Zelda Kaplan, New York socialite and eccentric, died on February 15 at the age of 95. The staple in New York’s art and club society was well-known for her outfits and her personality. After travelling around Africa and Asia after her second divorce (speaking to women in villages about birth control and female genital mutilation), she returned to New York with multitudes of African prints purchased directly from the weavers. She turned these into matching outfits ensembles, and was never seen in New York’s club district without her printed dress and matching tall hat.

Zelda was an enigma; she became famous for just being herself. She could out-party kids who were a third of her age, and didn’t care what people would have thought of her. She often stayed at clubs until they closed for the night, before making exits just as smooth as her entrances.

She was more than just her eccentric reputation; she was the passionate old woman with the spirit of a 20-year-old, the character of a philanthropist, and the nature of a true artiste.

Goodbye, Zelda Kaplan. The world will be a little less exuberant without you.

text by Sofie Mikhaylova

Binders are the antithesis of a bra. Bras, with their tendency to be colourful and embellished, are available in wild and wondrous patterns and shapes of every sort; they’re built to cup and lift, and designed to be seen and admired. Binders, on the other hand, are plain and inconspicuous, built to be worn like a second skin and designed not for the eye, but simply to perform a purpose; they flatten and shape a chest, creating a more masculine, square form for those who don’t wish to show their breasts. Bras have been considered beautiful and often liberating—but who says binders can’t be too? Kyle Lasky shows binders as a work of art in “Presence In Absense,” a photo series that captures the pain, liberation, and beauty in binders.

Kyle is a queer photographer based in Toronto who has just launched their first solo show with “Presence in Absence” this month at the female-friendly sex shop Come As You Are. Kyle chose binders because, “for a lot of people who bind, a binder is the final layer in undressing, so these photos actually function as nudes, they’re portraits of bare chests.” By presenting the binder as a chest itself, the wish of the wearer is being granted; the photos show almost no sign of a traditionally feminine form.

Binders are essentially an extremely tight fitting sort of modern version of a corset, and are used exclusively to flatten breasts and create a male contour chest. They’re worn almost equally by masculine identified people and feminine identified people, and most importantly they provide a surgery-free option of comfort for those who can’t afford the expenses and down-time a mastectomy can demand.


A self portrait of photographer, Kyle Lasky

Binders aren’t new to Kyle. “When I first started binding five years ago I tried one on and I looked in the mirror and just started crying, because I’d never been able to see myself in that way, and feel so happy about the way that I looked. It definitely is freeing to bind, but it is also straining… Now there’s a lot of shame for me. My binder and my binding is extremely personal and painful. It’s literally a weight I have to bare. I’ve found that after I started hormones I essentially stopped binding because I was passing so much without binding that it became unnecessary. I wasn’t questioned based on my face so I found people didn’t look to my body to answer their questions, they just took me literally at face value.” But as time passes and their comfort levels shift, Kyle often has to revert back to binding. “It’s a struggle for me, and a constant issue I have to deal with all day every day. I’m uncomfortable with my chest but I’m also uncomfortable with binding because it’s such a painful experience. I’m either more comfortable in my body and in pain physically from binding, or uncomfortable in my body but not in pain.”

Kyle’s discomfort with binding plays a part of the creation of the show. Each piece (there are 12 in total) has a suggested price, although buyers are welcome to pay more, and the proceeds from the show are being split between sending binders to other countries where they’re not available, and funding Kyle’s top surgery.

Want to read more related to this subject? Check out “Unbinding Binaries” in Issue 13.

text by Alyssa Garrison
photos by Kyle Lasky

From a young age, the line “Being plastic is fantastic!,” always associated with Barbie, was ingrained in my head. I never thought too critically about it—it was a catchy little rhyme—but as I grew older, I began to see just how warped the message being sold to my Barbie-obsessed friends and me was. To this day, I maintain a love-hate relationship with Barbie: the girl’s got style, and I can’t help but admire her determination to experiment with every career from veterinarian to pizza maker; however, her body type has been proven multiple times to be beyond realistic, a narrowly idealized figure being sold to young girls as the pinnacle of beauty. It’s not just that Barbie and friends lack diversity in their shape: her form is downright impossible to achieve.

