Interview with Sarah Mangle, for the Queer and Trans Clothing Project, via email, September 2020
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Jamie: One point you made that really stuck with me when we were brainstorming ideas for a garment was about clothing to make the body look bigger, to counter the idea that clothes should make the body look smaller. Can you talk a bit more about this? Why is this important to you? How does it feel to wear clothing that makes your body seem bigger?
Sarah: There is a dominant omnipresent idea that clothes should be slimming, that we should endeavor to look as narrow as possible. This limits the possibilities of billowing ballooning or angular and boxy shapes (among other shapes) that clothes could create in collaboration with the body wearing them.
When you are a chubby or fat person (I am chubby), the pressure to be smaller is all around. Sometimes the words around slimming are literally built into the names of the clothes themselves (pants in particular). I noticed a significant shift towards the fabulous when I stopped trying to hide the shapes of my body with clothes, to hide the body that was there, and instead use the shape of my body to inform my clothes choices. I had to flick a switch on what my goals were with wearing clothes. If I was afraid of the shape of my body, I was dressing in fear, I could not simultaneously dress to look good. Hiding does not look good. Hiding is an attempt to shrink. How can you shine when you're endeavoring to shrink?
This turned me on to celebrating and embracing bigger shapes. And oh! When we don't want to be small, think of all the amazing and interesting ways we can be big! Fabric is naturally billowing! How can we embrace that and explore that?
J: Do you think of your body as a queer body? What does that mean to you?
S: I do associate being unapologetically chubby and fat positive with being queer, which is funny, because I think it is still generally true that slender masculine presenting people are seen as sexiest in the queer community I inhabit. Multiple things can be true at the same time.
My tattoos and their stories also make me feel like I have a queer body.
At the same time, being queer in public has been for a few years, a gift I give those around me (in particular the children I taught), and more a community service than it has been important to me personally. The people around me benefit from my out colourful queer body in their spaces, it creates more space for them to embrace themselves and think, "How would I like to be?" Simultaneously, to me being queer, although it is everpresent in my life, it's not something that I think about all that much.
J: If you could imagine an ideal experience of finding clothes, what would it look like?
S: Ideally I would work in collaboration with someone like you, Jamie, to design and sew the clothes I dream of wearing. I have so many clothes I dream of.
J: How do the clothes you wear reflect who you are?
S: Clothing is a part of my art practice. I wake up and want to wear clothes that reflect how I feel each day. I want my clothes to bring the imagination and play and ridiculousness into everyday experience.
J: In general, how would you describe your relationship with clothing? Has it changed over time?
S: I had a very playful relationship to clothing as a child. I loved pattern clashing and had many pairs of big troll earrings. As a teen I loved vintage fashion, polyester pants, matching tops and bottoms, flowy dresses. When I moved to Montreal and started art school, and wanted to find queer community, I endeavored to dress like a lesbian at that time, which was masculine, army pants, tight tops, big plaid shirts, and I thought about how all these things looked, but I also subconsciously tampered down the feminine. When my body changed shape with age, and as the queer cultures around me slowly got less and less femme-phobic, my clothing changed, and now, at 39, I find myself with newly long hair, dressing in similar ways to my childhood self.
J: Can clothing be queer? Do you think of your clothes as queer?
S: I worry that if clothing is queer that means there are only certain ways for a person to be queer and present their queerness, and I worry that this means some people are seen as queer and others are not because of how they relate to clothing, so I hesitate to say yes to this. To me, this idea threatens to be exclusive, so until queerness can really be available to everyone, I would have to say, "not yet".
J: Have you had feelings about the jacket project that you'd like to share? Either about the process or the finished garment or both?
S: The jacket is very special to me. I hardly believe it is here and it is mine. It feels like a tremendous gift. It feels like a fantasy. I LOVE how soft it is.