There was never a chance that Qween Jean would not design the costumes for Saturday Church—Damon Cardasis’s musical adaptation of his 2017 film, inspired by a West Village church’s LGBTQ+ outreach program and its overlap with the city’s ballroom scene—and not just because she’s no stranger to crafting dazzlingly colorful worlds or collaborations with director Whitney White. (Incidentally, her work will make its Broadway debut later this year, in the White-directed play Liberation.) Since moving to New York to study costume design, Jean has been a key figure in the city’s trans community, emerging as a frontline organizer for fights toward all kinds of liberation.
Her organization, Black Trans Liberation (BTL), hosts weekly Wednesday fellowships similar to the one depicted in the film, providing food and mutual aid to those in need. “It’s become a community cornerstone,” Jean tells Vogue, “where folks can connect each and every week—a meeting place for those that are in between blessings, or looking for a blessing, or can maybe give a blessing.” In that same vein, she sees voguing on a Saturday night as sharing an essential quality with Sunday-morning service: Both create space for profound connections, and as she puts it, “People learn how to strengthen the voice and the fire that is growing within themselves.”
That sentiment is the through line of Saturday Church, which Cardasis adapted for the stage with James Ijames (Fat Ham), with music by Sia and Honey Dijon. The story follows Ulysses, a queer youth from a restrictively religious household, who finds his way into the Saturday Church and discovers the city’s legendary voguers.
Jean herself found the ballroom scene in much the same way, recalling Thursday vogue nights at now defunct clubs like Escuelita and XL as “sanctuaries for people to come and find their truths, explore, ask questions, and get to know what’s happening with their minds, bodies, and journeys.”
“In those spaces,” she continues, “people begin to strengthen their armor so that when they go back into the world, they’re not walking with their heads down.”
Jean grasped the power of fashion early, seeing her grandmother create bridal dresses in their native Haiti and noticing “how people’s entire lives and faces and bodies changed when they were in something that was created for them.” Through the costumes in Saturday Church, she’s been able to marry that embodied knowledge to a curatorial sensitivity she has honed while living in New York City, a place whose Black queer community she credits with influencing contemporary streetwear and runway fashions. “We are the fashion mecca of the world, and a lot of the influences, the genuine instinctual design, come from Black queer culture, who are continuously the visual architects for the language of dress,” she says.
“It’s no surprise—I think it’s divine—that this year we were celebrating dandyism at the Met Gala,” she says. “We’re seeing the connective tissue from Africa to the ways that Black and brown bodies look at tailoring. But most importantly, we’re honoring the very culture that was born within them and how that was fused—how it’s been taken—into different contexts. We see that in streetwear fashion, obviously. We see it now in Telfar. There is a new wave of fashion, of undeniable resilience, and that, for me, is how I’ve dressed every character in this musical. They have their armor to step out into the world.”
Indeed, Telfar is healthily represented in Jean’s designs for the musical through handbags and a few other key pieces, made possible through a partnership she brokered with the local label. Jean says there’s an “earnestness and truth” to the collaboration, pointing to the label’s history of charitable giving. Her costumes also mix in other brands, like Supreme, alongside in-jokes including a “Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor” tote. These touches stem from her engagement with the city’s youth via her work with BTL and seeing how they resist systemic oppression.
“I see the way people show up in spite of the things that they might be going through,” Jean says. “So there’s a beautiful balance here of how people are still honoring their truth while on their journey. Each subtle detail is rooted in a very specific aspect of humanity. That specificity comes from seeing folks on the train, seeing the way they’re tying their laces, details about their footwear, even, that can become signifiers of how people put things together.”
“That, to me, is what makes our city the most magical place to be and the most resilient as well,” she continues. “The way that people can thrift like nobody’s business and find something that’s maybe no longer bringing someone joy, but they can upcycle and reimagine it. In the world of Saturday Church, there’s no need to uphold binary foolishness. You are allowed to play and explore and really imagine how you see yourself and are addressing your body.”
The musical also gave Jean an opportunity to connect the dots between disparate New York scenes through her costumes, what with the ensemble variously representing Sunday churchgoers, Saturday Church revelers, and “everyday, beautiful, resilient New Yorkers on a subway train, working out on Pier 46.” Her work, she says, beaming, is “to convey a broad sense of humanity.”
By reteaming with trusted collaborators and encouraging holistic creative processes, White, Jean says, “creates regenerative communities in the way she works.” The two met while Jean was unhoused, sleeping in Washington Square Park while attending graduate school. (She received her master’s degree in design for stage and film from New York University in 2016.) Jean revels in exploring (and re-creating) transformations like hers: The musical’s finale—centered on the first ball organized by the Saturday Church—sparks a joyous recognition in Jean.
“I remember that feeling of putting on your first ball,” she reflects. “What’s exciting is creating an intentional space for people’s light to shine, a runway where they can step out. Oftentimes, it’s within these moments that people’s journeys accelerate, where they go from a spectator, someone in a congregation, into someone who religiously participates. It takes a lot of nerve, it takes a lotta courage, and most importantly, it’s still a competition, right? You may not win every ball, but you’re trying and declaring to the community that you’re here and have something to say. That happened for me, even in my organizing work. There was a shift when I went from just showing up every day with my sign and protesting to leading and galvanizing and ultimately creating space.”
One of the ball’s competing houses, the Haus of Namibia, is dressed in fierce leather outfits embroidered with roses, a hard-soft nod to “the warriors who lead with love” in Jean’s communities.
“Society will say that you have to hold onto anger in order to convey strength,” she says. “Actually, for us, it’s the opposite, darling. It’s your softness. It’s your joy in spite of the turbulence that is your measure of strength.”