“Fashion in the 21st century must be reactive, and you have to find a way to be able to do that,” he explains. The T-shirt that he bore backstage was Deadstock, but his team mobilized to produce new versions. All proceeds from the $ 99 T pieces (£ 75.00) go to Trans LifelineA US-based, transactive non-profit organization that connects Transmensen with the community and offers them support through a peer support and crisishotline. Ives had originally considered other LGBTQ+ organizations, but “going directly to Transmensen with a trans -guided organization was the most clear to me,” he says. Ives has sold 1,088 T-shirts from Sunday 13 April. After production, shipping and ordering removal costs, he donated more than $ 70,000. A song that continues to grow with the hour.
“When I think of the challenges with which transgender people in the United States are now confronted, I just keep thinking about how scared I was when I was a 12 -year -old gay boy in a suburb of the higher middle class of New York City,” he says, “let alone a transmeis in the middle of America does not exist.”
In a sense, the T-shirt is a thank you from Ives to the Transvrouwen who inspire him and “who really gave me my start in this industry”: Hunter Pifer, Alex Consani and Colin Jones, among others. “These girls are legendary, I feel the same excitement and looking at them as a child as a child in the 90s looking at super models on the start and runways,” he says. “It is a fantasy that I really gave up, and I mention Alex for lighting a fire under me the first time she did a show for us.” Ives was close to ‘giving up’, he says, after he felt disillusioned with the industry, but Consani materialized the dreams and ambitions he had when she took his runway. “I give the girls a lot of praise, because it is one thing to make these pieces of clothing,” says Ives, “but it’s a completely different thing to bring them to life.”