Barbie dolls

When lockdown was announced, the luxury stores seized their shoes, bags and belts. The high street left theirs in full view. Oxford Circus is now Xanadu, drained. The long stretches of abandoned storefronts remain dressed. Moored in a state with no purpose, the bi-weekly deliveries of new stock and quick-fire changeovers have been disrupted: the fast fashions linger with no warm bodies on which to be pulled. These shop windows have become a sombre Vanitas. They are allegories of the long erasure of fashion’s ceremony and purpose. Much of what we revere about fashion has nothing to do with what it has become.

That’s Not Me

Prose

That’s Not Me

23 April 2019

by Laura Albert

I found different host bodies until he finally settled into one, like locating that rare impossible blood-donor match. I finally had a human Barbie doll to connect the story in varying dimensions. My sister-in-law was an ideal host. She was starting to explore the parameters of gender expressionism for herself. What I was doing in language, she had the capacity and willingness to embody. We achieved the impossible, and JT LeRoy became a real human boy.