![]() ![]() The “Lavender Scare”, an anti-homosexual fear campaign in mid-century America, had irrevocably affected the lives of queer people in the country, but was only given its name in 2004 by historian David K. By this point, lavender was already cemented as shorthand for gay, queer, or different. In 1970, the Lavender Menace lesbian activist group stormed the stage of the Second Congress to Unite Women they were responding to famous feminist Betty Friedan’s comment than lesbians were a “lavender menace” that would undermine the women’s movement. It’s more of a linguistic correlation than a fashion one, but it’s where I’ll begin nonetheless. Of all the shades of purple, lavender is that which is most associated with lesbians and the LGBTQ community as a whole. ![]() There is, of course, Sappho, who wrote of girls adorned in flowers, wreaths of violets worn as a crown or woven around their “slender necks”. There’s the alleged lesbian dress codes of the 1920s, where not just monocles but “sprigs of violets” reigned supreme and signalled a woman’s love for other women. There’s the bright purple background of the labrys lesbian flag, a reflection of the colour’s popularity in lesbian feminist imagery. There’s the hand-made t-shirts of the Lavender Menace, lavender in colour as well as in lettering, at once an insult and a rebuttal. How many times, in the history of lesbian fashion, is purple on the periphery? Within this blog, it crops up repeatedly, an Easter egg for the eagle eyed. ![]()
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