{"id":12570,"date":"2018-01-17T15:22:50","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T20:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/?p=12570"},"modified":"2018-01-17T15:25:16","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T20:25:16","slug":"alok_theones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/posturemag.com\/online\/alok_theones\/","title":{"rendered":"#OverTheTop Part Two: The Fierce, Fabulous Life of a Famed NYC Performance Artist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Breaking though the gender binary, Alok Vaid-Menon (they\/them pronouns) defies stereotypes on the daily. An internationally renowned poet, performance artist, educator, and activist, they are known for their keen political wit and wildly original personal style. Their work with DarkMatter, a trans South Asian performance art duo they founded with Janai Balasubramanian in 2013, has been showcased around the world. The youngest recipient of the Live Works Performance Act Award, Alok was also featured in the acclaimed HBO documentary, The Trans List (2016).<\/p>\n

Layering traditional pieces with more contemporary silhouettes in vibrant colors, Alok challenges expectations of both gender and fashion. It’s a brilliant composite that the Posture team wanted to reflect in their set, which is why Creative Director Morgan Stuart chose to reimagine the Upper West Side apartment of a fabulous cat lady. To convey this, Nicky Ottav recreated a floral stencil pattern you generally see on wallpaper to make it larger and more colorful, and we filled the room with old books, reupholstered vintage furniture, and plastic cats. The scene paired perfectly with the bold lipstick, Dynasty-era blazers, and patterned dresses that are cornerstones of Alok\u2019s fabulous transfeminine style.<\/p>\n

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\"Alok<\/p>\n

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To start off, tell me a little bit about your style evolution. I assume a huge part of that’s intrinsically tied to your experience moving through gender?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sure. I think for me, style has always been about politics. I didn’t get to control my race, or my gender, and all the stereotypes and assumptions that were made on the basis of that. So from a young age, I used clothing as a way to say, \u201cthere’s something more complicated going on here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Style is very much boxed into categories that I didn’t necessarily consent to. I’ve always been a bit of a fashionista \u2014 when I was four or five I was wearing socks to my knees, velcro sandals with dolphins, coordinated purple lunchbox, and short shorts. Style was how I began to understand myself as an individual, and eventually that allowed me to come to terms with my gender.<\/p>\n

What were some of your early style influences as you started to carve out that space for yourself?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I really think cartoons are really great, and specifically cartoon villains. Cartoon villain style is so important to me, because I feel like that’s always been a space in popular imagination for queer and gender nonconforming people. Shoulders too big, arms too hairy, these fabulous monstrosities.<\/p>\n

I also take a lot of cues from underground queer club culture, because I think that it really feeds contemporary fashion. It can be frustrating too, because a lot of what is now put on runways was first implemented on the bodies of drag queens, and club people, and queer people \u2014 many who were brutally harassed in the past because of it.<\/p>\n

So it’s also really important to me, when I’m thinking about style and fashion, is to say, I actually feel like the current discourse about trans people starting to be recognized as models is misleading, ’cause we’ve always actually been the originators of the contemporary fashion industry. It’s just that our clothes made it, but not actually our bodies.<\/p>\n

When was the first time that you wore lipstick? Do you remember that moment?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oh gosh. When I was a little kid, I would wear my mom’s makeup, so probably five or six.<\/p>\n

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