The first time Max Sperber saw a peacock was at the Los Angeles Arboretum in Pasadena when she was nine or 10 years old. She remembers being amazed by their striking blue feathers and grand, elegant movements as they ran around the botanical gardens chasing her. “Do you remember the first time you saw something that really made your mouth open wide, and you were just in awe of its otherness, but it still maintained beauty?” she asks. “I think   as a trans woman, so many of us are people’s first. And so there’s a weight. We have to hold ourselves a certain way to be accepted.”

London-based, Central Saint Martins–trained and known for theatrical, craft-driven work exploring trans femininity, transformation and spectacle, Sperber often looks to the natural world in her designs – feathers, butterfly wings, pearls and sapphires – to make sense of her own experience. “We're in this new age and we're hijacking puberty. There's these new bodies being formed that have never been formed in history because of certain medications. And so it's like, what is natural? What’s alchemy?” She dresses trans models in headdresses and earrings made from peacock feathers to look like the headpieces worn by 18th-century showgirls. It’s an exploration of her own femininity and “how I felt I was performing. I saw the peacocks as such a good example”. 

She is currently working on gowns and bodices made of butterfly wings, and a cloak with a bow appliqué made from vintage gems donated from a couture house that went out of business. “What I'm so attracted to in fashion is that when you wear a suit you carry yourself a certain way; when you wear heels your body is in a certain position,” she says. The headdress makes the wearer hold their head up high with dignity, while the butterfly shirt makes “people light up and move a certain way knowing that it is fragile. It almost becomes like performance art when you wear this piece,” she says.

Recently, in one of fashion’s more surreal moments, she was trying on couture gowns designed by Alessandro Michele on the top floor of Valentino’s flagship store. The collection was his typical fever dream of florals, silks and sequins, heavily inspired by the 70s and 80s, full of delicate embroidery and beautiful appliqué. “That effort, that much time, and those techniques enchants the work,” she says, “enchants the soul, and enchants the wearer.” Looking in the mirror, “we were all beautiful reflections of each other,” she says.

Sperber thinks that trans women hold themselves in a particular way because of the trauma they’ve repressed and the power they embody to hold their head up high. “That's why I think we fill the dresses so greatly and why we are so respected in the fashion industry,” she says. “It’s because of our attitude, which was crafted through people being rude and cruel and us being invisible for a lot of our lives.”

She feels lucky to be in London right now because it’s a scary time to be trans in America. Trump has launched a  far-reaching campaign to push transgender people out of public life, restricting their access to healthcare and limiting their rights. He has said that the government would recognise only two unchangeable sexes, female and male, and the State Department has been forced to stop granting requests for new or updated passports with gender markers that don't conform with the new definition. “I do feel a bit like James Baldwin when he ran away to Paris,” Sperber says.

She doesn’t think there’s ever been a truly blissful time, but beauty has always been able to survive. Rather than letting politics dominate her work, she likes “to look more inward and to look at these friendships that we've built. This unspoken way in which we see each other.” Not too long ago, she came across the photographs of an upper-class, middle-aged white woman called Susanna Valenti, who lived as a man in New York, but as a woman in her house in upstate New York in the 1950s. Casa Susanna became a safe haven for the queer community to have fun and enjoy each other's company, and in many ways Central Saint Martins has been that for Sperber. “I feel like being trans in that space is like having a black Amex card,” she says.
 

She wants to see trans creatives have their big moment, like, she says, Black creatives did in 2017 and 2018, when models such as Anok Yai and Alton Mason came on the scene, Beyoncé headlined at Coachella, and designers including   Virgil Abloh, Grace Wales Bonner and Martine Rose were embraced by the mainstream. Today, “we have these models who are coming to prominence that are of trans identity, and we also have the cultural conversation with Trump and TV shows like Euphoria and Pose being as big as they were. I think we're waiting for trans creatives and trans designers.” She points to Dara Allen, who has styled Addison Rae and Hunter Schafer and has taken on the role of fashion director at Interview Magazine, as an example of someone really leading the way. “But don't let her be lonely,” she says with a laugh.

She wants the dolls to be taken seriously: Summer Dirx, Rafe Crane Robinson, Nussy Andrews, Stef Bonomo, Skye Osuki and Eli Langer, who document their lives and style on Instagram. “These images, I feel, need to be given real context, real consideration, just as much consideration as a Nan Goldin work, or Alice Neel, Ethan James Green, Diane Arbus”. 

“I feel like calling up the Whitney, calling Drew Sawyer, telling them all that there are real cultural texts being made here that need you – waiting in the heart of some late teen or twentysomething-year-old’s camera roll, oeuvre in the cloud, epiphanies from the screens, from the streets.”

They’re making “really cerebral and sharp decisions, like putting a Supreme nylon sweater over a 1920s hand-sewn gown with a TuckItUp showing through the organza – Puff Bar in hand,” she says. “I find these really impressive modes of communicating flushes of warmth, intentions of desires, timbres of a soul, and just asking for kindness and agency.” This juxtaposition of different styles and textures is something Sperber uses a lot in her designs. For the CSM White Show she styled her albino peacock feather headdress with a puffy sweater and elongated thong.

When she was conceptualising her idea for the show, the cultural aftershocks of Trump’s 2016 election were still being widely felt. “I was scared to go outside as a queer kid,” she says. “I remember bed-rotting in a really big sweater. And I wanted to play with that, wanting this space for leisure and almost protection. I felt very protected in a sweater; no one could see my body.” The peacock feathers represented her desire to keep dreaming. “It was possible to run away to Europe and go to the school I go to and meet the people I meet and find a safe haven,” she says. “So that's what those peacock headpieces mean to me.”

She plans on styling the butterfly wing shirt with a pair of jeans, inspired by Richard Avedon’s American midwest portraiture series. These contrasts are ever-present in Sperber's work: performance and comfort, hardness and softness. “Being a trans woman is all about friction,” she says. “You wake up and you're like, whoa, how do I present? There's how you want to look and how you actually look and the clothes you have and all that. You notice how people start to treat you differently in different spaces, how boys treat you. That's probably the biggest influence in how a doll perceives the world: how men treat them in different spaces, because men are dangerous.”

There’s a reading of her work that the ephemeral materials she selects reflect her own transition: the butterfly born from a caterpillar; the peacock feathers that had to be grown by a living bird. “I don't want to be too literal with it, but they're these beautiful emblems of what the Earth and life can provide,” she says. “I think a cis woman can look at it, a man can look at it and find a similar unspoken thing that is a poetry to them and beats a certain way.” 

"Being trans is waking up and asking 
— how do I present today?”