You can imagine how excited I was to stumble upon Margaux Lange, a New York-based jewelry designer who seems to share my sentiments. She created The Plastic Body Series: a handmade accessories line which pays homage to pop culture’s fascination with Barbie by salvaging old doll parts and transforming them into wearable art. As sweetly nostalgic as they are creepily Lynchian, the accessories themselves are a psychedelic gaggle of doll heads dangling from necklaces and disembodied eyes peaking out of rings. While one typically wouldn’t think of “dismembered female body parts” as empowering, it somehow works when the body in question was totally artificial to begin with. By reworking different Barbie parts into pieces, including a necklace that is a mash-up of different plastic chests, the result feels like a wearable statement forcing society to critically examine those plastic body parts constantly deemed beautiful. Plus, Lange’s work has given me the ultimate D.I.Y. inspiration for how to transform the Barbies that I was never able to purge and alter them to fit my teenage self. Perhaps next up will be decapitating Furbies for a new accessories line.

text by Emma from The Emma Edition

At first glance, we seem bombarded with clothing options. Never before in history have there been so many stores and styles to chose from. Don’t like the ‘fast fashion’ of the malls? There are vintage shops a-plenty. Having trouble finding a specific item you see in your mind? Go online and you’ll probably uncover something similar.

As clothing has become more and more central to our identities, styles have multiplied exponentially, like molecules in a petri dish.

But not everyone is represented in the innumerable items on the rack. As Jeanne Beker recently wrote about a friend of hers who uses a wheelchair, many people still get left out of the fashion industry despite declarations of democracy.

Karen Bowersox, an entrepreneur from Mentor, Ohio, noticed that it didn’t matter how many times her granddaughter Maggie rolled up her jeans. They never fit properly, and she was left constantly tripping over them.

Maggie has Down syndrome, the condition caused by the presence of an extra 21st chromosome. People with Down syndrome often share physical characteristics such as thicker necks, short limbs, slanting shoulders and protruding stomachs, which makes finding clothes exceedingly difficult. Traditionally, people with Down syndrome and their parents would adjust regular clothes. Getting every piece of clothing custom-made or tailored is something only a Parisian couture-buyer could afford.

Bowersox discovered no one was producing clothing specifically for people with Down syndrome. Despite having no background in fashion, she founded Downs Designs. She initially thought that she could just alter pre-existing clothes, but realized that there were enough unique issues to warrant starting from scratch. Designer Jillian Jankovsky came on board and the women began work on an entirely new system of sizing, which they called ‘Down Sizing.’

“Because of the enormous task of creating a size that had never existed before,” Bowersox says, “We started with adult-size jeans and a simple long-sleeve t-shirt.” To accommodate larger stomachs (caused by low muscle tone), Downs Designs offers jeans which are lower in the front. As people with Down Syndrome often have trouble with buttons and zippers, the pants feature elastic waistbands.

Although she had the help of eight testers with Down syndrome, Bowersox wanted to be sure her clothing would fit a good cross-section of people. It would have been tragic if, after all the work, her clothes still didn’t fit right. She packed up her samples and set out for The National Down Syndrome Congress Conference in Orlando, Florida. With nothing for sale yet, she enlisted attendees to try on the clothes. Based on their feedback, she made modifications.

“There are six million people in the world with Down syndrome and they come in all shapes and sizes. But over these last two years I feel that we have captured their uniqueness and will be able to accommodate most in some capacity.”

Finding a company to make the clothes was another trial. American manufacturers thought it was too risky an endeavor. The so-called democratization of fashion only works when money’s involved. Eventually Bowersox found a jeans factory in China willing to make the pants, which led her to another one for shirts. She and Jankovsky have flown there to see the factories themselves and pick out fabrics.

Currently offering staples like jeans and shirts, Bowersox wants to move Downs Designs into different areas, including more items for children and teens. Whether there is a large enough market for Downs Designs in the long run is impossible to know yet, but so far the response has been encouraging.

“I am in awe over the support I have received,” Bowersox says. “Mothers from all over the world have shared their gratitude… By the time my 6-year-old granddaughter cares what she wears, I hope she can shop at ‘grandma’s store’ for all her needs. I hope she will grow up with one less challenge in her life.”

There are all sorts of clothes out there to help you become a Goth or Punk, a Business Woman or a Vintage Queen. But we also need a diversity of clothing to help give everybody the chance to decide how they want to express themselves. Clothing can help create a myriad of identities, but sometimes the most important one for a person whose shirt has never fit right is Respected Human Being.

text by Max Mosher
images courtesy of Karen Bowersox