What does Princess Diana’s icy glare have to do with bars of Calvin Klein Obsession soap and a horde of cheesy men’s clothing catalogs riddled with beefcake models found in a Washington D.C.’s politician’s home after his death? To your average straight person, perhaps not much. But in the eyes of artist Silvia Prada, taken all together they’re potent markers of queer identity and desire. Prada’s latest show “Obsessions,” on view at Brooklyn’s VISO Gallery through July 16th, was sparked by her longtime view of Diana as an icon of pop culture androgyny and her recent observations that so many young gay men have begun to echo her style.
“The bomber jackets, the spandex athletic shorts, all gay boys today dress like Princess Diana!” she quips in the show notes (for one high profile example, look no further than Troye Sivan’s recent appearance in the front row of Loewe’s menswear show). The observation led Prada, whose fashion world bonafides have previously led to collaborations with Gucci and Miu Miu, to not only dwell on the ways generations of queer people have found identity in unexpected parts of pop culture, but those often-undiscussed points where both gay and lesbian desire and aesthetics intersect.
Prada, who says she’s always been attracted to androgyny over the traditional masc or femme, traces her fascination with Diana back to her younger days of trying to understand her own identity in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Diana herself may not have been queer, but her intensely public battle to assert herself and find her identity against the wishes of the world’s ultimate straight white family—The Windsors—resonated with Prada and other young queer people at the time.
“Diana was very rebellious and also living through some kind of trauma,” she says. “The way she would express herself was through her kind of like, queer codes, which now are actually queer codes: the short hair, bomber jackets, baseball caps, denim, high socks and oversized sweaters. So I think all of that made a huge impact on what is for me, androgyny.”
At the same time as Diana’s stylistic rebellion, Prada also found herself attracted to the increasingly sensual marketing of Calvin Klein. Their early ads for the fragrance Obsessions, which gives the show its name, featured nude male and female models posed together, who from afar were almost indistinguishable from one another. The men’s muscles were depicted in the same way as a women’s curves. “I felt like all of that is part of the sex appeal that is defined as something that embodies the full range of masculine and feminine energies, and also queer energies,” she says. “It was very ahead of its time.”
To complete the juxtapositions of image, she also included images from AH MEN, a forgotten ‘70s men’s clothing line which used gay porn stars as models (which were sourced, she says, from the empty house of a closeted politician in D.C.), and imagery from Madonna’s SEX book era. “It was a liberation,” Prada says of the book. “It’s so impactful, the job that Madonna did at the time, liberating us all as queer kids.” To finish, she appropriated works by Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso in an attempt to both queer their works, and put these new images on the same level. The result is a presentation that mixes collage, Prada’s own trademark pencil sketches and even the artist’s first sculpture work (she recreated Calvin Klein’s Obsession soap). Work from Prada’s friend and collaborator, Coco Capitán is also on display.
All together, it’s a mélange of various markers of gay identity that may have been deeply coded or even inadvertent, but which Prada finds more potent than the vision of queerness offered up today in mainstream pop culture and marketing. “I felt the need to put into a show a kind of like reclaiming that moment in queer history, because I feel gay culture is now straight-washed,” she says.
While the parade of yearly Pride campaigns may represent important political advancement and acceptance, in comparison the imagery Prada assembled in “Obsessions” reads strikingly more queer, even as it was all originally presented to a mainstream audience as well.