Making it Work: Kim Jenkins and The Fashion and Race Database
Photo credit: CEOPortrait.com
Kim Jenkins has recently hired an assistant. This person is going to help organize and streamline the many overlapping parts of Kim’s work as an assistant professor of fashion, a consultant to the fashion industry who makes frequent appearances in international media, and, most pertinently to this story, the founder and lead researcher of The Fashion and Race Database, the groundbreaking digital humanities project that launched in its newest iteration this summer. And while I feel a small thrill at corresponding with my friend via her assistant (I feel like a Hollywood hanger-on, a role I was honestly born to play), the need for this new hire makes very clear just how much work is required for Kim to provide as much as she does to the field of fashion studies.
This column we call ‘Making it Work’ was Kim’s brainchild to begin with, back when she was an editor at FSJ, endlessly curious about the work being done by our colleagues. The ‘Making it Work’ interview identifies someone working in fashion/studies and asks not only how they navigate their career but why they love their work and where they get their motivation or support. It therefore strikes me as totally appropriate that we should now turn this lens on Kim herself, as she’s not only worked exceptionally hard to build an exemplary career as a scholar and public intellectual, but she has so much to share about the deeper sources of her drive to contribute to the public discourse on fashion and culture, as well as to improve the conditions for marginalized people working within it.
When I met Kim on the first day of orientation at Parsons School of Design in 2011, I had been asked to lead the incoming first year students in the MA Fashion Studies program on a tour of the campus and Greenwich Village (I was starting my second year and was therefore an extremely sophisticated expert). Many of them had been in New York City for a matter of days, and were very shyly glancing around at each other before looking back down at their shoes. Kim was different; in a bright cardigan and beaded statement necklace, with her impressively upright posture, she greeted me right away in the friendly and warm but professional manner that now makes her an impressive but approachable presence for students and clients. At the happy hour that ended the tour, she articulated a clear, precise vision for where this program was going to lead her: Kim already knew she wouldn’t be satisfied in the cloistered halls of academia and wanted to take her research into the public square, to be accessible to people beyond this hyper-specialized world of peer review and symposia. Kim had, even then, a remarkable clarity of vision as to what she was propelling herself towards.
I’m going to skip over the details of what Kim describes as “in some ways, the most beautiful years of [her] life,” the period following graduation in which she built her scholarly practice as a part-time lecturer at Parsons and Pratt Institute and her public profile through innumerable hosting and interviewing gigs, panels, and fashion media appearances. I’m doing so partly because I want to focus more on her present and future, and also because her story has already been covered in a number of places I’m happy to point you to.
“Kim already knew she wouldn’t be satisfied in the cloistered halls of academia and wanted to take her research into the public square, to be accessible to people beyond this hyper-specialized world of peer review and symposia.”
Despite the recollected beauty of that time, the work could be punishing. Kim describes a low point, five years into teaching, when she just wasn’t sure she could, or should, keep at it. She was in her mid-30s, living with roommates in Bushwick, commuting by bus, working a side job at a vintage boutique, spending seven days a week teaching, prepping, grading, researching, planning and hosting a series of public lectures, not sleeping nearly enough, not yet seeing the pay-off to so much sacrifice. Heading into the summer, she stuck a Post-It to the wall above her desk with the dollar amount she knew she needed to make to avoid asking for help from her family—an amount that seemed impossibly far-off given her patched-together salary. She told a friend how seriously she was considering abandoning fashion studies altogether.
Kimberly Jenkins hosting a panel discussion, 'Fashion, Culture & Justice: A NYFW Dialogue,' Fall 2017. The panel was conceptualized by Jenkins and designer Becca McCharen-Tran and was commemorated by The New School as 'Dialogues that have shaped The New School for 100 years' (The New School at Medium.com, August 2019). Photo credit: Jonathan Grassi.
Then, Black Twitter noticed something a little off about a Gucci turtleneck [1]. The firestorm that ensued led to, among much else, a visit by CEO Marco Bizzarri to The New School, where he was to be interviewed by Tim Blanks. At this point, Kim was teaching her ultra-popular Fashion and Race course, and was brought in by the school to join the conversation with Bizzarri as to what had gone wrong (to “perform a bit of an intervention,” as she laughingly puts it). Within weeks she was hired by the brand as an in-house educator to inform corporate and design employees about, as Robin Givhan of the Washington Post put it at the time, “the role that race plays in perceptions of identity, beauty and intrinsic human value”[2]. The job, which seemed to come out of nowhere, brought both a boost to her public profile—making her known to journalists like Givhan and Vanessa Friedman at the New York Times, who still call her up for comment on all manner of things—and a renewed sense of purpose with respect to her bringing the knowledge and expertise she’d accrued to a population outside of elite design schools. While that job was dazzling, and there seemed to be a genuine commitment to doing better at Gucci, it wasn’t made into a permanent position. Real stability still eluded her.
