page_title: Alok Vaid-Menon
section_title: Fashion Design
hierarchical_section_title: Alok Vaid-Menon / Career / Fashion Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Transfemme Gender-nonconforming Performance artist Alok Vaid-Menon photographed by Abhinav Anguria
context_page_description: Alok Vaid-Menon is an Indian-American writer, performance artist, and media personality who performs under the moniker ALOK. Alok is gender non-conforming and transfeminine and uses singular they pronouns.
  As a mixed-media artist Alok uses poetry, comedy, performance, drag, lecture, sound-art, fashion design, self-portraiture, and social media to explore themes of gender, race, trauma, belonging, and the human condition. Their artistry responds to violence against trans and gender non-conforming people, calling for freedom from constraining gender norms. They advocate for bodily diversity, gender neutrality, and self-determination. Alok has presented creative work in over 40 countries.
  In 2019 they advocated for the complete degendering of fashion and beauty industries.
context_section_description: Alok has designed three gender-neutral fashion collections, which are known for their joyful color and celebration of skirts and dresses as gender neutral. Fashion design became a “materialization of the life that [they were] living,” a way to encapsulate what they were writing and thinking. Their designs were at first inspired by imagining what they would wear if they didn't have to fear violence. In their latest work, they are using fashion to challenge what kind of aesthetics are seen as natural and what are seen as artificial.
caption: Alok Fashion Collection 2018. Photo by Abhinav Anguria
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