Bryan Johnson, CEO and Founder of Black Boys Code · photo by Sean Anthony Photography

As the Black Lives Matter movement spread across different industries this year, 5,874 scientists around the world signed an online pledge in support of #ShutDownSTEM. The one-day strike in June was a call to action against anti-Black racism in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Supporters talked about the lack of diversity in STEM fields, and drew attention to groups that are working to close this gap.

Black Boys Code is one such organization. All kids are welcome, but the primary focus is on Black boys between the ages of eight and 17. In a cultural context that encourages them to dream only about becoming athletes or musicians, this national organization aims to get these kids thinking about becoming engineers, mathematicians, computer programmers, and more. (Black Boys Code is distinct from Black Girls Code, a similar organization based in San Francisco.)

Bryan Johnson launched Black Boys Code in Vancouver in 2015 after working in tech for 20 years, including for UPS and Aeroplan, where he’d often be the only Black person in meetings.

Johnson says this is not an unusual experience for Black professionals. “I always said to myself I would do something for the community when I had the chance. It was just a matter of deciding what that could be. When I left my last assignment, working for Aeroplan, I started looking around for something to do. And there was no one working with Black boys in technology.”

Workshops have various formats. Some run just two days; others take place every Saturday morning for four weeks, with volunteer instructors and mentors introducing 20 kids to computational thinking, website design, the programming language Python, and more. The local chapters are all volunteer-run, and workshops and all materials are provided to the kids for free thanks to donations from the community and funding from public and private agencies.

Since 2015, the non-profit has grown to include local chapters in 10 Canadian cities—Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Ottawa, Hamilton, Brampton, and Windsor—and one in Atlanta, Georgia. The organization launched its newest chapter in Windsor with help from a $513,924 grant from the CanCode fund, a federal government initiative that funds digital skills programs for kids.

It’s not just about learning to code, however. The kids who show enthusiasm and ability in the workshops may also be bringing home bad grades from school, hampered by systemic racism in the mainstream school system. “A lot of teachers don’t know how to relate to young Black boys,” says Johnson. “They’re automatically branded or identified as troublemakers, or as students who can’t handle the curriculum.”

That’s why the organization looks for Black men with STEM backgrounds to volunteer as instructors and mentors—as Johnson puts it, “people who act like them, speak like them, who they can identify with.” And, before the pandemic forced them to move online, the local chapters made a point of holding their workshops on university campuses to help demystify these spaces.

Looking to the future, Johnson hopes to offer electives in high schools, summer technology camps at colleges and a Centre of Excellence where the top 30 or so boys from each year’s cohort can be brought together for an accelerated program.

Photo courtesy of Rose Cullis

Picture me sitting on a couch in chartreuse satin pajamas with turquoise embroidery stitched on the seams. The satin feels cool and slippery when I shift to move my computer onto my crossed legs to begin writing. I’ve pinned a big pink button over the place on the body we associate with the heart. The pin says, “Don’t cramp my style.”

I’m an older woman and I’m being regulated to perform it in a way that satisfies social norms about fading away. If I behave too boldly in my choice of colours—or in my willingness to expose my aging body to view—I invite comments that remind me of how outrageous that is. The comments aren’t always negative, but ultimately they serve to make me self-conscious about my appearance and pressured to be more careful about the choices I make. People talk about feeling invisible when they get older; I feel like there’s lots of pressure to pull that disappearing act off.

I’ve been looking away and through too. But older people are suddenly more visible to me and I love it. I’m seeing aging faces in a full blown light: as beautiful and ephemeral as dandelions gone to seed inviting wishes.

When I was a teenager in the mid-seventies I favoured big overalls, high-top running shoes, and short faux fur jackets. One day, I went to the mall with my mother and we found a sleeveless mini dress she loved. In my memory, the dress invoked her crayon strip of blue sky personality with a great yellow strobing sun in the centre. We came home and she put it on to show my father. He looked disapproving when she spun in front of him. “It’s not matronly enough,” he said.

Matronly. I’d never heard it used this way before—as a fashion choice someone should aim for. It conjured up images of a grim Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But I knew what was going on. My mother, who would have been in her mid-forties at the time, was being checked for her aspirations. She was being told she needed to know her place as an older (married) woman and that she was to dress in an understated, unsexed regulation uniform that indicated modesty and a willingness to fade out.

I’m 62 years old now and the image of “the matron” is a spectre that haunts me. Mostly, I have a sense that I still just don’t get it. At my friend’s cottage in the country, I climb naked on an outcrop of rock that’s dressed in spongy sea-green moss and I feel variegated. Decorated. Complicated. Back at home in the city, I look down at exposed forearms and feel disconcerted to see ink blots of age spots.

What do people see? Who have I become?

Many people seem eager to enlighten me. A few years ago I was in New York on a hot sunny June day, a little lost and wandering the streets looking for an entrance to the subway. I’d been to an exhibit at the Guggenheim that had thrilled me.
I was a little achy and tired, wearing a short creamsicle-coloured sleeveless dress with faux snakeskin wedges. I was slathered in a greasy coconut-scented sunscreen that felt a little sticky in the heat. I was excited and stimulated by the show and feeling that tug of a sense that anything is possible. I felt young.

Then I heard a man call out, “Wow! Even Granny has tattoos!”

At first, I didn’t know he was talking about me. Then I realized that of course he was. My arms and legs are bedecked in tattoos, I was wearing a dress that made them visible, and as he had reminded me: I’m older. I turned around and laughed and said, “Damn right!” Then I asked him for directions to the nearest train station.

He was sheepish. Apologetic. He called me ma’am and pointed the way. I immediately knew what had happened. He’d seen me coming from a distance, read my tattoos and my heels as a kind of sexual availability, and then realized as I got closer that he’d made a mistake. That embarrassed him. He’d been attracted to an old granny!

