KING OF RAY
A REY Exclusive Fashion Editorial, photographed in Athens.
Photographed & Directed by Alexi Charovas
starring Aggelos
The body becomes a stage where gender rehearses itself; endlessly, restlessly. One moment, the chest is armour: sculpted, hard, virile. The next, it is pierced by softness: glitter, petals, shadows of leaves. Butler reminds us that gender is never essence but repetition, a series of acts that harden into “truth.”
Yet in the cracks of performance, vulnerability seeps through. Flowers erupt from the waistband, not as decoration but as insurgents. They expose the absurdity of virility when stripped of its theatre. Muñoz would call this a glimpse of queer futurity: masculinity remade in colour, light, and excess.
Ahmed teaches us that orientations matter, and here, the body bends, twists, reclines into new alignments that disorient the straight line of heteronormativity. Each image oscillates. The stripes reads a prison of expectation, yet also a runway for camp. The torso flexes, but the hand trembles. Glitter wounds and heals at the same time.
This is not contradiction but coexistence: virility and vulnerability locked in the same frame, refusing to cancel each other. The battle is not to defeat masculinity but to expose its costume. To wear it, distort it, queer it until its weight gives way to possibility.
Alexi Charovas
