Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion w/ Eleanor Medhurst & Kate Charlesworth

Join Eleanor Medhurst for the Edinburgh launch of her book Unsuitable: A Lesbian Fashion. Eleanor will be in conversation with author and cartoonist Kate Charlesworth.

Tickets are free and include drinks for the evening. Pre-order a book with your ticket to receive 10% off RRP!

About the book

The way we dress can show or hide who we are; make us fit in, make us stand out, or make our own community. Yet ‘lesbian fashion’ has been strangely overlooked. What secrets can it reveal about the lives and status of queer women through the ages?

The lesbian past is slippery: often deliberately hidden, edited or left unrecorded. Unsuitable restores to history the dazzlingly varied clothes worn by women who love women, from top hats to violet tiaras. This story spans centuries and countries, from ‘Gentleman Jack’ in nineteenth-century Yorkshire and Queen Christina of seventeenth-century Sweden, to Paris modernism, genderqueer Berlin, butch/femme bar culture and gay rights activists—via drag kings, Vogue editors and the Harlem Renaissance.

This book is a kaleidoscope of the margins and the mainstream, celebrating trans lesbian style, Black lesbian style, and gender nonconformity. You don’t have to be queer or fashionable to be enthralled by this hidden history. Unsuitable lights it up for the world to see, in all its finery.

About the speakers

Eleanor Medhurst is a historian of lesbian fashion and author of the blog Dressing Dykes. She has worked on Brighton Museum’s exhibitions Queer Looks and Queer the Pier, and been interviewed by Grazia, Cosmopolitan, Cameron Esposito’s Queery and Gillian Anderson’s What Do I Know?! This is her first book.

Kate Charlesworth is a cartoonist and illustrator living and working in Edinburgh, originally from Barnsley, South Yorkshire. After art college in Manchester she began work as a freelance illustrator in London where, along with David Shenton – as cartoonists accidentally documented L&G – she was part of (as it was then known) the ‘golden age’ of Gay publishing. Her work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, books, indie comics, exhibitions and electronic media and she has drawn storyboards for Hot Animation and Aardman Animations. In 2014 she collaborated with Mary and Bryan Talbot – 2012 Costa biography winners for their graphic novel Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes – to illustrate Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, published by Jonathan Cape. In 2021 she took part in The ‘Rebel Dykes Art and Archive Show’ that bought the Rebel Dykes group of artists back together for the first time in almost 40 years and unites important underrepresented cultural histories with contemporary dyke culture; inviting a variety of younger artists to exhibit new works alongside the dykes who paved their way.