Back in Toronto, I decided to dye my hair blue. When people started smiling at me on the street, I assumed it was a good thing. They were friendly smiles, grins, thumbs up. One man stopped me on the street to say, “You look great!”

“Thanks,” I said. I’m embarrassed to admit I was flattered.

“Let me explain,” he went on, and I felt a sinking feeling. “Most women your age wouldn’t have the courage to dye
their hair like you have. It’s great that you feel free. Keep
feeling free!”

I felt less free and I knew that part of what inspired his explanation was his desire to distance himself from the possibility of being perceived as attracted to an older woman. I also felt keenly patronized—a hazard for older people, for whom the designation “cute” has a whole new and annoying meaning.

Women regulate me too, but it’s subtler. A couple of years ago a woman who looked thirty-something rushed up to me after a performance in a queer space that I thought had gone well. “I want to be just like you in 20 years!” she cried. I felt compelled to take it as a compliment. I looked down at the shimmering silver oxfords I was wearing that night and knocked my heels together. When they catch the light, they’re rainbow coloured. Then I looked back up and said, “Thank you.” I knew the younger woman meant well, but I wanted, somehow, to just be who I am and not some example of aging to strive for.

Recently a friend of mine wrote to counsel me about how I should perform my age. She’s in her early forties now and said in her email that she knows that she’ll eventually have to cope with (more) wrinkles and other changes, and that the thought scares her. She wants me—needs me, she says—to be an example of someone who embraces my age with attitude. Ideally, I can be the badass she’s looking for. I don’t know how I feel about her request. Pep talks from younger folks are awkward. They’re a little humiliating.

If life is a casting off—if aging is a letting go—can’t that be a good thing? My East Coast mother let my sisters and I run around with our shirts off on hot days. She kept our hair cropped short, so it was easier to deal with. Even though I knew I was supposed to be a girl (and I admired, as it happened, dresses with smocks and long hair held back with a wide headband), my other genders sang in my flat exposed chest and there was a wildness there. Once I hit adolescence, which was 11 years old for me, my pointed nipples under clinging knit sweaters and see-through cotton blouses (ideally with billowing pirate sleeves) invited stares and comments from men on the street. “Go upstairs and put a bra on!” my mother would order me.

I was aware of being a provocation, which was exciting and powerful, but it came at the cost of self-consciousness. When I was a child my nakedness was a source of delight, and I felt like I owned it. Maybe there’s a way to win this sensibility back now that I’m older—a space opening up to redefine what sexy means—and take it away from the idea of it being contingent on someone else’s interest. I’m conscious of coming to this project late, of having aged into it. Many other people have already been working on it.

Despite my reaction to being called on to be an inspiration, I know mentors are important. A friend of mine, who’s in her mid-fifties, was travelling in Berlin years ago and she tells me she was intensely affected by an older woman she watched dismounting a motorcycle. The woman took off her helmet and ran her hands over her brush-cut hair. She was so effortlessly herself that my friend immediately crushed on her. The image of the woman sustains her and reminds her that older women can be beautiful because they’re who they are, not despite
their age.

Tonight I’m going to a private party. I’m wearing tight black jeans with a t-shirt and blue Doc Martens. My big belt buckle is glittering with blood red crystals. Time to put on Janelle Monáe’s “Tightrope” and take a spin with it. Self-possession is a bold and beautiful thing. I want to walk the streets loving all the art I see and take the stage in power. Don’t tangle with me. Don’t cramp my style.

Illustration by Derrick Chow

A quarter million Korean adoptees live (or have lived) around the world. Aren’t our black eyes so cute when they get pushed up by our cheeks as we smile for the photo displayed at the office? Don’t we garner the most likes and applause on those mommy blogs when we’re sent to show-and-tell in a hanbok? And how about when we blossom into comely-but-not-too-popular teenagers, the best of both worlds, already imagined in our parents’ alma mater stripes?

But what then, when shortly after that, we become grown Asian people all by ourselves, expected to navigate the ways our genders and sexualities and races collide without any practice or community or guidance? What do we do at that moment when we transform into the uncontrollable exotic beauty of our own mothers’ worst nightmares? At the moment when we start to be the headliner and no longer the opening act, the sidekick, the stage prop—but also when we find ourselves alone in a world that is already licking its lips?

I was around twelve or so when I started to peel photographs of myself from the albums stored on the bottom shelf of my bedroom armoire. Back then, there were these thick cardboard pages coated with an adhesive that yellowed over time. A sheet of crackling cellophane smoothed over top always had creases and bubbles and folds. There was one album for each of the first three years I lived in Canada. I recognized my Canadian mother’s kindergarten teacher penmanship labelling the top right-hand corner of every book. Probably part of a box set, the albums featured the same illustrated girl on its cover. On one, her blond curls were pulled back into a ponytail and she was on her tummy with her arms folded and her chin resting on her interlocked fingers. She was so cute. She looked like my Canadian sister. She looked like our mother when she was little herself.

There grew a disordered pile of photographs curling into themselves at opposite corners, their backs still grimed with residue.

My first night with my new family.

Held on one hip by a grinning moustached uncle who faced the camera.

My pregnant mother’s nervous smile. The same one she still offers today. The awkwardness of trying to hold one baby and carry another soon to arrive.

A rare glimpse at the grandmother who took me into bed with her when everyone else was alarmed that I remained awake through the night. I was a baby. And my body was still fourteen hours ahead.

The earliest days of my life in Canada.

The back of my hand as I reached for a dimpled yellow ball gently held in the teeth of a smooth-haired dog.

A post-baptismal brunch when the defrosted top tier of my parents’ wedding fruit cake was served with English Breakfast or Earl Grey and milk.

The series that captured the weeks following that time I closed a board book on my face and tore the skin off the tip of my nose.

The taming of wild hair into thick pigtails and blunt-cut bangs.

And then.

Sitting on the slippery brown couch, with the quilting and the white flowers, my new sister’s bonneted head rested on my lap, the bottom of my patent leather shoes unscuffed.

