The Qwear Pride 2020 Fashion Show Gives an Intimate Look into Queer Lives

Events
Written By Sonny Oram

In light of COVD-19, we invited the LGBTQIA+ community and allies from all over the world to walk the runway from home for the Qwear Pride 2020 virtual fashion show on June 13th. The result was a more intimate look at queer fashion and how our environments interact with our self-presentation.

This video is a historic document that reflects the unique time in history when the queer community faced multiple intersecting calamities: COVD-19, The ongoing murders of trans Black lives, as well as Trump’s multiple attacks on LGBTQIA+ rights (the day before this aired the Trump admin announced their attempted eraser of Transgender rights in health care). Despite the sorrow, mourning, and anger our community faced, this video captured the light that keeps us going: our creativity, self-expression, and willingness to come together against all odds.

We, nor anyone else to our knowledge, had done a fashion show quite like this before, and were pleased with the results!

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For 15 years, Qwear has been at the forefront of queer fashion documentation, providing content used in classrooms, academic journals, books, health care centers, and more. We are independently run and rely on support from our readers.

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Sonny Oram

Boston-based multidisciplinary artist Sonny Oram is the founder of Qwear, a leading voice in the queer fashion movement for more than 15 years, and the author of the foreword to Queer and Trans Fashion Brands: Resistance and Revolution in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025). His work has been featured in HuffPost, BuzzFeed, Design*Sponge, and QTYPE Magazine and he's spoken on panels at MIT, South by Southwest, and Simmons Nursing School.

His earliest published work was created at age ten: a series of collages made from cut-up magazines, accompanied by original text exploring themes of gender, cultural conditioning, predatory advertising, and media objectification. In 2025, images of these collages were published in Queer and Trans Fashion Brands: Resistance and Revolution (Bloomsbury Press) and the Fashion, Style & Popular Culture journal.

Through Qwear, Sonny has launched influential campaigns, including the award-winning #ThisIsWhatAsexualLooksLike with Yasmin Benoit, and continues to create spaces for underrepresented communities across internet and print media. He has also used search engine optimization (SEO) to increase the visibility and diversity of queer representation in online search results, helping terms such as “androgynous style,” “bisexual style,” and “asexual” reflect a broader range of identities and experiences.

https://sonnyoram.com
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