Manipulations of Images & The Body
I recently came upon a light news item that caught my eye: following a partnership between Disney and Barneys department store, beloved Disney cartoon characters have been augmented to resemble fashion sketches: Though many of us in the fashion world are used to seeing these hyper-elongated bodies, impossibly willowy limbs, bodies whose legs consume 3/4...
Poverty and Power: Secondhand Clothes as Protest
Later this week I will be giving an extended lecture on the secondhand fashion market and countercultures that adopted thrifted clothes as political statements — focusing on Yippies, but touching upon the Beats — at this year’s Pop Culture Association symposium in Boston, MA. My panel will be on Thursday at 4:45pm, and there will...
The Monetary Value of Fashion
As you may or may not be aware, the auction of Debbie Reynolds’ extensive Hollywood costume collection was (not surprisingly) a smashing success, in that it set new new highs for what collectors would pay for literal fabric of Hollywood history. Items that have been reported on most have included: $4.6 million for Marilyn Monroe’s...
Symposium Recap: Authenticity in Yale’s “Urban Catwalk”
It was excitement and ultimate delight that I attended (and presented at) Yale’s “The Urban Catwalk” conference this past weekend. Though ostensibly the theme was street fashion, as with most conferences, this topic was expounded upon by a wide range of scholars from vastly different fields (performance studies, French history, literature, communications, etc.). More even...
Sebastian Smith, Fashion Photographer
I met this perfectly lovely — and dapper (he often wears a hat) — young man about a year ago at one of our favorite galleries, Chair and the Maiden. With more than a whiff of Helmut Newton, Sebastian Smith has managed to make a career of his passion: fashion photography. I picked his brain...
Subversion in Trompe L’oeil, Graffiti, and Fashion
Coming from an Art History background with all its unfortunate snooty and consumerist associations (fashion shares these themes, I’m afraid), I’ve recently become obsessed with its subculture offshoot, the publicly accessible graffiti (or “street art”) movement. Long fascinated by graffiti, I’ve recently gone on a binge, going out of my way to walk around Pilsen...
The Cult of Marilyn Monroe Celebrity
I have had Marilyn Monroe on the brain recently due to two rather under-publicized tidbits: Michelle Williams (1980 – ) will be playing Marilyn in an upcoming movie My Week With Marilyn, about the tense filming of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) with Laurence Olivier; and WWD recently informed me that Authentic Brands Group,...
First Ladies’ Dresses at the Smithsonian– lessons learned
I had the last minute opportunity to visit DC last week and since I hadn’t been there since my 6th grade field trip, I thought it was high time I checked out the capital again. Perhaps I was not walking in the right neighborhoods, but I was pretty disappointed with street life and the lack...
Age and Gender-Appropriate Fashion
A few months ago I discovered a video of 8 and 9 year-old girls in a national dance contest, athletically gyrating to the Beyoncé hit “Single Ladies” (a.k.a.”Put a Ring on It”). Prepare yourself: I am anything but a prude, but there was something distinctly unsettling in watching prepubescent girls dance around in fringed burlesque...
Grey Hair as Social Statement?
As a young woman who has atypically looked forward to turning shocking silver (I’ve even promised myself to grow my pixie haircut at that time to accentuate it), I’ve read with some curiosity but ultimate skepticism, the rash of articles and blog posts about the supposed trend of women embracing grey hair. The most recent...
Fashion of the Working Man
A recent NYTimes article on the latest Levi jeans ad campaign featuring not dead-eyed models in awkward sexualized positions, but real-life residents of Braddock, PA caught my eye. A continuation of last year’s “Go Forth” ad campaign, this one uses actual inhabitants of Braddock to show real workers in their natural habitat: a town that...
Bathing Suits, Technology and Morality
In weather like this (namely, 90+ degrees, little-to-no wind, and me without air conditioning), beachy escapes are on everyone’s mind. Following is a rough timeline of how women have historically bared their flesh — or not — to enjoy the sand and sun. Classical Times In Classical antiquity swimming and bathing was most often done...
Copyrights and Patents in the Fashion Industry
I recently watched the video presentation of Johanna Blakley who is involved with TED (a non-profit whose conferences unite the worlds of technology, entertainment, and design), and UCLA’s Norman Lear Center, which utilizes Entertainment as a lens through which to read world events and ideas, much as I use Fashion to do the same. I...
Fetishizing Military Gear
After seeing Gisele Bundchen’s latest Vogue shoot entitled “Call of Duty” in various military-inspired ensembles, my conflicted feelings about the sexifying of war gear swung hard and fast in the “that’s not cool” direction. Huffington Post presents these images with significantly less conflict: “let us know which is Gisele’s fiercest moment.” I should mention that...
The Secret Sexy Life of Zippers
After reading the recent NYTimes article highlighting Eddie Feibusch’s zipper business in New York’s Lower East Side, I was reminded of — what else? — the history of the not-so-humble zipper. This now-ubiquitous device that fastens and unfastens our pants, dresses, and bags, is a relatively recent invention, as far as the history of fashion...
Men’s “Feminine” Styles
I recently gave a lecture on cross-dressing to a terrific sociology class at FIT, and I had such ridiculous fun (and stress!) researching it that I thought I’d share with the blogosphere to spread the wealth. You don’t get the pleasure of my witty repartee, but you do get a decent, if slightly inferior, substitute....
The Politics of Mannequins, Part III – Mannequins in Art
Until the article I recently read, mannequins in their practical form held little interest for me; however mannequins in art have always attracted me, most likely due to my obsession with fashion coupled with my fascination with unsettling representations of people (and who doesn’t love to be unsettled?). Incorporating mannequins — invented to market and...
Must Disaster Fashion Photoshoots be Disastrous?