Nan Goldin was sixteen years old, a stray who’d left home, when she became the ‘unofficial’ school photographer. She was studying at a countercultural free school in Massachusetts. It was here that she enveloped herself with David Armstrong, a beautiful, androgynous artist, who later introduced her to night and day worldings of drag and glamour in Downtown Boston. ‘Nan’ was a hippie who preferred pearls and red lipstick. She shared an apartment with drag queens Ivy and Bea who dressed in the soft silk pleats of vintage designer gowns like Fortuny, sometimes loose-fitting 1970s jersey, often cloche hats outside, and turbans inside, with lace-trimmed slips. It is these garments that feature in Goldin’s intimate black-and-white photographs of her gender-expansive friends, referred to as her “roommates”, beside their “sisters”; she photographed them in the intimate dwellings and textures of their lives as a creative, communing act of devotion. While Goldin also documented the queens performing at beauty parades and bars, it is the ‘fashion-intimate’ images taken in the corners of their collective home across 1972–73, which are my focus in this article: images that hum with quietude, respite, imagination, absorption, and practice. Inside and outside the image, it is a photographic archive that recuperates 1930s fashions and scenes as ‘backwards’, enchanted, cinematic reverie. Shaped by Goldin’s own monochromatic attachments across cinema, fashion, and fashion photography, as well as her ‘adolescent’ methods of research and practice (gossiping, shoplifting, past-decade-dreaming), I argue that this archive of ‘not-quite not-yet’ fashion photographs — encompassing images that are rooms that are studios that are dreams — holds speculative craftings of sensual life that offer reparative resources of political survival in the present. In the early 1970s — ten years before she published subversive fashion editorials in the arts, culture, and fashion magazines of Downtown New York — Goldin “dreamt of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue”. On the surface of such pages, the dream did not come true, but in dialogue with queer theorists of affect and time, including Munoz’s reclaiming of the “not yet queer”, this chapter wonders otherwise; slips into the fugitive spaces and shadows to dream some counter-possibilities.