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...
Subversive Knitting
In preparation for the upcoming Textile Association of America symposium I’m presenting at later this week — “Textiles & Politics” symposium — I’ve been doing a lot of research on our country’s history of using yarn crafts — specifically knitting — as a political act rather than merely a domestic or social one. Primarily a...
Book Review: Boom! A Baby Boomer Memoir
Boom! A Baby Boomer Memoir, 1947-2022 by Ted Polhemus Lulu.com (January 2012) An anthropologist by degree, Ted Polhemus has written numerous books on style and/or subculture including Streetstyle (2010), Style Surfing: What to Wear in the 3rd Millennium (1996), The Body As a Medium of Expression (1975), Social Aspects of the Human Body (1978), among...
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...
Steal this Style: Yippies and Political Fashions!
I assume readers will agree that apparel can be a powerful tool of political and social dissent, such as the Communist / anarchistic subtext of Surreal fashions (see my earlier post). Costume has likewise been leveraged in political upheavals many times; for example Caroline Weber recently illuminated fashion politics in the 18th century with her...
Codes of Dress: Inclusionary or Exclusionary?
As most fashion historians (and, I would wager, even most non-fashion historians) accept, clothing is a clear way of identifying oneself as part of a culture, a sub-culture, a tribe. Most of the time, we think of these tribes as unifying, identifying people who listen to similar music, hang out in similar venues, perhaps come...
Hair Textiles and Gaga
We all know Gaga loves her wigs, but she also dabbles with clothes that resemble wigs, as with this LaVer dress she recently wore to a taping of The View: Gaga on The View, May 2011 LaVer couture hair dress, 2010 collection Since medieval times, locks of hair have been given to lovers as amulets,...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
Kirchner & the Berlin Street
One of the few advantages of working in midtown is that I am just a couple minutes jaunt away from the MoMA, and every once in awhile, I actually take my full hour lunch break to soak up some visual culture. Yesterday I fought my way through the rainy day museum-attending mob (I believe it’s...
“Punk Style:” An Interview with Monica Sklar