Dressing for Her: Performing Queerness in Sapphic Nightlife
By Avery Lynn Wheless
Submitted in Partial Requirement for The Degree of Master of Arts in Fashion Studies
Parsons School of Design 2026
This thesis is an autoethnographic study that examines the dressing practices of queer/lesbian-identifying women and non-binary persons who participate in sapphic nightlife in New York City. As a member of this community, I wished to shed light on a population of women/sapphic adjacent individuals navigating a world in which heteronormativity and patriarchy prioritize subservience to the male gaze, who choose to actively rejecting ideas about conformity and binarism through their dress practices.
My study integrates data collected over 5 months (September 2025 through January 2026), during which I conducted observations within a few chosen spaces that reflect my experience within New York City nightlife. Incorporated into a comprehensive history of New York City’s queer nightlife beginning in the 1890s, these observations showcase the modern sapphic nightlife participant, who attends venues that are physical brick and mortar bars, as well as less-established, arguably more “contemporary” nightlife scenes that move from place to place. In tandem with these observations, I conducted intimate interviews with close friends who felt they were reflected in the community I was researching, comparing their experiences against my observations in these spaces.
This narrative, which I choose to call the study of “sartorial sapphism,” ultimately seeks to understand how individuals navigate the complexities of queer attraction through self-expression in their community spaces. This research elucidates the commonalities between sapphic individuals in the ways that they perform their queerness and, secondarily, their gender identity within spaces that exist explicitly for this community. In effect, this is a study on the ways in which queer individuals construct their identities to either attract people with preferred sexual preferences or individuals with similar values for the purpose of creating community by codifying dress practice.
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