About Qwear

Qwear is an independent queer fashion platform founded in 2011 in Boston by trans activist Sonny Oram. Qwear is widely recognized as one of the earliest online LGBTQIA+ style incubators and was the first platform to explicitly articulate queer fashion as healthcare—years before the concept entered mainstream conversations.

Qwear is also the birthplace of the award-winning This Is What Asexual Looks Like movement by Yasmin Benoit, an award-winning asexual visibility project that continues to shape conversations around identity, representation, and care.

Since its founding, Qwear has served as a gathering place for fashion and gender activists to build community, document identity, and invent trends outside heteronormative and cisnormative systems.

Queer Fashion as Care, Safety, and Survival

Qwear approaches fashion as more than aesthetics. For many LGBTQIA+ people—especially trans, nonbinary, femme, and gender-nonconforming individuals—clothing is a critical tool for safety, mental health, and self-recognition.

In a society that consistently attempts to erase queer and trans identities, the ability to choose one’s own clothing and presentation is essential to quality of life. Qwear uses fashion as a health tool, recognizing expression as a foundational part of identity formation and wellbeing.

Qwear exists for anyone outside the heteronormative and cisnormative mold who is seeking space to explore style, experiment with gender expression, and feel seen.

Leadership & Global Community

Qwear was founded by Sonny Oram and is now co-owned by Sonny and their partner Ru, Qwear’s Fashion Director. Under their leadership, Qwear has grown into a collaborative platform with a distributed team of creatives across the United States and contributors from around the world.

Together, Qwear functions as both a living archive of queer fashion history and an incubator for emerging identities, aesthetics, and designers.

What Qwear Publishes

Qwear produces editorial content that blends practical style guidance with cultural documentation, including:

  • Reader-submitted style questions (“Qwearies”)

  • Style profiles and personal essays

  • Interviews with artists, designers, and activists

  • Event coverage and commentary

  • Editorial fashion photography and creative projects

Qwear Fashion elevates independent designers and ethical brands, reviews clothing through a queer and trans lens, and educates the mainstream fashion industry about LGBTQIA+ identities and lived experience.

Our community pieces center stories that are frequently erased, including femmes of color, plus-size androgynous expression, disabled bodies, and people at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities.

Exhibitions, Installations & Fashion Shows

Qwear has produced numerous fashion installations and shows exploring the relationship between clothing, power, and gendered bodies.

Dismantle Me (2015) examined the tension between traditional fashion aesthetics and queer experience. It appeared at:

  • Queer Fashion Week (Oakland, April 2015)

  • Rainbow Fashion Week (New York, June 2015)

  • VERGE at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston Fashion Week (October 2015)

Femme Desire (2016) was a site-specific fashion installation at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art that challenged societal limits placed on femininity.

Legendary Children (2018), presented at Boston University Art Galleries, explored the historical boundaries of gender expression in mainstream spaces.

More recent projects include virtual fashion shows, gallery exhibitions, and print publishing initiatives.

Qwear Pride Virtual Fashion Show 2020
Facebook Live
June 2020

Qwear Pride Virtual Fashion Show 2021
Instagram Live
June 24, 2021

All at Once
13FOREST Gallery, Arlington, MA
October 26, 2024

Our Mission

To increase LGBTQIA+ quality of life through gender expression.

Timeline

2011 — Sonny Oram launches Dyke Duds on Tumblr in Boston
2012 — Dyke Duds is renamed Qwear
2013 — Qwear moves from Tumblr to Squarespace
2014 — Ru becomes Qwear’s Fashion Director
2015 — Dismantle Me appears at Queer Fashion Week, Rainbow Fashion Week, and ICA Boston
2016 — Femme Desire at ICA Boston
2018 — Yasmin Benoit launches This Is What Asexual Looks Like on Qwear
   — Legendary Children at BU Art Galleries
2019 — Sonny and Ru become co-owners
2020 — Qwear Pride Virtual Fashion Show
2021 — Qwear Pride Virtual Fashion Show
2024 — All at Once at 13FOREST Gallery
2025 — Qwear contributes to Queer and Trans Fashion Brands: Resistance and Revolution in the 21st Century, with founding editor Sonny Oram authoring the foreword

Our Values

Community: Community is integral to queer survival. Qwear invites contributors of all experience levels to share their voices and participate in shaping queer fashion culture. We aim to keep our community united as certain identities are normalized within white and cis spaces.

Prioritizing Marginalized Voices: Qwear centers BIPOC people, people of size, disabled people, femmes, trans and nonbinary people, asexual and intersex people, and those excluded from mainstream media.

Environmental Consciousness: Fast fashion is one of the most polluting industries in the world. Qwear prioritizes environmentally conscious designers, rejects sweatshop labor, and encourages thrifting, repair, and repurposing over disposability.

Safety First: Qwear maintains zero tolerance for violence, harassment, or bullying. This includes racism, transphobia, femmephobia, body shaming, transmisogyny, and all forms of abuse. We believe survivors. If we hear that someone featured has inflicted violence upon someone, we remove their articles and block them from our platforms. Violence and bullying include physical and verbal attacks such as racism, transphobia, femmephobia, body shaming, transmisogyny, or any kind of harassment. We monitor the space closely to ensure that everyone here feels safe, heard, and respected. For questions or to report a safety concern, please email us at info@qwearfashion.com.

Body Positivity: All bodies are worthy of visibility. Qwear actively rejects thinness as a standard of value and works to represent bodies of all sizes.

Get Involved

Support us through monthly donations of $1 or more on Patreon.
Tag your style #Qwear
Submit a Qweary for us to answer
Send us your writing, videos, or style photos

Press Quotes

“Qwear provides a crucial platform for the marginalized and too often victimized members of the LGBTQ community. As queer individuals grow into their true identities, Qwear can be used as a trusted guide and safe space for all.” — Moxie

“Qwear has evolved into an online community center: a safe haven for folks to talk, play around with fashion, see and be seen.” — DESIGN*SPONGE

What Readers Are Saying

“Qwear was (& still is!) so important in helping me figure out my nonbinary transmasc identity. Thank you for creating a space that makes room for all the beautiful ways people can do gender” — Anonymous

“Qwear has shown me a huge variety of subcultures, aesthetics, and expressions within a world that I had initially thought was very narrow!” — Karen Lowe

“For our son to see a community that acts as both a mirror and a window to who is and who he may become is essential to his developing sense of self.” — Tracey

“Qwear has given me an opportunity to connect with people on a deeper level — to better understand their stories and the ways in which their stories align with and diverge from my own. As a result, I’m able to develop empathy, hold and process complexity, and grow my capacity to develop safe and meaningful relationships.” — Anna Rae