No one questioned my excavation project. I don’t know what happened to all those sepia toned images. I refilled the albums with pictures of wild animals cut from childhood magazines.

This year, I taught a university course entitled Race, Fashion, and Beauty. I did it because Black, Indigenous, and other People of Colour (BIPOC) are innovative and creative and playful and beautiful, for ourselves and for our kin. But it is a risk because someone might say, “You’re so beautiful” in one breath and in the next, “Your kind is so beautiful.” Or they might ask, “Can’t you take a compliment?” and then, “Can’t you take a joke?”

I overheard that the students, well, some of them, were afraid. They were afraid to say the wrong thing and afraid to do the work. They were upset that mine was the only course that fit their timetable. They were irritated that they were asked not to cite white scholars. They suddenly acknowledged that whiteness is a race in order to avoid this, but only then. They were angry that they were told that in the class BIPOC speak first and choose first.

I tried to shrug off all the ugliness. I tried to be beautiful.

My campus office has a window. But outside my window is a wall. Sometimes, when I consider the closedness of my view, when I count the years I’ve been here, I feel angry at newer colleagues who bask in natural lighting. But then, I wouldn’t want to be watched.

The walls of my office are covered in photographs printed from Korean and Japanese magazines. Asian femmes pout down from all four walls, their bodies twisted into gorgeous impossibilities. Many are not conventional beauties, but have the absurd and curious loveliness so feted in the fashion industry.

Once, a student came to office hours. Like many do, they admired the exquisiteness lining my space. “Complimented” my bravery. Asked me if it was me in all the photographs.

I learned about the skepticism of a colleague who works at another university. She said that doing beautiful things, doing things to make beauty, was a gimmick. She said that it distracts from politics. I was confused because to me, politics can be done through beauty. And beauty is political. And anyhow maybe she’ll one day understand that someone like me, someone afraid to be exchanged or returned or rejected or something else, must always, always exist through beauty-making.

One summer, I was asked to speak at a culture camp for Korean adopted youth and their parents. I was cautious of the fragile audience. One man, fittingly a lawyer, laughed and declared himself the devil’s advocate. But his daughter, who was a teen at the time, came to me with her friends later on and asked me how to curl her eyelashes. The next day, their white mothers also came to me and asked to help them make their children feel beautiful.

There was another girl a few years younger. Her prettiness was irrefutable. She was shy and away from the older teens and I told her she was beautiful. Her mother said, “It doesn’t matter if she is pretty. She is smart.”

Ever since that time I’ve thought hard about what that girl’s beauty signified to her white mother. Why it was so threatening. Seen as exclusive from intelligence. I’ve thought about how isolated we sometimes feel, how lonely and how ugly. I remembered the pressed powder I’d steal from my own white mother’s drawer when I was that girl’s age and how it smelled like rotted flowers but still I’d dust it on my face to feel lovely. The ache and dry of unblinking wide eyes. The experiments with lemon juice that Seventeen magazine promised would lighten my hair. I remembered how my parents’ friends complimented my Canadian sister’s cuteness and my studiousness when we were young. I remembered how receiving no words confirmed my ugly. And how special attention was rationalized as a need for diversity as opposed to a desire for me in particular. I remembered praying for freckles and arm hair and eyes like my sister’s that turned green when she wore green and blue when she wore blue and grey when she was angry.

What was the danger of telling that girl she was pretty? Is it the same danger in telling myself I was too? Is it a reminder that there are things we are gifted from our Korean mothers that no one else can take credit for?

I was in my late twenties when I met her. I knew she would be beautiful. My Korean mother wasn’t smiling in the photograph that was our introduction but still, she was beautiful. Her eyes were serious and black. She wore yellow.

She stroked my hair when we reunited face-to-face. Her hands were in my hair and she said, “I’m sorry,” and then, to the translator who stood off to the side, “she’s prettier than in her pictures.” Later, as we sat next to one another on the agency couch, she laughingly confessed to the social worker of me: “I used to have the same eyes.”

One time in Seoul, I traced the tip of my finger across my mother’s lips. She asked, “weh,” in that lilting way that Korean women do, but I didn’t stop. I traced the shape of all her features and she didn’t blink.

My youngest Korean sister was there. Our mother asked me, through her, if I’d let her gift me with the day surgery that would give us matching eyes.

My mother calls me “ippun ddal” and sometimes “ippun aeggi” in her singing voice when we speak on the phone. “Pretty daughter,” she says, “pretty baby.”

People were always looking and guessing and holding me in place, holding me down, with both those acts. When I was small, they asked questions about the exotic lands I came from, its fiery food and the black-haired women who made it. As I grew older, it was prolonged glances, comments about Woody Allen. A neighbour who made me feel shy in my stomach. Children who reached for their mother’s hands, hid behind them, without breaking eye contact with me. My solution was to enrobe myself in ostentatiousness. To convince myself that I invited, curated, revelled in spotlight. I made myself into the main event, always smiling, always laughing, lips glossed and hair piled high.

At some point I left my hometown and was told I was valuable all by myself but it was too fast. I was reckless and felt powerful and at once it drew people to me but it also made me aloof.

Today, I live differently in my body. A calm acceptance and affection for eyes I used to widen, of skin I used to powder, hair I used to bleach, transforms beauty-making into pleasure.

Whenever that person I love very much tells me I possess a certain “swanness” and I conjure the duckpond of my earlier life.

Photos courtesy of Sanchari Sur

I am not sure what compelled me to ask him, and what compelled him to say yes. But there I was, craning my neck like a chicken about to be slaughtered, and smizing my eyes for all they were worth, while he clicked. The photos were for my new fashion blog, my experiment with fashion as
an academic.

