‘Dress-up is for everyone, even femme cuties in turbans!’

Nipples, butts and Y-front briefs —illustrator Jasjyot Singh Hans’s riotous new zine is a bedlam of fashionable queer and femme bodies

Jagmeet looks at you with a frank stare. His face covered in thick facial hair and glossy curls that tumble down his slim waist as he stands stock-still in stiletto-heeled boots. He holds his arms out as if to draw attention to the Y-front briefs. In another image, Rajbir (identifies as trans male) looks to the side, the defiant uptilt of their chin emphasised. A section of coiled ends of their braids skirt the left nipple, and a rose stands in place of a navel. “When I imagine characters, I also think of their names and attributes; their gender, sexuality, clothes, where they would shop and so on. 

Thankfully, in Sikh culture, a lot of names are gender-neutral, which helps,” says illustrator Jasjyot Singh Hans. He is talking about his fabulous ensemble of Sikh queer and femme characters dressed in finest fashion in his latest zine titled, Sikh Femmes in Sick Fashion ($500, jasjyotjasjyot.com).

Jagmeet and Rajbir are part of the folio set of 21 hand-pulled screen prints that document a riot of bodies in dialogue. Hans, 33, who identifies as a queer man, uses black-and-white portraits to provoke the viewer. If you look at his work without seeing sensuality in it, you miss half his power.

Jasjyot Singh Hans. Pic Courtesy/Adam David Bencomo 

The manner in which his queer and femme characters celebrate their body image, sexuality and self-love while expressing agency through fashion echoes his 2017 satiric project, Sikh Ladies in Sick Fashion. “The first one was called Sikh Ladies… but anyone can be a lady!” Hans counters with a toss of his hands in a video call from his home in Chicago. “Dress-up is for everyone, even femme cuties in turbans! I want to keep making work that is queer and pokes at clichés of gender. Jagmeet, for example, is your everyday Delhi ‘manly man’ but he is presented in a queer setting and styled in stiletto boots and Y-front 

Representation may be the more obvious motivator for his projects, but it is only half the story.

Hans studied animation at the National Institute of Design (NID) and has a Masters of Fine Art in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. “I still call myself an illustrator, not an artist. I don’t like the baggage that comes with the word,” he says.

Growing up in Delhi as an effeminate kid, Hans spent a large part of his childhood trying to grasp a warped idea of how a man should behave, talk and dress. “The social performance was stifling,” Hans says, adding that he found his spirit animal in women. “Everything that women did, the way they dressed, their body confidence, felt cool and liberating.” Drawing confident, large-bodied women often caught in unladylike pursuits, helped Hans explore the ongoing “internal drama with his own body image, and its inadequacy”. “They [women] became my triumphant alter ego.”

In his sketches, Hans liberates the female form from wanton voyeurism and embraces the more quieter, elemental  moments of what it means for them to live inside their bodies. In contrast, his male-presenting characters burst out of the 11x14 inch screen prints as sinewy pin-up boys, flamboyant and profane. “A lot of it comes from my queer desire. Why not objectify men for a change? Let’s reduce them to just their sexuality?”

In the last couple of years, Hans says he noticed that men’s fashion was becoming softer and assured in its queerness, and he wanted the zine to reflect this shift. Featured alongside each character are detailed credits of the designer labels, like you would find in magazine editorials. These include Y/Project, Willy Chavarria, Simone Roche, Christopher Kane, JW Anderson, Loewe, Saviojon Fernandes, Nor Black Nor White and Sabyasachi. “It’s my way of paying homage to fashion magazines,” he shares, teasing out memories of nerding over fashion photo-spreads in mags that his mother brought home from a local library. “If I saw the same [model] faces regularly in editorials, I’d go—oh, Carol [Gracias] again or Lakshmi [Menon]! They became my friends.”

Hans’s dedication to fashion is also something of a personal obsession. Earlier this year, together with his sister, Tarveen Kaur Vohra, he launched a label of “elevated casuals” and accessories called Tappa. “Since we both like big-sized clothing, we decided to create a capsule line of considered separates that is proudly democratic; the range starts with size ‘S’ and the largest size is ‘Q’ (Queen) and follows Q1, Q2, Q3 instead of XXL and so on.” He saw an opportunity here to rethink the power and gender roles tied to labels of king and queen. “A queen-size bed is smaller than a king-size. The queen card is lesser in value to a king card. Who decided this? We wanted to rob the king convention of its greatness, topple and queer that, and call it Queen.” 

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