| From: jools (Original Message) | Sent: 31/03/2003 02:37 |
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Cross-dressing for
Success
To celebrate her new album, Drag, k.d.
lang decided to try something different ---- dresses! Charles Gandee talks to the gay icon about fashion, femininity, and fame. Photographed by
Herb Ritts.
Two days before she's scheduled to sing five songs from her
new album, "Drag", with the Boston Pops, k.d. lang who may
have once looked like Elvis (according to her friend Madonna)
but who now looks more like Bryan Ferry, is sitting on the love
seat in her suite at the Four seasons Hotel overlooking Boston
Common. She's wearing big, and I do mean big, black boots,
an oversize sweatshirt, and a pair of overalls from which her
girlfriend, Leisha Hailey, the lead singer of the Murmurs, has
removed the bib. Somewhat uncharacteristically, lang, who's
normally as cool as Warren Beatty in "Shampoo" -- even when
wearing a patch reading HOMO on her jacket at the VH1 Fashion
Awards -- is as skittish as a kitten. Not about the concert,
which "The Boston Globe" will ultimately declare "breath-
taking", but about the fact that, for reasons she can't now
quite recall, she has agreed to fly to New York the morning
after and be photgraphed wearing evening gowns.
I'm a little nervous because, except for the Miss Chatelaine video, which was a
complete send-up, I have never worn a dress in my adult life. Never! Not that I hate dresses or that I refuse to wear them as a social statement
necessarily, it's just that I personally feel very vulnerable in them. I don't know why. So maybe it will be a good exercise for me to
wear these "evening gowns." Maybe.
What's the worst that can happen? That I'll look completely uncomfortable and ridiculous,
that I'll look like a drag queen waiting for his wig on Halloween. That would be bad.
Of course I understand that dresses can be very beautiful - when I see a gown worn in a spiritual
sense, like a monk wearing a gown, it's very beautiful to me. So I've decided to go to this shoot with that idea in my head. Obviously, the
challenge is to make it work in a pure and honest way, without being camp or fake. Which I think I can do. But it won't be easy.
Besides, I'm an artist, not a model. And I don't have a perfect body. I like my body,
I'm comfortable in it, although there are times when I wish it was better, which I think is normal. But there's this whole thing happening
now in marketing where artists are expected to be models in a sense, and it's tough for me. I've spent 35 years developing a strong sense
of self and trying to portray that to the public, and not being, you know, stubborn, but also not being swayed--or compromised.
By the way, the new album is not about clothes--or dressing. It's a nonjudgemental study on
smoking as it applies metaphorically to love and human need. Of course the title is provocative. Everything I do is bait. I'm an artist. Why
conceptualize and emote for nothing? There has to be a conceptual core to something, with all these peripheral dimensions to it, or else
there's no reason to do it.
It's funny. I guess to some people I'm in drag when I'm onstage in a Richard Tyler
tuxedo. But to me it's not drag at all. It's what I feel comfortable in. It's just that society has this understanding of gender
fashion lines, which is crazy to me, and yet I adhere to it as well, because women's clothes make me feel vulnerable. So it's all very
convoluted.
But I do always see myself in a suit, no matter what. I hate to bring sexuality into it, but,
honestly, I feel that I don't sing from a typical female perspective or a typical male perspective. I sing from a lesbian or a gay perspective,
which is slightly different because it has a more--and I'm going out on a limb here--"balanced" understanding of the sexes. So for me
to show up onstage in a dress would be to lean too much one way, because when I'm singing I switch from being Frank Sinatra to Eartha Kitt in
seconds. I don't feel like a woman, and I don't feel like a man; I feel like both, simultaneously. Suits help me achieve some kind of
balance, because I have a very voluptous, womanly shaped body--a Botticelli sort of body--and I have a mind and an emotional self somewhere in the
middle.
But I have nothing against dressing in a feminine style. Actually, my mom, who was quite
fashionable, used to make me wear dresses to church. But I stopped going to church when I was eight or nine, so I stopped wearing dresses. I felt
silly in them. I think people have natural inclinations--you know, some little girls want to wear dresses, some little girls want to wear OshKosh.
Well, I went for OshKosh.
I do remember trying on makeup one day and my mom saying, "You know, you don't need to
wear makeup, because you have beautiful skin." And I never wore makeup again. Although now I do for photo shoots or videos. Actually, now I
represent M.A.C. It's awesome that a company is so courageous that it would hire a black drag queen [RuPaul] and a dyke who doesn't wear
makeup to represent them. They developed a lipstick called Viva Glam 11 for me, and 100 percent of the retail price goes to AIDS charities.
It's only been out since February, and already it's raised over a million dollars.
Fashion is a strange thing. I kind of go on and off it. Sometimes I rebel against it very
strongly, because I really was quite naive when I first got into it. When Ingenue hit, my stature rose quite swiftly, and designers were
courting me a lot, flinging clothes at me. And I didn't want to wear just one designer, so I guess I pissed off a lot of people. But for me,
it's more piece by piece. You know, not every painting from one painter is going to be your favourite.
It's funny, but when I go to fashion shows my mind races. It's exciting and
putrid at the same time. I'm thrilled and disgusted. The core of my clothes are men's, but sometimes there are women's pieces
mixed in. So it's very much to my advantage to be aware of both men's and women's fashion. Certainly I'm attracted to women who
wear dresses. Leisha loves Miu Miu. I think if she could afford it, she would probably dress in Miu Miu all the time.
I like Miuccia Prada very much. Not just her clothes, but her. I wear the men's stuff,
although this season it's all cut too narrow for me. I also like Richard Tyler a lot. But for me, some of the Japanese designers are more at,
and I hate to use this word because it's been abused, the androgynous centre of fashion--you know, where it's just this kind of beautiful
clothing. I think Helmut Lang is trying to do that right now as well. I also like Gaultier because every time he does something, it's
different. He's out there. He's an artist.
I kind of like buying my clothes rather than having them given to me. I think you appreciate them
more if you have to really make a choice that you like something enough to pay $1,000 or $3,000 for it. Besides, then it's legitimate.
But I'm not rich. At all. I don't sell that many records, plus I don't get played on
the radio, and that's really where you make your money as a songwriter. I'm a lot more famous than I am rich. Which is kind of a bummer
because it's hard to be famous and not rich.
Besides, I'm famous for doing things other than selling records.
Doing Ellen was fun. I mean it's nice to be part of history. But one thing I want to
make clear is that many, many people came before to allow Ellen to do what she did. And I'm talking about people before me, before Martina
Navratilova. There was Julie Andrews in her own little way in Victor/Victoria, and before that, there was Marlene Dietrich.
Postcript: The morning after the shoot, I tracked down lang in New York and asked her how it
felt to be photographed wearing a few choice selections from the New York fall collections.
Pretty uncomfortable. What shocked me is how unglamorous it is to put those things on:
You have to sort of dive up into them. It's like this weird little cocoon that you throw yourself into. To me, it's far more glamorous to
put on a suit, because there's all these layers and it's just very ceremonial. I think it will be a while before I put on a dress again.
But who knows? Inspiration can zap at any time.
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