CJ King felt prepared for anything that could go wrong at the Junk Kouture World Final, the world’s largest sustainable fashion competition for youth. Maybe the long blue-and-white dress that earned his team a spot in the finals would get lost on its voyage to Abu Dhabi. Or perhaps feathered wings that stand taller than he does would fall apart. But the North Bergen High School student was “blindsided” by what actually went wrong — he couldn’t walk on the runway in that gown because of his gender. Moments before the competition began, King’s teacher Steven Defendini broke the news that local authorities would not allow a boy to wear women’s clothing on stage. United Arab Emirates law prohibits men from wearing women’s clothing, and people who do so could face imprisonment. Defendini and King, along with his classmate and co-designer Jazzlynn Vargas, decided to withdraw from the competition altogether. “It was a forced withdrawal,” King said. “There was literally<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CJ King felt prepared for anything that could go wrong at the Junk Kouture World Final, the world’s largest sustainable fashion competition for youth. Maybe the long blue-and-white dress that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,123,108,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-624953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beauty-fashion","category-education","category-lifestyle","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624953\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}