As London Fashion Week was coming to a close a different kind of show was taking place across town. Held at the V&A Museum of Childhood, the London Queer Fashion Show was a showcase of fashion, identity and expression. Giving visibility to new talent and helping to break down gender norms, the show was a joyful display of fashion that doesn’t exist in the binary of male and female forms.
Models of all identities from London’s queer community, including Rain Dove, Rude Boy Roy, and Santi Storm walked the show and photographer Andrea D’Auria was there to capture it all.
Conveying a sense of both transcendence and defiance, Andrea’s photographs present a community that celebrates freedom of being and freedom of expression. “Beauty is not an aesthetic convention and doesn’t need to be approved. Beauty is a feeling of self-fulfilment,” says Andrea. “In the world we are living in there is still a lot of homophobia, especially outside of the fashion and art industry and most definitely outside of big and cosmopolitan cities like London, Berlin and New York. So there is a fight to fight, and the way they are doing it is by coming together strong, creative but most importantly, careless and arrogant.”
