect that looking at
32:29
the illustration. It's of a Gene Banda who is a
32:32
medicine man. That was often called
32:35
grandmother as an honorific in society.
32:39
They oversaw and still still oversee funeral rites, they
32:45
oversee marriages. They're all sorts of things that
32:48
this particular kind of priest does in East Africa.
32:54
But there's only one historical image of this, of this figure
32:59
that we know of and it's from, it's from a Portuguese
33:03
missionary in the 1600s. And that means that it is
33:07
missing a lot of information. It's very, it's a very simple
33:11
drawing. It has some local pigments in it
33:13
which were really helpful. But otherwise we had to rely on
33:17
really extensive contextual research and trying to figure
33:21
out what is that 1 little drape mean.
33:26
It took us. Three months and I ended.
33:28
Up. I had to.
33:31
I had to do 3D cloth simulations in order to figure out, well,
33:34
how did they take this cloth? How much money or access to
33:38
fabric would this person have? Did they cut fabric or was it
33:41
woven and, and, you know, single pieces?
33:44
Yeah. And if it is a single piece,
33:46
then how would they drape it to get this drape on just one side
33:49
of their body. And so we we ended up having to
33:52
do a 3D model in order to play with it and drape it and figure
33:56
out what what it would actually look like.
33:59
It was very, it was very intensive and really
34:02
interesting. But that section of the book has
34:05
a lot of that because many of these figures were not well
34:08
recorded. And you know, the modern way of
34:12
recording things is overwhelmingly Western.
34:15
So many 2 spirit people throughout history.
34:20
There's one or two photographs of them, but they're also a
34:24
little sensationalist because the other Ness was exotic to
34:29
Western people who had access to photography.
34:32
King and Jinga also has this really very famous statue.
34:37
It's a very large bronze statue and it it credits her by her
34:43
Christian name and she she essentially did a baptism as a
34:48
political stunt in order for the Portuguese to trust her more.
34:52
And then later in life she continued to use the name.
34:56
But the reasoning behind why is not clear and doesn't
35:01
necessarily seem to be religious or personal identity.
35:05
So there are a lot of issues with that one too, where, for
35:07
example, they covered her breasts in the statue, but
35:11
historically none of the depictions of her show her
35:13
covering her breasts. So in the book we decided not
35:17
to. There are some really
35:20
interesting and tricky things around this one because it's so
35:24
it is so different from what the Western perspective was at the
35:28
time that these people were recorded.
35:31
What we found with this chapter was it pretty much in all
35:35
cultures. Polynesian, Mexican, many Native
35:39
American cultures, Arabic cultures, even all the way to
35:44
Albania. There are individuals that
35:47
represent the sort of third space for gender identity.
35:52
And a lot of times it was men that were wearing women's dress,
35:56
but not all the time. There were often women wearing
35:59
men's dress or a combination that they created themselves.
36:05
And that was really fun. And then I felt like it was
36:08
really important to have first person information.
36:12
So I interviewed some living individuals who identify as
36:18
their gender. And so their words are directly
36:21
in the book. And that was really cool to have
36:24
Gwen delving into the past and me talking to people right now
36:28
that are living that same experience.
36:30
And they might be 1000 years apart or 2000 years apart.
36:34
So that was, I think that's almost the essence of the book
36:37
in that sense of connecting the past in the future.
36:41
Yeah, I am so fortunate I got to be your guy's student today.
36:46
I mean, I feel like I have learned so much in such a little
36:50
time. I mean, we have to do this all
36:52
the time. This has been so much fun.
36:54
But before I let you both go, one more question.
36:59
What do you hope audiences will take away from bending the
37:02
rules? Fashion beyond the binary.
37:04
I would like people to take away the idea of tolerance and the
37:09
idea that there's a big span of history and we're a little point
37:14
in time and we have our fixed perspectives.
37:18
But I feel like the book really shows the diversity in humanity
37:25
across time and space, and that maybe if we have a little more
37:28
tolerance for everybody around us, we can sort of understand a
37:34
little bit more about our history and where we're going in
37:37
the future. I find as a designer and a lot
37:41
of my design expertise is in world building, so it's more
37:46
towards open game, AAA, you know really large expansive IBIP
37:54
creation. Something that is the most
37:57
exciting to me is building the scaffold for how we create rules
38:02
for the world's we build. And understanding that identity
38:06
is our reaction to the world in which we've been plopped as a
38:11
character, as a person, as you know, whatever an entity with
38:16
narrative. And I hope that people who read
38:21
our book find a lot of excitement, that they get a
38:25
thrill out of realizing that what they've been presented with
38:30
is not everything. I I hope that people are able to
38:36
see themselves in unexpected places in this book.
38:40
See their family, their family's history, their belief system in
38:45
an unexpected and in an unexpected way that really
38:49
expands their point of view. To celebrate more to to love and
38:55
laugh a little bit more. To feel permission to be
39:01
themselves, to design the way they want to.
39:04
To present the world with with more vibrancy than than what we
39:11
think there is. Fashions both fun and serious,
39:15
and there's such a big toolbox of things in the book, but also
39:19
just in general. So maybe this kind of opens it
39:23
up to everybody mixing things up a bit more.
39:26
And even my husband, he was looking at a men's sort of kilt,
39:30
like a school skirt, but a grey pleated skirt.
39:33
And he was like, I would probably wear that.
39:36
And that was like, amazing. I love it.
39:41
Well, I learned so much from the two of you.
39:43
I loved reading through this book.
39:45
I feel like I learned so much and opened my eyes to so many
39:50
different things and I'm just I'm ready to read through it
39:54
again and again because I feel like I just on another re read,
39:59
I'm going to learn so much more. So thank you so much.
40:01
Camille Benda, Gwen Conaway, thank you so much for being
40:04
here. For everyone listening, please
40:07
get a copy of Bending the Rules, Fashion Beyond the Binary.
40:11
There will be information in our show notes so you could grab a
40:13
copy. It is definitely a must read.
40:17
I loved it so much. Like I said, it's full of so
40:19
much great information, photographs, illustrations,
40:23
interviews with such great industry icons.
40:27
I loved it so much so you have to get a hold of it as soon as
40:30
possible. Thank you so much for being
40:32
here. This has been such a joy.
40:33
I'm so glad we finally did this. Thank you this was so much fun
40:38
it. Was so much fun.
40:39
Now we can go back to being your students.
40:42
Oh, gosh, hardly. And when both of you have a
40:46
project they want to talk about, please, please, please come
40:48
back, Camille, I want to talk about this HBO show.
40:50
So. Happy too, yeah.
40:53
I can't wait, definitely. So the both of you, thank you so
40:56
much for being here. This has been so much fun.
40:58
Thanks, Spencer. The Costume House with Spencer
41:01
Williams is a production of The Art of Costume.
41:04
This episode was hosted, produced and edited by Spencer
41:07
Williams. To discover more conversations
41:09
with the designer shaping film, television and theater, visit
41:13
theartofcostume.com or follow us on social media at The Art of
41:17
Costume. And don't forget to connect with
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41:21
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