As a gay woman I’d never really fantasised about my wedding, but I made a sartorial odyssey from Savile Row to Shanghai. Just don’t call it menswear
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t’s a month until my wedding, and my suit has arrived in the post, unceremoniously crammed into a plastic postage bag. I wasn’t expecting it to come from China, but China is of course where things come from. Unbagging the crinkled jacket and trousers for my supposed Big Day felt a little deflating.
Although I’m not sure what I did have in mind. I’ve never fantasised about getting married. As a gay woman, this wasn’t even an option for me until 2013. In fact, the closest I ever came to daydreaming about this occasion was when I was around four and I’d inferred from Disney movies that “getting married” was the act of a prince ballroom dancing with a princess. The dancing was neither here nor there, but I knew I wanted to be the prince.
There wasn’t a single a-ha moment when I twigged that feminine clothes made me feel like the world’s most reluctant drag queen (a drag peasant?), but gradually I embraced being butch. And casual butch I can do – wearing Carhartt, Finisterre, even M&S menswear for that middle-aged dad look.
