11 Designers Share Their Foremost Queer Fashion Icon

“One of my earliest icons was Parveen Babi, who was the first Indian film star to ​appear on the cover of Time magazine in 1976. As a child growing up in India, I fell in love with her bold and glamorous style. She was a new kind of female star​ who was unapologetically sexual, and challenged every traditional Hindi movie stereotype o​f​ respectable leading ladies – she smoked, drank, and had love affairs​. Sadly, like Marilyn Monroe, she found it hard to be taken seriously beyond the role of a sex symbol in a male-dominated ​industry. ​During her short, decade-long career, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The last few years of her life were spent as a recluse, and she died tragically in 2005. There wasn’t ​much of a​ visible queer community ​in India before the Noughties, (homosexuality would not be decriminalised until 2018), but perhaps we instinctively recognised a little of ourselves in this defiant, glamorous woman who fought for recognition and happiness, ​despite ​the odds.”