In 2019, Kim applied for the first time to a tenure-track assistant professor job, at the School of Fashion at Ryerson University in Toronto (My hometown! Go Raps!). The reason she was able to confidently do so was that their job posting explicitly stated their desire to remove conventional barriers to this type of academic position—namely, a PhD—in favor of prioritizing candidates with proven excellence in teaching and service. The way this posting openly acknowledged but rejected its role in gatekeeping was an important reminder that norms aren’t law: if one school can open the door to people with diverse qualifications, they all can. They just usually don’t. To their great credit, Ryerson Fashion saw the immense value in having someone like Kim join them: someone committed to students, committed to justice, and with a talent for making complex ideas about dress and culture accessible to people who need to hear them.
One of the ways Kim has seen Ryerson materialize their support for her work is through their funding of The Fashion and Race Database. As has been recounted in much press this year, the Database began as the Fashion and Race Syllabus, a joint effort with Kim’s Parsons peer Rikki Byrd. The intention was to gather as much material as possible about the intersection of fashion and race, since the topic was sorely lacking on all other fashion studies syllabi. It gathered sources on not just the Black experience of fashion and dress, but histories of Latinx, Arab, Asian, and Jewish dress and fashion cultures, among others. When she was hired at Ryerson, the financial support they offered to the project allowed her to hire a web developer who could bring her vision to life.
Screenshot of The Fashion and Race Database, an online platform to decentralize and decolonize fashion, founded in 2017 by Kimberly Jenkins. Art credit: Fabiola Jean-Louis. Image credit: Kimberly Jenkins.
Knowing she couldn’t do all that needed to be done alone, she contacted Rachel Kinnard, a friend from Parsons and fellow former FSJer, the type of person who listens carefully to five people brainstorm 30 ideas and instantly identifies the best one and how to execute it, then gives each person the list of tasks best suited to their abilities. Exactly who you want for a multifaceted project with a ton of potential that just needs a clear plan of action. Kim then sought out research assistants via Ryerson’s job boards to help with not just gathering sources from the far corners of scholarship, but with writing entries to the site’s content streams, including the ‘Objects that Matter,’ ‘Profiles,’ and ‘Library’ sections, which feature garment histories, biographies of BIPOC fashion figures, and helpful summaries of books and other media. These assistants (Adriana Hill and Safia Sheikh in the first round, now Kai Marcel and Laura Beltrán Rubio) have brought their own areas of expertise and interest to the job, finding freedom to research and write about topics that move them, while gaining experience developing a major digital humanities project and helping to “build the house as we’re moving in,” as Kim describes it. Having planted a fairly modest seed years ago, Kim is finding immense affirmation in seeing these other people (her assistants as well as the site’s guest contributors) take ownership of her idea and work to sustain and grow it.
Kim sees the Database like a startup, in need of not just a great product but also careful management and a sustainable income stream. What’s been especially important to her in the process of expanding from the original site to this more multi-pronged business is to resist and avoid the exploitative models of the academic system, and to instead create a new type of self-sustaining resource that also offers opportunities for paid research and writing. As she says, they can sleep easy knowing they’re supporting writers and researchers, many of whom are in their early careers. The mission of the database has become not just to broaden fashion history and theory in terms of resources, but to create a safe space for BIPOC that rewards their work financially.
Kimberly Jenkins giving a lecture that juxtaposes two historically relevant covers of Vogue. This photo was taken during The Fashion and Justice Workshop, hosted by Jenkins and Dr. Jonathan M. Square at Columbia College in Chicago. 2019. Photo credit: Jacqueline Wayne Guite.
Though Ryerson does provide some funding, the growth of the site means more is needed. Through a stroke of luck (or maybe something less capricious like a well connected network of dedicated professionals), a student in a fashion graduate program in New York reached out with her desire to help gather funding for the FRD. This person happened to be married to a celebrity, and that celebrity was glad to harness their social media for a donation-matching campaign, and the rest is history: more than $50,000 raised for the ongoing work of the Database team! Further to that end, Kim’s connections in the fashion industry, built up over years of hustle in New York, are paying off too, in the form of partnerships like Holt Renfrew’s sponsorship of the Fashion and Race Database Conversation Series, which launched this month.
There’s a complicated aspect to the Database’s visibility that goes beyond the evident work, inspiration, and goodwill behind it, and that’s timing. Having already planned to re-launch in summer 2020, Kim couldn’t (and would never have wanted to) predict that it would become a season of global racial reckoning. As she expressed to a colleague, it’s not lost on her that she was deemed worthy of a blue checkmark on Instagram because of increased engagement after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and the movement that arose to protest their deaths and those of too many other Black people at the hands of police in the U.S.. Of course, her profile rising is both a result of and an opportunity to continue educating more people, but that responsibility is not neutral, not just another job duty. What’s increasingly expected of her is intense emotional labor, based on a tacit belief that she should be able to digest and contextualize trauma in order to help other people through it in real time.
