Sometime later in the day of March 28th, just before Justin Vivian Bond took to the stage of the Great Hall at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, she got herself ready. There was the putting-on of the Prounis gold, diamond, and tourmaline jewelry, the fastening of the silver Manolo Blahnik sandals, the slipping into an Erdem Moralioglu dress, and the arranging of a custom Erdem veil made specifically for her for the night’s performance, Origins of Love: Celebrating Trans Day of Visibility (the International Transgender Day of Visibility is on Monday, March 31st).
Bond, a singer, actor, and a recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, has performed in Erdem a few times now—quite recently, she wore pajamas from his Maria Callas-inspired Fall 2024 collection. “I find how Viv wears my clothes infinitely inspiring and wonderful,” Moralioglu said. “Seeing her perform in the clothes… they become something else, and she makes them her own.” This, though, will be the first time she wore a look specifically made for her. The designer chose to riff on look 22 from Spring 2025, with a pistachio cady draped gown embellished with silvery sequin carnations and shrouded in tulle.
That collection was inspired by the writer Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una Troubridge—in 1928, Hall wrote The Well of Loneliness, which, Moralioglu has said, “has become a queer-lesbian bible of sorts.” In donning a look from that collection, Bond has created the most magical and evocative—and, frankly, urgent—continuum of almost one hundred years of queer history, linking the gender radicalism of Hall with today and Bond’s own fearless championing of not just trans rights but so many other rights around gender and sexuality. In the lead-up to her performance, Bond posted on Instagram: ‘Forgive me if I am over promoting this”—but of course, she wasn’t. Given where we are right now (namely: in a place on the map of life called Not Good) there is no too much, so thank goodness for her vocalness and valor.
“I’ve been a fan of Erdem’s for years,” Bond said via Zoom the other day, “and when the collection inspired by The Well of Loneliness came out, I was working on ideas for a new show—I am always coming up with show ideas! Seeing that collection, I had a eureka moment.” Bond alighted on doing a show dedicated to lesbian singer-songwriters, which she’s calling Oh Well—in fact, there will be two more shows in the same vein: Well, Well (May 6-11) and Well, Well, Well (June 20-29), both at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York. “I’m wondering which Well is the most lonely?” Moralioglu mused when he, Bond, and Bond’s stylist, Christopher Rao, were all on the same Zoom. “I guess,” Bond said, laughing, “it really depends on how depressing the songs I pick are.”
Justin Vivian Bond and Erdem Moralioglu have known each other for quite some time—he first met her backstage after one of her shows at Le Poisson Rouge in New York, and they reconnected in London when Bond performed with Anthony Roth Costanzo at Wilton’s Music Hall. Yet the idea they’d collaborate came from Rao, who, in his other day job, serves as a commercial special projects consultant for the Erdem brand. “There’s a subtle theatricality to much of Erdem’s work that lends itself to the charismatic glamour Vivian conveys—not only on stage, but in her everyday life,” Rao said of the pairing. “Erdem and Vivian share an innate love of storytelling, whether it be through craft or song, and know how to expertly nod to history without being nostalgic.”
While she may not indulge in nostalgia, the past has been a fruitful source of inspiration for Bond—both in her mining of the torch singer-glamour Rao referenced (Bond’s look, often coiffed and soignee, has nodded to the likes of Julie London) and in her choice of songs, which have wrought, through joy, anger, hope, and defiance, a vocalizing of queer experience, literally and metaphorically. When I first saw Bond perform about fifteen years ago, she covered everything from queer poet Essex Hemphill’s “American Wedding” to “The Golden Age of Hustlers,” an ode to San Francisco’s Castro as if sung by Joan Baez.
For her show at Cooper Union, Bond’s choice of material was equally electric and eclectic, ranging from “Kid Fears” by the Indigo Girls to Electronic’s “Getting Away With It.” For some of those songs, she was joined by the Youth Pride Chorus and the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus—they performed together one holiday season. For Bond, that was an incredible experience. “It was such a thrill,” she said, “because I love singing. It’s my favorite thing to do—that’s why I’m a singer. But also,” she added, with feeling, “singing is healing.”
