Identifying (with) couture

Couture promises individuality, while its worlds of design, retail, and display remain shaped by boundaries around gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. We examine couture beyond the legal designation of Haute Couture as an ambivalent cultural economy, in which inclusion is continually made and unmade. Through co-created autoethnography of two dresses worn by a non-binary author – Gabriela Hearst’s silk-and-lace gown (a symbol of post-surgery ‘gender reveal’) and Azzedine Alaïa’s purple wool dress (a liminal marker of mixed ethnicity) – we show how garments become attachments through which gendered and racialised meanings are lived and contested. We map three design logics of gender crossing—masculinising womenswear, feminising menswear, and de-gendering – each unsettling and re-entrenching hierarchy. We trace the uneven inclusion of trans and non-binary lives across designers, casting, runway formats, and ‘genderless’ retail experiments, showing how these lives remain marginal to couture’s infrastructures and imaginaries. Finally, we argue that Paris-centric couture institutions and symbolic repertoires police belonging through gatekeeping ethnicity. Couture’s liminality is thus double-edged: enabling resistance while sustaining exclusion and erasure.