Kim is not alone as a scholar of color facing these increased expectations of their labor in this moment of racial crisis and societal evolution. In every field and industry, surely, there are increased calls for BIPOC individuals to comment upon, make sense of, and suggest solutions to discrimination and injustices in their particular milieu, which are—it should go without saying—not their responsibility to fix. At the very least, if we’re going to keep insisting on this work, can we not account for and compensate it as job hours?
Academics on the tenure track are expected to teach, publish their own research, be available to students, colleagues, and advisees for myriad requests, and provide additional service to their school and discipline in various forms. For anyone who’s labored in the part-time trenches, these responsibilities might seem welcome in exchange for dental insurance, a pension, even just the knowledge of a job waiting for you in six months. And the exchange is fair on those terms. But the ongoing experience of scholars of color, particularly our Black colleagues, makes clear that these expectations are not distributed equitably. What happens when “making yourself available to students” means counseling every Black student in your department through trauma you are simultaneously experiencing yourself? What about when “service” means fielding requests for endless panels on diversity, equity, and inclusion, being tasked with solving the very lack of representation that made you the only person your institution could ask?
In the pandemic context, this lopsided set of expectations is even more apparent, as teachers of color are shouldering more child and elder care, more grief and loss in their communities, and increased risk as the result of medical racism. Still, the expectations for faculty remain the same across the board. It’s a prime example of the difference between equality and equity: expecting the same from white and non-white scholars demonstrates a belief in equality—to do any less would be to imply that scholars of color are less capable. But a more equitable model would recognize the extra labor of inhabiting a racialized identity in academia. Though Kim herself speaks of the nourishment she finds in supporting Black students, including through her faculty advisor role for the Black Fashion Students Association, and credits the School of Fashion for recognizing her extra labor, she also states clearly and plainly, “I’ve been dealing with a whirlwind of emotional labor, and I do need support, and I know I’m not the only one.”
Kimberly Jenkins arrives at the Gucci show during Milan Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2019/20 on February 20, 2019 in Milan, Italy. (Feb. 19, 2019 - Source: Getty Images Europe).
There is, of course, hope and comfort to be found in connecting with other people, which, in spite of being holed up in her apartment in Toronto anticipating at least another semester of online teaching, continues. She loves to learn through podcasts and audiobooks—she particularly recommends Caste by Isabel Wilkerson—and she finds community and solace in speaking with friends, students, and online followers who reach out often to tell her how much her work has meant to them. And there is much satisfaction and joy in witnessing herself develop as a thinker and communicator. Reflecting on the trajectory of her academic career specifically, Kim says, “I find that now compared to two years ago, four years ago, everything is coming together, that things flow out of me, and that I like the way I sound.” The “everything” she means is her own life of learning, an ongoing story that centers fashion but doesn’t shelter it away from the rest of the world, and one that incorporates her personal experiences with not just dress but academia, popular media, art, and the daily realities of life as a Black woman on this planet.
I want very much to do justice to Kim’s story and her work by suggesting that we, her colleagues (and particularly her non-Black colleagues) use what she’s given us in the form of The Fashion and Race Database to take some of the onus off of her and other fashion scholars of color. Let’s read, share, and use the material in the Database. If you’ve inherited a fashion history syllabus with exclusively Western examples, rip it up and start again. In fact, don’t write another syllabus without including work from the ‘Library’ section. Have your students watch and comment on a video from the site’s extensive ‘Lectures and Panels’ section. If they can’t get to a museum during the pandemic, send them on a virtual field trip to the ‘Objects That Matter’ section and have them discover the Áo Dài and the Dastaar, or, when they can go back in person, insist that they study a collection of Indigenous or “ethnic” dress as the objects of fashion they are. If you’re the one responsible for a costume collection, give the last two centuries of European stuff a rest and figure out what you should acquire and display to better represent the population. As a matter of fact, look into what you might have through ill-gotten gains and think about giving it back.
We’re now many months post-black square, post-statements of solidarity with the movement for Black lives, and we’re still learning how well fashion brands, universities, museums, and individuals are actually going to show up for people of color. As Kim says, “This is a long game. I can’t teach you to overturn racism in your company in a weekend workshop. So where are you going to be as the months pass, and are you going to keep trying to take shortcuts?” Real leadership and vision are required at the top of organizations large and small, as is a willingness to invest in complex solutions. The same is true for each of us.
Notes
[1] Madeline Holcombe, “Gucci apologizes after social media users say sweater resembles blackface,” CNN, February 8, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/07/us/gucci-blackface-sweater/index.html.
[2] Robin Givhan, “‘I was the person who made the mistake’: How Gucci is trying to recover from its blackface sweater controversy,” The Washington Post, May 7, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/i-was-the-person-who-made-the-mistake-how-gucci-is-trying-to-recover-from-its-blackface-sweater-controversy/2019/05/06/04eccbb6-6f7d-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html.
