Artist Alok Vaid-Menon's Fashion Line Challenges Industry Gatekeepers

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Artist Alok Vaid-Menon's Fashion Line Challenges Industry Gatekeepers

The artist and fashion icon Alok Vaid-Menon has designed and released their third fashion collection, exclusively with Out, and honey the photos are major.

In collaboration with, Adrianne Keishing and shot by the photographer Ayush Gupta in Delhi, India earlier this year, Vaid-Menon brings this line to life with gender discourse at the forefront, as they do with most of their work.

"Trans people and gender nonconformity is biological, natural, anatomical and all of the words they gatekeep from us," Vaid-Menon tells Out. "What is unnatural is their prejudice and transmisogyny. We should be able to look like whatever we want and not have our identities be up for debate."

"For me, clothing and accessories have always been extensions of my body," Vaid-Menon wrote in a press release. "They are integral to me. I am most myself when I am adorned in the ways that I see fit. The boundaries of my body do not end with my skin -- or rather my clothing is a second skin. My makeup and my accessories complete me."

"This collection is an aesthetic argument against who and what we have been taught to regard as 'natural,'" they wrote. "It is a celebration of the intimate communion we find with so many things this world dismisses as excessive or unnecessary."

Vaid-Menon models all the clothes themself, with hair and makeup by RoRo. For the past few years, Vaid-Menon has been designing gender neutral fashion ("By which, I mean fashion") and for their latest collection, each garment is named after a term that is used to police the identities of gender nonconforming expression.