Graphic by Mia Yaguchi-Chow

Cripping Masculinity: Designing Fashion Utopias

March 10 – May 12, 2023
Tangled Art + Disability, Toronto

Cripping Masculinity: Designing Fashion Utopias is a journey into the fashion worldbuilding of Disabled, Deaf and Mad-identified men and masculine people.

Welcoming the ways stutters, dissociations, aches and pains — alongside genders, races, and sexualities — greet clothing to fashion identities. Here, dressing becomes a practice of crip imagination, connection, and rebellion. Saulting the uneven shapes of bodies, the caress of fabric, and metal chains with which to stim. Honouring the sneakers that stare back, the shirts that reinforce words, and the sweaters that cocoon in crowds.

This exhibition showcases a selection of the everyday clothing and re-made garments from participants in Cripping Masculinity. The clothing and stories highlight the fashion imagination and wisdom that comes from the experiences of disabled masculinities, demonstrating how closing off access to prevailing systems of fashion and masculinity opens up alternatives that foster belonging, creativity, and desire for disability.

Here’s to the convictions and trepidations, the wisdom and frustrations, the joys and challenges, the reached for and not yet grasped.

This is our playground. This is your space. This is crip fashion utopia. We’ll meet you there.

Graphic by Mia Yaguchi-Chow, image by rawpixel.com on Freepik

Public Events and Engagements:

• Artist Talk: April 1, 2023
• FAT Fashion Show: April 29, 2023
• Here to Cause Problems: A Crip Fashion Hacking Guide: Available in print and online starting March 10, 2023

Follow @CrippingMasculinity social for updates on public programming.

Cripping Masculinity: Designing Fashion Utopias is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Toronto Metropolitan University, The University of Alberta, Parsons School of Design, Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life at the University of Guelph, The Design + Technology Lab at the Creative School, Small World Music, and Tangled Art + Disability.

Graphic by Mia Yaguchi-Chow

Tangled Art + Disability
401 Richmond St W S-124, Toronto ON M5V 3A8
(647) 725-5064
info@tangledarts.org

Web: tangledarts.org
Instagram: @Tangled_Arts
Facebook: @TangledArtAndDisability
Twitter: @TangledArtsTO

Web: crippingmasculinity.com
Instagram: @CrippingMasculinity

Image Descriptions:
1) A graphic icon featuring black and white photographs of four items of clothing. The clothing is surrounded by a sulphur coloured graphic brush stroke. The background of the graphic is hot pink.
2) A graphic of the front cover of Here to Cause Problems laying on a black ground. The cover has a punk-rock, collage aesthetic. The title “Here to Cause Problems” is written in a black type-written font on bright orange rectangles, with the subtitle “A Cripping Masculinity Hacking Guide” in white over a gradient black and orange ground. At the bottom of the cover are black and white images of hacked clothing, including a pair of pants with low pockets added, a denim kimono with various fabric patches, and an embroidered vest, The Cripping Masculinity: Designing Fashion Utopias logo in sulphur green is in the bottom left corner of the graphic.
3) The Cripping Masculinity: Designing Fashion Utopias exhibition logo. Cripping Masculinity is in two lines of pink monotype text, the letters in Cripping move slightly towards and away from eachother. Designing fashion utopias is in one line in black text. The background is a sulphur green.
Image Descriptions by Kristina McMullin and Francis Tomkins.