1999 Mesh Top, Bender Collection A/W 2019

Gender bending

This fitted, reversable mesh top, is from Jimmy D's Bender Collection. James Dobson, the designer behind the Jimmy D label, developed the Bender collection in response to a review of New Zealand Fashion Week which applauded a number of designers for having a political outlook and for engaging with the world around them. Feeling that sexuality and gender were political ideas that largely seemed ignored by New Zealand fashion, he chose to explore those ideas.

1999

In Bender he combines personal '90s nostalgia for fashion icons such as Jean Paul Gautier, who 'built his whole career in queering fashion' (Vänskä, 459), with an exploration of sexuality, gender, queerness and a desire to produce 'genderless clothing in less tokenistic ways'. Mesh tops were a popular fashion item in the 1990s for both men and women. Dobson's 1999 Mesh Top has been designed to be worn by any gender.

George Hajian print

While James Dobson is known as a designer who works primarily in black, he occasionally collaborates with artists to produce unique prints for his collections. For the Bender collection, he worked with George Hajian, a Lebanese Auckland based artist. Haijan is interested in the genealogy of the athletic male body, and the ways in which it is 'objectified, sexualized and commodified' in popular culture, from magazines to social media, the internet and dating/social apps. Hajian provided Dobson access to his back catalogue of collages from which he created a large scale repeat print.

Of the print, Dobson says:

I love it’s raw, torn, scribbled and pasted up vibe, I love the images of classical sculpture and how this talks about vanity and body image obsessions that are rife within the gay community, and I love the flashes of pornography and phallic references that, for me, are a commentary on the conservatism and de-sexualisation of the fashion world, especially in New Zealand right now.

As well as creating a colourful repeat print, Dobson also created a series of placement prints.

 

Reference

Annamari Vänskä (2014) From Gay to Queer—Or, Wasn't Fashion Always Already a Very Queer Thing?, Fashion Theory, 18:4, 447-463.