Don't forget! Interesting stuff happening on a specific date on the calendar below this is just filler text to get the idea across.
On August 9, 2014, one day after the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson, civil unrest ignited in Ferguson, Missouri. Many of the photographs published during the riots imagine Ferguson as a city on the verge of apocalypse, showing cars and civic buildings on fire as black bodies run through the streets crying and chanting that their lives matter.
I don’t know how I felt when I first tried the shirt on, but presumably, beyond the obvious fact that it was the right size, even at that tender age, there was a good fit between us, the unspoken sense of a partnership in the making, the magical realization that this will work, waiting to be confirmed and reinforced with each successive wearing.
Looking just a little bit like Captain Marvel helped me feel a bit like her, which in turn helped me feel like my favorite version of myself—the one that finds in superheroes the courage to be critical, even of things I love, and that finds in superheroic style the courage to be seen while I do it.
“You know what we did one time? I can’t believe it… we invented bell-bottoms,” the innkeeper admitted, shaking his head and laughing. It was startling to hear, even from Carlo Casini, a natural raconteur with a long career as a serial entrepreneur in the storied Monte Argentario peninsula of Tuscany.
It’s rare for an exhibition to outlive its subject, but the record-breaking show would continue on, reaching twelve cities and drawing over two million visitors. The ability for the show to continue without much change—even keeping the title in present tense—stems from how the curators focused on Bowie’s creative influences.
Transformable fashion is an umbrella term for any clothing item designed so that its appearance can be easily altered, either by the wearer or by a specialized service provider.
Since the European Middle Ages, religious dress and ornamentation have gone hand-in-hand with the lush fabrics and craftsmanship now associated with haute couture.
Ruby Bailey, Zelda Wynn Valdes, and Ann Lowe were three very different designers, united by their experiences as black female designers in mid-century New York City. Despite their differing design aesthetics, they faced the same racial and gender discrimination in their efforts to make names for themselves as designers in a burgeoning fashion capital.
In an industry that doesn’t like to talk about race (let alone blackness), it’s rare for designers, who identify as black, to readily insert identity politics into their brands. The fear, perhaps, emerges from the fact that doing so could pigeonhole them into a singular narrative of blackness – one that could result in them being unattractive to customers, investors, and the media.
Painter Alex Katz is so closely attuned to the fashion scene, specifically to the New York fashion scene, that it could be said that he has at times created or at least anticipated major shifts in it. Even his "sweet, unassuming" paintings have a predictive quality to them. Indeed, Katz and fashion form a kind of symbiosis.
Whether the paper doll is a girl or boy, celebrity or historical figure, these “stylish” pieces are advertisements for the latest fashion trends. Beyond play, they are objects that have taught children, throughout time, how to dress for life.
While she alludes to common archetypes of femininity in her photographs, the photographs of the Countess are more than just a submission to pre-scripted definitions of womanhood.
As one of the culture industry’s principal soothsayers, Edelkoort certainly looks the part: with her cropped, grey-streaked hair, red lips, and signature 80s minimalist attire, she exudes a kind of “arty” knowingness in her daily uniform that her clients have come to conflate with her trend forecasting ability.
Unpacking how masculinity is embodied in images from HIV prevention material targeting a gay male audience, this essay explores how, through their streaming and modulation with the viewer’s body, such images become affective, thereby potentially informing our ideas of and identifications with the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
The textile storage space is a place of gentle, gloved movements and careful, reverent handling of myriad artifacts. It’s a place where, currently, conservation tasks lag and preservation is maintained at a bare minimum, aimed to suspend time and deter the real world practicalities of change, decay, and age.
As a fashion and textile historian who works closely with the Fashion Calendar archive, I am exceedingly privileged to not only have access to a previously un-investigated source that is so rich with information, but to be able to interact with the maker of the archive herself. This enables the archive to be continuously dynamic, since Finley’s knowledge about American fashion history is vast and mostly based on experience.
Throughout history, dance performers have pushed the boundaries of acceptable dress. At a time when it was considered inappropriate for a woman to expose an ankle or calf, on stage doing so was, conversely, required. For the sake of improving technical skills and freeing the body to move, ankles, calves, and knees started to emerge, until eventually the entire leg was visible.
In New York City, there exists a small community of heterosexual men who seek to learn flirting and dating skills in self-help communities called “seduction communities.” Playing a key role in their social construction of identity, fashion makeovers aim to help these sexually-frustrated men embody charismatic masculine identities.
My bouncy curls that were the product of a mixed heritage and symbolized a forward-looking world were seemingly not to be celebrated, at least not by the media and fashion industry. The fleeting moments of praise were shrouded in fetishism, and the sense of “otherness” was consistently present. Ironically, however, I continued to respect a system that did not respect me back.
