Alok Vaid-Menon on Why Clothes Have No Gender | BoF VOICES
The Business of Fashion Podcast
The Business of Fashion
4.6 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At VOICES 2019, performance artist and designer Alok Vaid-Menon lifted the lid on fashion’s ‘regressive’ gender stereotypes and urged the industry to ‘de-gender’ and redefine the meaning of beauty.
To watch Alok's talk at VOICES 2019 on our YouTube channel click here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Imran Ahmed founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion and welcome to the |
| 0:07.6 | Bof podcast. This week, we have a very special talk from Voices 2019 that closed the entire event. |
| 0:15.4 | Our final speaker was Alok Menin, a mixed media artist whose work to create a world beyond the gender binary is internationally |
| 0:23.5 | renowned. Alok is a leading voice in the movement to degender the fashion and beauty industries. |
| 0:29.1 | And over the past decade, Alok has shared creative work at over 500 venues in more than 40 countries. |
| 0:35.2 | Don't miss this one. Here is Alok Menon at Voices 2019 on |
| 0:39.3 | white clothes have no gender. My beauty is so tremendous it has to be edited out of magazines |
| 0:49.2 | and movements, whitewashed from history, evacuated from sermons, streets, and schools just to prove that it does not exist. |
| 0:57.7 | My beauty is so tremendous that they try to confine it, build health and science, fashion, and finance as gates around it, but my beauty, you can still peek through and see it. |
| 1:08.7 | My beauty is so tremendous, there are no words for it, or rather the words |
| 1:12.2 | they're too ugly for my beauty. My beauty is so tremendous that they had me believe for so long it was |
| 1:18.0 | not there. So when I finally found it here and all the places I was taught to hate here and my body |
| 1:25.6 | not theirs, I finally figured it out. |
| 1:28.8 | My beauty, my beauty is so tremendous that the men will have to kill me for it, but my beauty, |
| 1:35.4 | my beauty will still be there when I am gone. |
| 1:38.7 | My beauty will still be here when I am gone. |
| 1:42.6 | Hello, my name is Alok and there are many words that I could use to |
| 1:46.6 | describe what I do, but I'm currently in a polyamorous relationship with all of them, and we're |
| 1:51.4 | still very much in the process of figuring out our ship. When I speak about the writer and me, the performer, they get jealous. |
| 2:04.0 | The designer has been ghosting on the model for a while, and they're not really on good speaking |
| 2:08.5 | terms. |
| 2:09.6 | Yes, this is my roundabout way of letting you know that I use the gender neutral pronoun, |
... |
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