Don't forget! Interesting stuff happening on a specific date on the calendar below this is just filler text to get the idea across.
All in Longform
Clothing, how we feel when certain textures brush up on us, the sensation of donning certain garbs — all of these things which we experience daily, seem precisely to be part of the ineffable qualities of our daily lives. And yet, their very everyday feature makes us drift away from considering their implications.
In this piece, Osman Nemli reflects on the idea that fashion, fundamentally, is an expression of one’s intents and purposes. Drawing upon this idea, Nemli writes that fashion grants the possibility of externalizing oneself for others to see.
One way to assess and try to understand the freedom of thought that any society enjoys, protects, and promotes is to determine how robust its public sphere is. Read along as Osman Nemli asks: Where would fashion come into the conversation addressing freedom of thought within society?
It takes a village to raise a fashion brand — a fact that often goes overlooked within the fashion studies literature. In response, Erique Zhang questions what collective action might look like if we recognize the many individuals involved with this work and foreground an ethics of care.
COVID-19 has created a crater in the fashion industry. Globally, early-career and established designers alike are proposing new business models and reshaping what the fashion industry is and how it operates. Jonah Solomon considers how recent design school graduates are uniquely positioned to thrive in times of turmoil.
Fashion and textile conservator Callie O’Connor pulls back the curtain on the precarious nature of museum work and the unwritten rules young fashion professionals are expected to follow.
Steven Losco considers Marc Jacobs to be “the strongest proponent of change in the rhythm of fashion,” and examines his AW2020 collection — possibly Jacobs’ last — as evidence of his ability to predict the shifting tides of the fashion system.
Osman Nemli reflects on the lasting impact of fashion going virtual, how screening fashion can both break down barriers (while also building new ones), and the virtual commons that a fashion gone virtual can constitute.
Robert McCaffrey considers the concepts of Melancholy and the Performative Sublime in the catwalk presentations of the late designer Lee Alexander McQueen. Through examinations of No 13 (1998) and The Widows of Culoden (2006) the author demonstrates how McQueen’s engagement with artists and artistic philosophy elevated his creations.
It is truly remarkable to see the creative extent that individuals go to, not just for themselves but for those around them, during these uncertain and chaotic times. We are able to see, in real time, stories of success and failure, individuals confessing their failures, while also sharing their triumphs.
Osman Nemli reflects upon the recent passing of the artist Christo, along with his wife Jeanne-Claude — hailing them to be “couturiers of the city.” Nemli considers the political import of this dynamic duos works and the implications of their work for fashioning a future.
A central character in HBO’s Game of Thrones, Sansa Stark began as a teenager who subscribed to every patriarchal norm. Safiyya Hosein explores how costume designer Michele Clapton outfitted Stark’s transition from damsel-in-distress to an independent Queen of the North.
Fashion is not politically neutral, and in this series I set myself the task of philosophically unpacking the relation between fashion and politics.
Most women’s swimwear leaves something to be desired for those lumped into its targeted audience. These kinds of exclusions are important because they tell us something about what a “woman” is imagined — maybe even “supposed” — to be.
Osman Nemli comments on the moment Democratic lawmakers donned traditional West African kente cloth stoles in an opportunistic show of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.
On his runways, Alexander McQueen always aimed to create spaces in which our own conceptions of reality and fiction came into crisis.
“There is art in dressing for a protest to present a unified front, purpose, and mission,” writes Ismelka Gomez, in this firsthand account of witnessing the 2018 protests for safe, legal abortion rights in Argentina.
I took my glasses off. I wouldn’t be needing them. I picked up the white cane and practiced tracing shoulder-width arcs on the ground in front of me. For a moment, I was still sighted. Then, gripping the cane in my right hand and the smooth metal railing in my left, I walked along a corridor and entered the darkness.
The fashion world has often embraced Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale as an icon of quirky, eccentric style. When Grey Gardens was first released, however, it left an overwhelmingly negative impression on many reviewers, who believed that the film took advantage of its vulnerable female subjects.
While we are used to seeing ancient pieces, on which time has left its marks in the form of fractures, faded paint or missing parts, we mostly assume that we are seeing the piece in its finished form, as the artist intended to present it. Meeting an unfinished piece, however, is a completely different experience.
