gender exansive greenville, june 2021 – egan volert – FESCH.TV

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

What exactly is a “gender expansive” fashion show? The good people of Greenville, South Carolina, attempted to answer this question in June of 2021. My wife and I drove up from Atlanta. Like most people who participated, we’d been stuck in our house for ages due to the pandemic. It was our first post-vaccine road-trip and we were thrilled, rebirthing our best and most fashionable selves against the onslaught of coronavirus. But we were also amused and worried. A queer fashion show attempted on this big a scale—in Greenville?

My wife was walking the runway for Sharpe Haus, helmed by designer Leon Wu, a dear friend of ours from Los Angeles. I embedded with the Sharpe folks and generally roamed around behind the scenes, noticing and documenting on the fly with my crap smartphone, inspired in a Nineties kind of way by the newbie DIY vibes emanating from all corners of this scene. These Southerners were starving for a loudly queer conversation. They wanted to assert their existence in order to provoke a rebirth of Southern culture itself—where South Carolina is revealed to be inclusive and proud.

The event sold out. There were 250 guests and over 50 staff, models, designers, vendors, et cetera. Perhaps the wildest thing was discovering there was zero press coverage, neither local nor national. The event organizers had hired a professional photographer to do the classic head-on posing shots at the end of the runway and that’s it. But anybody who has ever walked at a queer runway show knows it’s not about the fifteen seconds you’re individually up there doing your thing; it’s about the community you make all weekend long to create an experience that has been greater than the sum of its parts. It’s about the crowd, not so much about the clothes.

Whether the event becomes an annual thing or whether it turns out to have been a legendary one-off, this 45-minute video I put together seems to be the only full story about it on record. I’m glad I was there to catch it, to give it a permanently available second life among people who couldn’t participate in it directly that weekend. Hopefully this event was a spark that can ignite Greenville and the South at large. Only time will tell.