At the time, I was in my second year of a Gender Studies MA at Queen’s University, while he was in his second year as a master’s of engineering student. We had met on our second day in Kingston the previous year, and upon meeting another brown person—the very first since our arrival into the city—we had been drawn to each other in a way neither of us could explain. He was a good-looking man with a childish laugh, somewhere between a gurgle and a chuckle. He loved cricket, and even played the sport for the university team. He was a little over two years younger than me, and apart from our love of food and Bollywood films, we had nothing in common.

I grew up a tomboy. As a kid, my go-to outfits were knee-length shorts and t-shirts. They were great because they made movement easy. With my closely shorn head of hair, on my red bicycle, when I whizzed through back and inner streets (within a one-to-two mile radius of our apartment building), I could very well have been a boy to those who caught a glimpse.

But even those days of passing were short-lived. Shortly after I hit 10, I got my period, and my nubby breasts suddenly began to sprout, like mounds of alien flesh. My mother diligently got me training bras, contraptions that I hated. I despised the feeling of being caged in, and so when I went on my bike, I wilfully forgot to insert the changing geography of my chest into these elastic coops.

A neighbour from two houses down stopped me on the second day I went out like this.

“Hey!” she said, beckoning at me to talk to her and her older sister, one 14 and the other 16.

“What?” I said.

“We were wondering,” she said, exchanging looks with her sister, “are you wearing a bra?”

For the first time, I felt conscious of my body, in the way I was seen. I had hoped that if I ignored my changing body, everyone else would too.

“No,” I said.

“I told you,” she said to her sister.

“Well,” the oldest girl said to me, “you should wear one.”

He liked long hair on me. When I wore makeup and dressed up in dresses or skirts, I found his smiles got wider. He never said anything outright. He never said, “Don’t wear this,” or “do your hair like that.” But it was implicit.

Once or twice I managed to take him to a house party with my gender studies peers. He didn’t like going. He said that he felt uncomfortable.

In my second year of school, and the second year of our relationship, we began to drift apart. I often found myself losing my temper, conjuring fights out of thin air. He often said nothing during these fights, his silence fuelling my anger and unfettered words; words that made things even sourer between us. Neither of us wanted to let go. I held onto the belief that it was the situation that was causing the rift: his moving into a house with undergrad boys where we had little to no privacy, or his increasing absences for out-of-city cricket matches, or his unwillingness to study together like we used to in our first year. These were excuses I made for our relationship, and for him. So perhaps, asking him to be my photographer was my way to test this theory. To spend more time with him, and to bond in the process.

And for the most part, it worked. We would schedule meetings for fashion shoots, and he would show up diligently. After, we would go out for dinner, or watch a movie, and spend the night together.

The first shoot was on Valentine’s Day, an unusually slushy wetness coating the streets outside the house where I rented a single room. We held the shoot indoors. As someone unaccustomed to being in front of the camera, I found myself smiling shyly. Discomfort etched across my face, as I tried to make myself as confident as I felt when he looked at me in my Valentine’s outfit: a tight black mini skirt paired with a sleeveless black satiny top with lace frills at my arm holes and V-neck. An envelope clutch with dark orange and gold accents, matching the gold of my twisted neckpiece. I had left my hair open, the length of my curls stopping right above my breasts.

I felt sexy, yes. I felt sexy through his eyes.

When British feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, theorized the male gaze, I wonder if she was thinking about the controlling gaze of the photographer. Being in front of the camera was different from being behind it. There was a loss of control, as if I was putting my vulnerability on display without really wanting to. As someone who was used to being behind the concentric lens of the camera, rather than in front of it, I felt conspicuous, my body on display. A doll-putul, like my mashi would say. A made-up marionette for the sole consumption of the male eyes behind the lens.

When the cis-het photographer is also your boyfriend, how do you see yourself?

The first few shoots featured me in clothes that put my femme side on display: bright lips, mascaraed eyes, lacy dresses, tight skirts. Now when I see those photos, I see the discomfort, the uncertainly in the forced smiles, the awkwardness in my poses. I also see myself trying to inject comedy into the postures—sticking my tongue out, or pretending to be in a fight scene in a movie—to lighten the mood, so I could hold on to some semblance of myself.

As the blog posts changed from the conventional feminine dress-ups, I also recall the behind-the-scenes fights. With each fight, I felt myself falling away from him, and reasserting myself. With each fight, I felt myself choosing outfits that I wanted to, transitioning to an almost ideal version of myself, the version I really wanted to be. Pants, button ups, oxfords, neutral lips, and hair in a bun.

At a get-together with my gender studies buddies, one that he didn’t come to, I repeated an outfit: red pants, blue shirt, black boots, and a bow-tie. Everyone complimented me, as I relaxed into my clothes, a second skin. For the first time in a long time, my outer version felt like the way I imagined myself.

For the first time in a long time, I felt like me.

Genderqueer is a term I encountered within my gender studies classes. In my two years in the program at Queen’s, I would unlearn and relearn everything I thought I knew about gender and sex. That both gender and sex were on a spectrum. That the binary of either was an imposed illusion. That it was possible to feel like you belonged to neither end of the spectrum, or that you could exist outside the binary.

When I began fashion blogging, I found that my ideas of fashion and dressing up relied on my internalized ideals of this gender binary. That even as I found myself falling on one end of the spectrum, my inner self resisted and recoiled. These resistances came out through my fights with my then boyfriend, and through the ways I wanted to reimagine myself. And in this friction of wanting something and resisting impositions (however implicit), lay an inner struggle I had never quite had the language to articulate. Fashion blogging and my gender studies classes gave me that language.

As I came toward the end of my gender studies program, I began to identify as genderqueer. I found myself inserting the word silently into my writing bios as a gradual way of coming out without it becoming a spectacle. While genderqueer is often known as another term for non-binary, I felt this description fit me better. I was tired of defining myself and my body against the binary, and “genderqueer” felt just right.

