My girlfriends and I were at Queen Vic, a gay dive bar on 2nd ave, for season four of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars viewing party when Gogo Graham followed me on Instagram. When a designer you’ve been following since undergrad notices you (albeit digitally), you keep your cool, and at the very most fail at it. The latter was the case when she immediately messaged me asking if I would like to walk for her Fall/Winter 2019 Eternal Peep Show runway.
To my surprise, our interaction didn’t stop after the show back in February of 2019. I spent time at her apartment working on assignments for graduate school, and eventually graduated. I watched her Depop shop take off, including a pop-up shop event she did with them. She gifted me a custom hi-lo turtleneck sweater for my birthday—a dress the next year. We cooked dinner at my place on the night of the 2020 election. And the most inevitable, most honorable of them all: I grew a vast amount of love for her not as a designer, but a friend.
So when she asked me about being in the Fall/Winter 2022 Home! Sweet Home! show, I said Duh, though the honor and reverence I feel from being seen by her never seems to dim.
Home! Sweet Home! marks Gogo Graham’s first in-person fashion show in two years—Tenkx Fall/Winter 2020 being her most recent one, although the independent designer remained consistent in releasing collections remotely throughout the pandemic. Her remote collections include the Spring/Summer 2021 Curse The Ill Fortune That Led You To Me, Fall/Winter 2021 Sissies Pay Me To Tell Them What To Wear, and Spring/Summer 2021 BOULDER!
In the span of three fashion seasons amidst coronavirus, her works touched on subjects of SoulCalibur-inspired garments and sex workers, her first (and heavily requested) menswear collection, and the trans history behind the Miss Fire Island pageant. If there is one thing about Gogo that I am certain of, it is the affinity she has for starting a dialogue—the first throughline thread in everything she sews.
This season, her collection is a reference of a moment in 1988 Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies, in which the movie itself was derived from the semi-autobiographical short story by Akiyuki Nosaka. In the movie, two siblings rely on each other to survive in the countryside of Japan during World War II after an American bombing separates them from their parents. The show itself is the title of the operatic soundtrack sung by Amelita Galli-Curci at the end of the film. Gogo’s show takes a moment in which Setsuko, the younger sister, plays dress-up with pots and pans, blankets, sheets, and uses the scene as the amulet of a collection that centers comfort, simplicity, and innocence in the context of pandemonium.
To Gogo Graham’s credit of being attuned to culture, her first live show out of the coronavirus pandemic is realistic.
“The vibe [of the collection] is playing dress up in everyday objects and everyday clothing,” she tells me while wearing a hoodie (and me in my brother’s t-shirt).
The weeks leading up to the show, Gogo texted me: I’m making you an all yellow look.
As someone whose favorite color is yellow, I was touched by her applying what I like to be considered for her collection. These levels of small gestures of benevolence for the models that she infuses into the garments embodies her approach to fashion and community, and how those two things coincide; Gogo Graham doesn’t just make clothes. She is mindful of the stories of her model, and how the garments she designs can be a vehicle of those stories. The clothes are for the people who will represent her clothes.
What makes a Gogo Graham fashion show stand out from the rest is that there is no separation between the designer, the clothes, and the models. Between Gogo, the models she casts, and the models’ backgrounds, the stories of her collections are informed by each other; a collective tale in and of itself becomes its own piece of garment—an untouchable quality not many designers are capable and willing to do.
Even before I met Gogo, I’ve watched the industry praise her for casting (trans) models of all sizes and heights, and none of their commendations resonate with me. And I wished the industry itself understood how easy it could be for modeling standards to change.
But ever since I walked for Gogo’s shows, having shorter and plus-size models cast in her shows never felt like a point of contention. It was simply a job that she offered to you because she wanted you. It speaks to the kind of demanding imagination she has; to see a fashion industry wherein the focus does not only need to be the clothes.
And it’s not to dismiss what the models bring to the table, but who they are identity-wise isn’t commodified either. In many ways, the revolutionary approach Gogo has in her fashion is that it’s deep and also not.
“It requires less skill and creativity to dress someone who is [sample size],” Gogo says. “To make something look flattering on someone who [isn’t sample size] is more difficult because [designers aren’t taught] how to do that. You have to figure it out your own way.” To Gogo’s credit, it says something about her craftsmanship when she can make clothes look good on different body types.
At the location site, Nowadays—a club in Queens—the outdoor space was dressed with several tents for hair, makeup, and two dressing rooms.
The runway space was dressed in surgical rags and t-shirt scraps to create a fort-like set. The models would walk out of the “fort” and walk back in, a nod to playing house in a living room.
One of the things I looked forward to this time around was reuniting with other models who I’ve walked a Gogo Graham show with that I haven’t seen since before the pandemic. In the hair tent, I spotted fashion stylist Kaidon Ho, getting her hair braided for the show.
“I came in from Texas a few days ago,” she told me. “I leave Monday!”
In the makeup tent, Leah James, photographer and performance artist who would also walk the show was doing the models’ makeup.
“I’ve missed you!” she said in between face-paint brushstrokes.
I waited on the tent bench for my turn with actress and performer Maya Margarita, who told me she had just landed from LA. It was, as it always has been, very clear to me the distance people would go for Gogo.
The dolls were officially present and they were, in fact, dolling.
For the show this time around, Gogo had been relaying that things are not really ordinary right now, but that we are to also pretend like it is. “[Portraying] normalcy is like fantasy to me,” she tells me. With outside temperatures nearing 15℉ during a relatively warm week, it had seemed more than fitting to do a fashion show out in the cold, presenting Gogo’s message of normalcy amidst abnormalcy.
Yes, it felt preposterous walking the show and seeing the show attendees bundled-up through my foggy breath. There was only so much whining and giggling backstage we could have done to keep each other warm. And maybe it’s even more preposterous to admit that I have no doubt the models (myself included) would do it all again for Gogo, but I believe this to be true.
People admire Gogo’s work because in addition to her designs, every cast tells a special story. And because every look is designed around the model, the stories are dynamic, fiery, and alive. From the first model to the last, the twine that pieces us all together is the awe to be chosen by Gogo Graham.
It isn’t lost on me how lucky I must’ve been to become her friend, because watching the work of someone you love and care for deeply from the inside, like I do for Gogo, means witnessing the days her magic flickers, questioning itself. The occasional doubting and phone calls of uncertainty.
I love getting to see her incertitude unravel at the seams during a show, where all there is left of her is the surge of a blaze—that thing everyone is drawn to her for. But as a friend, that fire I too have for her is additionally informed by the moments of stumbles and challenges. For me, that thing people marvel about her is not just that thing, but an overbearing weight of love in those moments when you see someone you believe in see herself the same.
After unloading the collection back into her apartment, we went out to celebrate. Gogo and I clinked gin and tonics in between other models and family and friends of her’s. A breath of relief to be beholden to just celebrating..
Later in the night, she raised her brows at me, smirking.
“Sleepover?” she asked.
In the red lights of the bar and beats from the speakers, I felt only the thumping in my chest; that the idea of being Gogo’s home sweet home, as she is mine, could spin me forever.