Life

Beyoncé wore vintage Mugler made famous by trans fashion icon Connie Fleming

"How does my presence and my being offend you?” the trans icon once asked.
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Beyoncé on the cover of her Cowboy Carter album
Beyoncé on the cover of her Cowboy Carter album

While Beyoncé’s 2022 album Renaissance was explicitly influenced by and a tribute to the queer Black and brown house music and ball scenes, her latest, the country-tinged Cowboy Carter, also features at least one very prominent nod to a trans icon.

Earlier this week, fashion house Mugler posted a photo to its official Instagram account spotlighting a photo from the 2024 album’s artwork. The pic shows Beyoncé standing next to a gleaming horse-shaped motorcycle, surrounded by flaming stars, and wearing a vintage Mugler look. As the fashion house noted in the post’s caption, the bejeweled crimson cowboy hat, gloves, bustier, and chaps come from its spring/summer 1992 “Les Cowboys” collection designed by late founder Thierry Mugler.

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As Australian Vogue first pointed out, the stunning look was first worn in Mugler’s spring/summer 1992 runway show during Paris Fashion Week by transgender trailblazer Connie Flemming. According to the fashion mag, Thierry Mugler, who died in 2022, met Flemming—known to Manhattan nightlife denizens as “Connie Girl,” one of the city’s most discerning door-persons—and fellow trans model Teri Toye at famed event producer Susanne Bartsch’s 1989 Love Ball in New York.

The provocative, openly gay designer would go on to feature the Jamaica-born, Brooklyn-raised Flemming in his runway presentations at a time when it was unheard of to see a trans woman in a major fashion show, and she became a muse for Mugler and other designers like the late Vivienne Westwood.

“When I started, there were a lot of things I wasn’t put up for or could do because it would be seen as subversive or pushing a narrative,” Flemming told Models.com in April 2023. “Thierry, Vivienne [Westwood], and [Jean Paul] Gaultier–and there were a couple of others–wanted to show the world beauty, in all of its aspects and configurations, and they didn’t put it out there as a spectacle. It was like, this is real, I am conveying to you something that is not only a dream, but it’s the world we live in.”

“Me being on Mugler’s runway, that should have been the end of his business,” Flemming told trans DJ Honey Dijon in 2020 conversation for Interview. “People thought no one would ever buy from him anymore. But his business did not go up in smoke. How does my presence and my being offend you?”

Flemming has continued to work with Mugler under current creative director Casey Cadwallader, most recently walking the runway for the brand’s spring/summer 2024 show last October and again in March for Mugler’s fall/winter 2024–2025 show.

Following the February 2024 announcement of Beyoncé’s country-inspired album and the release of lead singles “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages,” Flemming’s official Instagram posted a tribute to the “cowboycore” trend with a series of western-inspired fashion looks, including one from the 1992 Mugler show.

“Yeehaw,” the post’s caption read. “Some fashion trends come and go and then come around again.”

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