In Camera Lucida, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes writes, “There is a kind of stupefaction in seeing a familiar being dressed differently.” Barthes writes this in the context of seeing a photo of his mother as a little girl, and finds that time collapses when he looks at the photograph after her death. In the same instance, his mother is both the little girl as well as his mother who passed away recently. He is essentially stupefied by this collapse of time.

Rifling through my fashion blog photos in the present time, five years after the blog’s demise, has this similar feeling of stupefaction for me. I am both in the present time and in the past, a bridge between my gender identities from then to now. There is a sense of disconnect between who I was in those photos and who I am now. While time doesn’t collapse for me in the way it does for Barthes, time does become malleable in the sense that I can stand secure in who I am now and who I am becoming, as I look back at who I was back then. I am still in the process of getting comfortable in front of the camera, but these days, it’s on my own terms. I am not who I want to be—yet—but as I hurtle towards the future, I feel myself getting comfortable within who I have chosen to become. And that, I think, is the beginning of everything else that is to come.

Later in the spring, Canthius, a feminist magazine of poetry and prose, tweeted that “the best thing on Twitter right now has to be makeup #booklooks … Thanks for giving us something to look forward to.”

It was a difficult spring, with COVID-19 keeping many of us at home in isolation. And yet #booklooks prevailed. What, you may ask, is a #booklook? Book looks are makeup looks based on book covers. Occasionally it’s more of a dress-like-a-book thing, with outfits inspired by book covers instead—though amongst Canadian writers, makeup has been a more popular route.

Though #booklooks began before the pandemic, they really picked up as a creative outlet during it, with writers and readers submitting their own through social media. Perhaps most inspiring has been the camaraderie between writers, the retweets and praises sung amongst a group so often made to compete. The looks themselves are glorious, and the added bonus of learning about amazing—and notably diverse—books through the informal project doesn’t hurt either. For This’s fashion and beauty issue, we asked six participants what creating #booklooks has been about for them.

Domenica Martinello

I created the Instagram account @makeup4books in January 2019 as a way to privilege pleasure over productivity. Like many, I tend to fall into the trap of valuing my self-worth based on how productive I am. And as a writer and teacher, my favourite things to do with my time—write and read—overlap with my professional life. So, as a New Year’s resolution to cultivate creative hobbies just for the sake of joy and leisure, I decided to merge the aesthetic delights of makeup looks and book covers.

I’ve had a fraught and ever-evolving relationship to makeup and femininity. It’s something I continue to negotiate. Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mother’s daily ritual of doing her makeup, understanding it not as an act of creative expression but as self-regulation. When I started experimenting with makeup in high school, it went from unintentionally garish to brashly weird on purpose. My mom, exasperated by this subversion, begged me to take a makeup lesson at the mall (I didn’t).

I’ve internalized so much gendered negativity around makeup, especially as it began to intersect with my professional life: am I wearing too much? Too little? Will I be taken seriously? It’s been powerful to reclaim this space as an unregulated one full of play and pleasure through the book looks.

Victoria Liao

When I was a kid, reading was my escape and my salvation. Struggles with mental illness from around nine years old onwards meant I always needed an elsewhere to go, and reading books granted me that freedom. At 19, after my mental health deteriorated my ability to read without extreme effort and stress, I found myself turning to makeup instead.

For me, makeup is not only a form of queer expression, it’s a source of self-love and creativity that can’t be measured by others’ expectations. I was never supposed to be good or bad at makeup, so I could just do it for myself and treat my face as a canvas.

I tend to pick books that I’ve already read for a book look, because it feels deeply personal to put another’s art on my own face—both that of the cover artist, and the authors themselves. I want to honour their work with my own connection to it. Small Beauty in particular is a book I quote often at friends, with its meditations on anger and its themes of intergenerational trauma and relationships—between both blood and found family.

While I’m still healing in many ways, rediscovering my ability to read and connecting it to parts of my identity that showed up in its absence has been a joy. Book looks are a way to unite my love of both these hobbies.

Terese Mason Pierre

I started doing makeup book looks in a time of great fatigue. I worried about my productivity. At the start of the pandemic, I read articles online about how writers “have so much time now” and I lamented at how little I was getting done. At this point, magazines had reached out to me to solicit work, but I didn’t have anything to give them, and I couldn’t bring myself to write new poems. When I started doing makeup book looks, I felt myself become more creative in ways that weren’t emerging through writing.

I enjoy isolating the colours and textures in a book cover and swatching eyeshadows on my arms for a match. I enjoy looking through catalogues for new books, or finding an author’s bibliography for their most vibrant title. I enjoy experimenting with the makeup on my face—some looks have taken more than one attempt to get right. When I choose a cover of a book I’ve already read, I think about what I felt when I read it and try to remember that as I apply the makeup.

As the quarantine continues, I have found myself mentally withdrawing from other creative forms in order to invest in makeup. I’m not writing much poetry anymore and I’m trying to be okay with that. But I’m no longer fatigued and I’m excited to fill my day. I wonder if when the quarantine ends, the book looks will too, so I decide to enjoy it while I can.

Jenny Heijun Wills

In the minds of some, aesthetics are seen as frivolous if they are temporary and easily removed with a wipe or some baby oil. In all other circumstances, aesthetics are the most important thing—or at least when it comes time to lock down the boundaries of what is good art, writing, etc. When it comes time to dismiss BIPOC and other marginalized creators as too political. As unimaginative.

So, aesthetics are just another technology of rejection. One more moving target. One more way to keep people down, keep people out, keep people going in circles hoping to actually, truly be seen.

This isn’t new information, but we spend a lot of time discussing the effects of these thinkings: prioritized Eurocentric beauty ideals on one side and cultural appropriation, window dressing, and fetishization on the other. Let’s also talk about the judgements placed on doing aesthetics, as in, the act of.

It is no coincidence that this whole makeup book look thing has proven itself to be an outlet for people told to choose between politics and aesthetics (as if those things are ever separable). It’s no coincidence that these makeup book looks have emboldened some folks to insinuate we’re doing feminism wrong. Or doing reading wrong.

