Pink is for girls. Blue for boys. It’s the colour cliché we’ve come to expect from children’s clothing. Layered on are gendered clothing prints and styles.

I felt unbridled joy at the thought of it being reduced to smouldering ashes, along with all the heteropatriarchal constraints it had come to represent.

While I’ve outgrown the items in the musty dress-up box, I never outgrew my desire to dress up. My collection no longer comprises ’70s velour nor does it have that insipid mothball stench I remember from my childhood.

Our patchwork is a poorly tattooed symbol of Venus on a forearm, a home-job buzz cut on a middle-aged dyke, torn posters of t.A.T.u., wardrobes full of colour-coordinated plaid and dog-chewed Calvin Klein underwear. But, beyond the obvious, it’s also genderless, breastfeeding, transgender and transcending.

The word fat is one steeped in stigma, but many fat people are reclaiming the word. Fat people are multivalent, sexy and fashionable, too.

Clarence Chai is a gay Singapore-born Australian fashion designer and vintage clothing dealer. Clarence spoke to Angela Serrano about his work.

Step behind the scenes on our fashion shoot for the transgender and non-binary issue of Archer Magazine, out December 2016.

While fashion as a form of self-expression can be both a political and a personal tool, it says as much about our social codes and perceived norms as it does about our diverse sexual preferences.