American Art, American Fashion. What is it, anyway?
As a native Cantabrigian, I read with interest and delight the NYTimes review of the newly opened, newly expanded American Wing of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, a museum I practically grew up in (my father still lectures there). I was especially intrigued by the following statement: “One can imagine arguments growing sharp in the...
A Different Take on Street Fashion Photography
A few months ago I had the delight of popping into the Met’s modestly-sized exhibition “Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein’s New York Photographs, 1950–1980.” From the Met’s website description: “Leon Levinstein (1910–1988), an unheralded master of street photography, is best known for his candid and unsentimental black-and-white figure studies made in New York...
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...
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...
John Waters on Fashion
A long standing fan of director / writer John Waters, I am delighted that the Pope of Trash is appearing with greater frequency in periodicals these days due to his new book Role Models. I’m going to brush aside the content of the book (though it looks awesome!) to concentrate on the style of Mr....
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...
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...
The Politics of Mannequins, Part II
Picking up from where I left off last week, I’m going to address mannequins’ evolution in the second half of the 20th century. The revolutionary ’60s came as a shock to the world, the American youth rebelling against the traditions of their conservative parents who desired normalcy and stability after the chaos of WWII. The...
The Politics of Mannequins, Part I
I happened to run across an old issue of Hue, FIT’s alumni magazine, and read a surprisingly interesting article on “The Life and Times of Mannequins” by Alex Joseph. Though I have not previously studied dress forms in depth, I have been mistaken for a mannequin (I spaced out in a flu-induced frozen position while...
Cleopatra & Egyptian Fashion in Film
Fashion inevitably looks to history to interpret and re-interpret previous fashion trends. At the recent SAG Awards, I noticed 2 Egyptian-influenced dresses, worn by Toni Collette and Nicole Kidman: As I’m never content to stay in the current era for long, let’s go back 100 years to trace a century of Egyptomania…. The Egyptian style...
Paper as Textile
I stumbled upon the contest Cheap-ChicWeddings.com sponsored for the most impressive wedding gowns made of — wait for it — toilet paper! Yes, this humble stuff is the focus of an annual challenge to use as the sole fabric of a wedding dress. I’m always interested to learn how technology affects textiles and by extension,...
Anatomical Fashion & Lady Gaga
As friends and family already know, I love me some anatomical charts, grotesque dissections of the intricate layers of the human body, old-timey skeletons and medical charts of muscle groups and the nervous system, etc. It appeals to my love of dissection in general, I think: peeling away layers of a body — or a...
The Original Vamps: Silent, Deadly, & Stylish
Occasionally fancying myself an exotic woman of mystery too, I have a special place in my heart for that early 20th century icon, The Vamp. When my friend (whose intelligent and fun horror blog And Now the Screaming Starts this is cross-posted on) suggested I write about them, I welcomed the opportunity to revisit some...
Who Inspired Michael Jackson’s Fashion?
In the wake of Michael Jackson’s recent sudden death, there has been a predictable spike in pictures, radio and videos runs, articles and blog posts about the star. We often have the tendency to think of style icons as Athena: “born,†emerging from Zeus’s head swathed in what was to be her trademark ensemble of...
Bicycle Chic & Athletic Aesthetics
You might have noticed, as I have, a proliferation of articles about “bicycle style†in recent months. Mayor Bloomberg has invested money in designating bike paths and adding bike racks to make New York friendlier to the traffic easing, eco-friendly transportation. Fashion has responded and, being the fashion culturalist I am, I’ve been slowly making...
The Cult of Marilyn Monroe Celebrity