So my question is: what is it about momentary aesthetics that makes people so uncomfortable?
Is it that it shows that we know how to do everything—politics, style, innovation, and more?
That the perennial shifting target has taught us we can do it all?
Is that why people look away?

Nisha Patel

From strings of dim Edison bulbs to the harsh reflection of a front-facing selfie, it feels like the face of the modern writer is always illuminated. There is a miserable duality of being visible but not seen, judged for your material appearance, or applauded for a keen play of the eyeshadow brush. It is common that a writer is paid $100 to read from their book and spent $30 earlier that evening on a new foundation. And then they’re the only BIPOC woman in the room.

To be a woman in writing today demands that you always look the part, look good. Publishers need audiences willing to buy books and authors with personality and followers get more likes and sales, and thus are more worthwhile investments. Women need to be careful to toe the line of looking good enough that no one asks if you are having a rough week, but not so good that you are accused of treating their writing careers as vanity projects. On top of that, white male authors pack two suits for their three-week speaking tour, but BIPOC women in cultural garb are trying to stand out. 

The story of the #booklook is that critics cannot hide behind their ivory towers forever, nor is there just one way to interpret and connect with a book. Writing comes from full and breaking lives, and BIPOC writers know this more than anyone because we have had to build immense resiliency to scrutiny. To be a BIPOC woman and a writer is to hold all of yourself out to be judged. Engaging with books through makeup (one of the most criticized uses of the brush) allows women to claim and see the art form through on their terms.

What looks to be a fun play on art is more profound: our looks and our aesthetics are explorations of joy, and that is why it makes so many people uncomfortable. 

Alicia Elliott

There’s something meditative about applying makeup. Like any task that requires concentration, dipping my eyeshadow brush into crimson or goldenrod or cerulean powder, then slowly, softly swiping and swirling it over my eyelid, fills me with peace. In those precious minutes where I’m focused solely on perfecting my blend, I’m not worrying myself sick over the state of the world. I’m not over-analyzing the words of my loved ones, or questioning whether the change this world needs can ever really happen. I’m not worried about whether others see me as competition or conquest. I’m not indulging in the negative thoughts I’ve so often convinced myself are the only possible thoughts I can have.

When I’m doing my makeup, the peace I experience always brings me back to this truth: I’m none of the things people have tried to convince me I am. I’m just me—a person with a tapered blending brush, working toward beauty.
That beauty is a subjective beauty, of course, like any idea of beauty. But what’s important to me is that it’s a version of beauty that I have chosen for myself.

In that way, I suppose, makeup is a natural companion to books. Both are methods of self-expression. Both encourage us to see and reflect on the beauty around us. Both encourage us to see and reflect on ourselves, to consider what face we want to show the world.

What face do you want to show?

Photo by Brandon Brookbank

Shaya Ishaq’s work moves fluidly between mediums—words, ceramics, fibres, jewellery—while maintaining a central locus of honouring Black lineages and sparking light toward liberated Black futures. Tenacious and ever-evolving, Ishaq walked away from journalism school and signed up for a hand-building course at a pottery studio in her hometown of Ottawa. “I really fell in love that winter,” she says. “It was pretty magical to come into the studio first thing in the morning to see my work come out of the kiln or even just how the clay would change when the pieces would air dry before firing. I was totally enraptured by the many stages of the medium of clay.”

Now, Ishaq masterfully combines ceramics and fibres to create ornate and intricate wearable art pieces. On the origin stories of these designs, she says, “At their core, [these materials] come from the earth (before mass production and industrialization, before creating synthetic versions) and I am very dedicated to working with them to see what connections arise. Both invite a meditative process that has saved me time and again.” She started bridging relationships between ceramics and textiles when she began art school in Halifax, going on to continue her studies in Montreal. “It’s only been in recent years that some kind of visual vocabulary has emerged.”

Ishaq’s wearable art possesses a distinct aesthetic that plays with the juxtaposition of hardness and softness, gloss and matte, the whimsy of tassels and sharp curves of ceramic. That aesthetic is visible in her Holy Wata collection, showcased on her online portfolio, and her most recent solo show Mirror Mirror, exhibited at the Anne Dahl Concept Studio in Ottawa.

“Some of my stylistic choices are definitely informed by Black and Afro-diasporic futurist and Indigenous aesthetics,” she says. “More and more, I am trying to find inspiration from my own cultural background in East Africa … which requires a lot of digging, but is ultimately worth it because it brings me closer to myself in a way, by allowing me to reconnect with an embodied sense of self.” Ishaq is also inspired by people who express a certain kind of “unfuckwithable energy,” including characters like Lauren Olamina from Octavia E. Butler’sParable series or Ketara from Avatar, and performers like
Moor Mother, Debby Friday, Backxwash, and Kelsey Lu.

Themes of Blackness in regards to identity, craft, culture, and liberation are integrally woven into Ishaq’s spatial design, as well. During a month-long residency at Halifax’s Khyber Centre for the Arts, she created Black Libraries Matter, for which she reimagined the gallery space by creating a Black library by inviting community members to donate books by Black authors.

Soon after, she had a collaborative exhibit, Reconcile/Overcome, at the Ottawa Art Gallery. It consisted of a handwoven sculptural textile piece and written work reflecting on the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade and labour of enslaved Black people on the foundation of Canada and the United States. Her written work from the exhibit includes this excerpt: “Made by my Black hands in celebration of Black spiritual resilience in all corners of the world. Not all our struggles are alike yet we are gold. We are nuanced and yet are gold. We are resilient and we are gold.”

In reflecting on the intersections of Blackness, fashion, beauty, and culture, Ishaq understands that Blackness and popular material culture are also deeply entwined. “I believe this includes Afro-diasporic cultural production as well. I really believe that materiality is political and omnipresent.” Black culture, she says, “is celebrated yet the people who create it are oftentimes disregarded, treated as disposable, only celebrated when they are dead or in moments like this where the world has to recognize the deep systemic patterns at play. There are so many case studies of appropriation that intersect Blackness, fashion, and beauty.”

