From Sappho and Suffragettes to t-shirts and TikTok, a fascinating journey through the history and politics of lesbian clothing.

From Sappho and Suffragettes to t-shirts and TikTok, a fascinating journey through the history and politics of lesbian clothing.

Longlisted for the 2025 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing

‘Charts the myriad styles of women-loving women through the ages.’ — The Guardian

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.

• For readers interested in titles such as Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers or Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, Unsuitable is a defining work of lesbian history.
• A kaleidoscope of the margins and the mainstream, celebrating trans lesbian histories, Black lesbian histories, and histories of gender-nonconformity
• As featured in fashion magazines such as Vogue and Marie Claire