My best bud El and I got kicked out of the mall parking garage because it’s “not for photoshoots.” I mean, okay, it’s for parking, but we were on the top level, which was empty, and it was Sunday afternoon, which is not exactly rush hour in the downtown mall that keeps collapsing into administration.
It really should be for photoshoots. The lighting was impeccable: dingy skylights created patches of softly diffused light, and more sunlight, filtered by the spring haar (cold sea fog), danced through the openings in the walls. Uncomplicated grays, flashes of functional yellow, and industrial geometries lent themselves to El’s soft-grunge-normcore style, looks they build from boxy silhouettes in neutral tones and the occasional primary color.
We used the space to film El’s catwalk for an open casting call. They’ve walked two runways before: one in Kentucky, in what seems like another life, before we knew each other, and one earlier that same weekend, for the local art school, where I had a front-row seat.
It was my first fashion show, and I took full advantage of the occasion. I wore a two-toned blazer, an oversized tank patterned with sketched faces under a mesh crop top in rusted rainbow colors, billowing bright yellow trousers, and a smattering of rings, including one El made from a spoon. El’s runway outfits were the opposite: a simple gray layer wrapped in a pair of long, tubular cushions, topped with a pillowy headpiece that completely obscured their face, and a set of black shorts and tube top, the latter emblazoned with “NO SIGNAL” in silvery letters, beneath a mesh shirt with windowpane-like black lines and a close-fitting black hood.
This is often our dichotomy: me with my mane of curly brown-red hair in bright, patterned pastiche; them with their almost-black shag and layers of black jackets, Docs, blazers, cropped tanks, and straight-cut trousers. I’m the moon in most relationships. With El, I’m the sun.
Strutting across the parking garage with steady hips and a smoldering expression, El angled for the masc contingent of the open call. El is masterful with androgyny. They know fashion; they know styling; they know how to carry themselves on the border of legibility.
They’ve influenced my style: the types of clothes I try on, the shapes I explore. I’m both more colorful and more haphazard, sometimes misjudging how layering works and often forgetting to consider my shoes. If I had been catwalking in the parking garage, I would’ve been read as a slovenly femme. I had put minimal effort into my outfit, wearing baggy jeans and a long rain jacket that cinches at the waist, a silhouette that makes me recoil in the mirror. Yet the jacket is warm, comfortable, and shows few signs of wear for the decade I’ve been using it. It occurred to me, as I walked home from the mall, that I might have that jacket forever. Function over fashion—for now, at least.
I aspire to achieve El’s stylistic coherence, but style is not a sprint. My version of androgyny has developed significantly over the three years since we met. For most occasions, I do have something akin to a signature, a look people know me by. The slower shift is in the day-to-day; transforming clothes I already have into clothes that fit my aesthetic or else exchanging them for new-to-me pieces through secondhand sources.
The spoilsport security guy waited around watching us leave, a disheveled photographer and a butch-y model. If only he’d seen us at the real runway.
The gender and fashion envy I have for androgynous people is real :’)