In its variety of mediums, Ishaq’s practice seeks to centre Blackness and move closer toward creative sovereignty, despite continued appropriation of Black art and culture. “Ultimately, the more we are able to lean into our own creative sovereignty, the more authentic our creations can be. That sovereignty can look like not fighting for ‘a seat at the table,’ detaching ourselves from Eurocentric symbols of success but really doing things for us and by us.”

TOP: Photo by Cheryl Hann; Models: Francesca Ekwuyasi and Portia Karegeya LEFT: Photo by Mallory Lowe; Model: Jada BOTTOM: Photo by Brandon Brookbank; Model: Candy Contrera

Illustration by Stephanie McKay

The fashion industry still has a lot of work to do when it comes to inclusivity. Often, when we discuss the lack of diversity—race, gender, body size, or disability—we think that the work of inclusivity has to start on the runways, in the boardrooms, or in editorial spreads. While it’s true that those changes need to be implemented too, if we want to truly break the societal norms in the fashion industry, we need to start in the classroom first where tomorrow’s designers can learn to design for all bodies.

In 2016, it was reported that the clothing manufacturing industry in Canada was worth $24.95 billion(U.S.), and although stats have not yet been released on what the industry has made to date, it has been forecasted to increase to $30 billion by 2020. Even with the steady increase in revenue in the industry and call-outs for more inclusivity to all facets of the business, fashion education programs throughout Canada have largely remained untouched.

From George Brown School of Fashion and Jewellery in Toronto to LaSalle College in Montreal, programming has largely remained unchanged, offering the same fundamental courses including pattern making and creation, construction, business management, and styling—to name a few. According to data compiled in 2015, 19.8 percent of those who graduate end up finding employment within the industry, which means that schools have the ability to shape students’ relationships with how fashion is produced and who it is made for.

In 2018, Ben Barry had just been appointed to become the incoming Chair and Associate Professor of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the Ryerson School of Fashion, located in Toronto. In an interview with the Toronto Star he explained how, prior to being appointed, he told the Ryerson search committee that he hoped to revolutionize not only their fashion education program, but the industry and the world.

Fast forward to 2020, and Ryerson is in the midst of rolling out their new mandate that cultivates inclusion, equity, and decolonization in the field of Fashion Studies that helps students enrolled in their fashion programs. Barry hopes that by showcasing to students the marginalization and barriers some face in fashion, in the classrooms at Ryerson, they will be able to help shape and introduce new fashion norms by facilitating more learning experiences and discussion.

“I think that this approach is fundamentally why teaching students to design for diverse bodies and to think about diverse bodies in liberatory ways is the sort of way forward to really shift fashion education,” explains Barry, noting, “Education is really the birthplace of the thinking and the practices of the next generation, and it shapes the future of the industry.”

However, Barry’s approach to fashion education is quite unique in Canada. Many times, for changes to take place in the classroom, students will often have to advocate for themselves and call attention to the fundamental imbalance of representation within their program offerings, and the industry itself. In 2016, Nayyara Chue, a fashion design student at Parsons School of Design in New York City, petitioned to the school that she would be unable to finish her collection, as they didn’t have plus-size mannequins. When interviewed for Dazed magazine, designer and Parsons student Sinéad O’Dwyer mentioned that when she worked towards her BA in fashion design, beauty and thinness were ingrained within the
school’s culture.

Alysia Myette, contract lecturer at the Ryerson School of Fashion shares, “Students, especially now, have their finger on the pulse of social movements … and they’re just so much more vocal about the changes that they want to see happen … they’re using their voices in a really proactive way.”

Heather Clark, program coordinator with the Wilson School of Design at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Richmond, B.C., recognizes, though, that like Chue at Parsons, many students are seeking more from their institutional educational program offerings.

“One of the challenges is that in a four-year undergraduate degree program, there is only so much that you can teach students,” she says. She explains that in the program they try to provide students with a good foundation of skills, so that once in the field they can start shifting and applying those skills as they see relevant.

But Clark realizes that some students who vocalize the need for more programming on body diversity and inclusive fashion are necessary. “As faculty, it’s up to us to go off and think ‘how do we help support these students?’” One of the first steps for faculty members to start teaching students about the different range and types of individuals, including plus-size bodies and disabled bodies, is to mentally reframe who should be included in the industry.

Myette believes that this ultimately becomes the biggest barrier for faculty members and a huge disadvantage for students. “A lot of the times when you bring in instructors from the industry, they’re bringing their own set of biases; they’re bringing their own understanding of what they know of the fashion industry and what works and what doesn’t, which then can influence what they teach in the classroom,” she explains.

For many students who are just getting starting on their careers, they don’t see themselves represented in the curriculum being offered. For many, the colleges and universities they are attending don’t feel like a safe or inclusive space to make the changes necessary, design the collections they want to see in the world, or even be themselves.

Hilary MacMillan, owner and designer of her namesake line, graduated from Blanche Macdonald in Vancouver in 2009, a creative arts college focused on hair, makeup, and fashion design. While she found the program useful, noting that her program included courses on construction, draping, and other skills, it was up to students to expand their studies outside of the school setting.

MacMillan became interested in designing for plus-size individuals, and introduced plus-sizes to her spring 2020 collection. Prior to its launch, she spent a considerable amount of time on research and development, since she had no formal training in school. She chatted with individuals who regularly purchased plus-size clothing, and also purchased garments to deconstruct, so she could examine how to construct patterns for differently shaped plus-size bodies all on her own. “I just tried to gain as much information as I could to figure out what was the best path for [our brand]. A lot of people think that it is just sizing things larger and that’s it. But there is a nuance to it,” MacMillan explains.

