Awakening a storied queer space with Whimsical Magic
Sunday, June 25th, was a quiet and uneventful night in New York’s East Village—at least at the street level. Around 9:00 PM, small groups began to gather on a stretch of East 4th Street between Cooper Square and Second Avenue. After locating a nondescript door (this took some teamwork) and passing down several flights of stairs, guests found themselves in a markedly different world.
The scene: an open concrete pit, an above-ground swimming pool, a disco ball, a rope swing, seats from a passenger jet, and a model in red emerging from behind plastic sheeting—all vibrating with music and lit in purples and blues.
This was the world of Whimsical Magic, described by its invitation as “a visual feast of imaginative design, provocation, and fusions of multimedia delight.” Part fashion show and part theater, Whimsical Magic was produced by fashion designer Bones Jones (House°Bones) and Maurice Ivy in support of Logic(s) magazine.
Some of the night’s whimsy came from the venue itself. Now known as Ella Funt, the space at 82 West 4th Street was an early bastion of drag and queer entertainment. Known in the 1950s and 1960s as Club 82, performers were men dressed as women, and wait staff were women dressed as men. Marking the end of Pride Month, Whimsical Magic was considered by its producers an awakening of this storied space.
“Queer Black Infiltration” by Bones Jones for Logic(s).
The show featured Bones’ Spring/Summer ‘23 collection, which was recently photographed for the inaugural issue of Logic(s)—the first magazine to explore tech from Black, Asian, and queer vantage points. In an accompanying interview with Editor-in-Chief J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Bones discusses relationships between aesthetics, tech, attribution, and Black queer kinship.
Bones’ work finds good company in the magazine’s latest issue, “supa dupa skies: move slow and heal things.” Pushing the bounds of tech journalism beyond product reviews and doomsday speculation, this issue critically engages with topics including surveillance via digital prison mail, the role of caste in Silicon Valley, and the link between plantation labor and modern computing. It also pushes boundaries in form, mixing long-form essays and interviews with fiction, Tezhip (the Turkish art of illumination), poetry, and fashion.
Whimsical Magic presented an expansion of Bones’ Spring/Summer collection to the fashion, art, academic, tech and LGBTQ+ communities of New York. Over the course of two hours, the event delivered on its promise to celebrate, delight, and provoke.
Rather than having a clear start, unexpected and delightful vignettes (including an impromptu marshmallow roast with a blow torch) mounted in intensity until the crowd was transfixed on the action happening center-stage. But center-stage, as guests soon learned, was a suggestion at best. Models emerged from behind plastic sheets, and, instead of returning after a catwalk, subverted expectations by dipping in and out of the crowd. Stanchions separating the crowd from the performance were taken down and refashioned into garments.
Attendees received copies of the first-ever issue of Logic(s).
As did its beginning, Whimsical Magic’s end blended into the rest of the night. The crowd lingered and celebrated before filtering back to the world above, bringing with them copies of Logic(s), renewed joy, and a little bit of magic.
Logic(s) is now available for subscription. To find out more, click here.
To shop Bones’ work, click here.
Special thanks to Reginald Robson for technical production and artists Christine Shepard, Viper, Mimi Tao, and Beau Jangless for their contributions.