Similarly, Izzy Camilleri, the owner and designer behind IZ Adaptive, started designing ready-to-wear items professionally in 1984. During her time in school, Camilleri was taught the basics, which she explains gave her the tools to do whatever she wanted with her lines. It wasn’t until 2005, when Camilleri was approached by a wheelchair user to create custom pieces, that she became aware of the challenges of creating adaptive clothing. She says, “I didn’t realize what it actually took to get dressed and how limited her options were around clothing. So it was through that work I opened my eyes to a very big problem.”

Camilleri explains that making adaptive clothing is so much more than just designing, pattern making, and drafting; it’s also learning to understand the issues that people with physical disabilities face. This is why more than ever, it is important to challenge the status quo and have faculty open the door for marginalized groups to be represented and make inclusions outside of the industry norm in the fashion education system.

“I think that it’s almost that we also need to step back even further because part of this is about re-educating faculty and the majority of faculty,” explains Barry, noting that for many faculty members, they’ve grown up in a culture that praises specific types of bodies and is rampant with cultural appropriation. Barry believes that a refusal to represent or acknowledge certain groups can cause real harm to students, and the industry at large, by not training faculty to adapt. “There’s a process of learning—sort of educating them—and then there’s also practical consideration because when they went to fashion school, they didn’t learn how to design for a diversity of bodies or individuals. So there’s also training that’s required for them to learn these skills and practices to integrate that into their own courses and classrooms.”

While issues of diversity and inclusion are conversations that individuals like Ontario-based Métis artist Justine Woods and influencer Marielle Elizabeth in Edmonton, Alberta have been sparking online and offline, discussions like these often miss pointing out just how pivotal a role the fashion education system can be in changing things from the inside out. Jess Sternberg is the owner and CEO of Free Label Clothing and developed her line of ethical and size-inclusive clothing after working as a buyer and manager at a Toronto clothing boutique. Although Sternberg did not attend fashion school, she looks at many of the courses offered as a chicken-and-egg situation. “You know, we’re not being taught it and it’s not prevalent in the industry. So maybe I didn’t go to school, but what I needed to know wasn’t taught, like how to be size-inclusive or sustainable.”

Sternberg has a point: with a lack of accessible information available to students throughout Canada, at what point does the industry influence the education system? She further adds, “If we’re demanding that we want size inclusivity and we want more sustainable options for fabrics, fashion schools and the industry need to create more information and lessons on that because there’s a demand for it. We can blame the brands, we can blame the customer, we can blame the educational system, but somebody at some point has to make the choice to say ‘screw it and we’re going to go for it.’”

Right now, all throughout Canada, the training grounds for tomorrow’s crop of designers are bleak, but there is room for improvement. Clark admits that the sustainability conversation has been an amazing gateway for her faculty to open the door to conversations within the fashion industry, sharing they’ve had to explore how to make something that’s inclusive to all in terms of taste, what they need style and size-wise, and purposed for what they need the clothing to do. “There’s so many different components—and I’m not just talking about environmentally sustainable, but sustainable to our lifestyles as individual people. Everybody needs clothing!” she says.

While the system won’t change overnight, plenty of schools are slowly starting to implement the basic groundwork of diversity and inclusion into their programming, with Ryerson University leading the way in Canada. Right now, it’s time for these conversations to both enter and hopefully evolve continuously in the classroom. Myette says, “You really don’t know where the fashion industry is going to take you and learning to work with different bodies, learning to work with different personas, learning different facets of the industry and how you can play a role in different facets of the industry just gives you so much more of a well-rounded experience to enter the fashion industry, as opposed to just having a very narrow idea of what you’re going to do and closing all those other doors that could have otherwise been open.”

But fashion and beauty’s place in the world goes far beyond this moment, and their place within social justice runs deep. Many may think of fashion and beauty as surface issues, but there’s so much more to them than that. There’s ethical consumption: who is making the products we purchase and use? How and where are they being made? There’s representation and inclusion: who do we see in the media; who are we told is beautiful? Fashion and beauty intersect with feminism in a multitude of ways; they also intersect with mental health in far more ways than one (I say this as a person who wears big earrings every day in pseudo-quarantine—I swear, it helps a tiny bit). There’s much more than may initially come to mind when these topics come up.

Even in this letter, there’s so much I want to say. I wish there was space to talk about how women and girls, especially, are often introduced to magazines through fashion magazines. How problematic so many of those were growing up. And how much they’ve changed, some very much making positive contributions at this point in time. (I very much admire fashion magazines that are taking more of a political stand these days, and it is not lost on me that we’re taking a political magazine and making it fashion-related!)

I want to talk about the endless expectations there are on our looks. When I was a kid, very much against my mother’s wishes, I entered a beauty pageant. While pageant culture itself could, and does, fill many books and documentaries, I’d be lying if I said that it was an anomaly, even as a child, to feel in competition with others about appearances. When I first immersed myself in activist culture, I thought I needed to stop wearing lipstick and wear all black and a bandanna around my neck. Expectations are everywhere. (It should be noted that I was never crowned Miss Sunburst Canada.)

This year’s culture issue is rich in talented writers. Amanda Scriver talks about how fashion schools could push for inclusivity in the industry. Jenny Heijun Wills pens a gorgeous personal essay about Korean adoption and beauty. Sanchari Sur talks about coming into genderqueerness as a fashion blogger. And we look at the CanLit trend of #booklooks—makeup looks based on book covers—and what’s compelling local writers to put together and share these looks.

For better or worse, our bodies, and our outward appearances, are political. I, myself, no longer long for a title or tiara. I’ve also given up my patched-up hoodies (I miss those patches most—R.I.P. “Only dead fish go with the flow” and “Gender
is a drag”). Whether these are topics you think about every time you get dressed, or very rarely, we hope you’ll find these articles informative and entertaining, whatever you’re wearing (we just hope, for your sake, that it’s not “hard pants”).