Don't forget! Interesting stuff happening on a specific date on the calendar below this is just filler text to get the idea across.
To say 2016 was a big year for America would be a drastic understatement. The events of the year pushed our nation into an intense period of self-reflection and re-evaluating. With the shocking success of a businessman’s run for president, our culture was obsessed with exploring what America stands for and who gets to define contemporary patriotism.
It has come to my attention that communication technology has a profound influence on the lives of people, especially the younger generations. My hypothesis is that the increased use and reliance on gadgets such as smartphones creates a decrease in face-to-face social interaction and empathy, creating a world of virtual interactions and loneliness instead.
A hand-scrawled note reads: “Now that Fashion’s Gone to Hell And Dress has become neuter." The phrase floats alone in the center of a small note page—the type of thing one might expect to find today, coffee-stained and abandoned amid a mess of stir sticks and sugar crystals on a vacant table at Starbucks, except this particular note dates to a very pre-Frappuccino® era, written sometime around 1969 by the resident of apartment #429 of the famed bastion of New York bohemian culture, the Hotel Chelsea. It was written by the one-and-only Elizabeth Hawes.
In the late nineteenth century, there was steady coverage in The New York Times about the act of dress smuggling. This act, often referred to as "fashionable smuggling,” involved the practice of smuggling European-made gowns and dress goods into the U.S. Whether a quick report or an in-depth exposé, the focus of each story is smuggling's relationship with the women involved, and of the women who were reported to have smuggled.
It was an itsy bitsy, teenie weenie, yellow polka dot bikini…. This catchy tune is as much a part of the summertime for many of us as ice cream. Despite years of singing this song on my way to the pool, it was only once I began researching the bikini’s origins that I found the multiple links between this popular swimsuit style and mid-20th century military developments.
This essay looks at advertisements that appeared in three turn-of-the-century fashion magazines — exploring how the fashion industry in some ways participated in the perpetuation of normative gender roles, but in others created a more subversive counter-narrative.
Debating and dissecting Westbrook’s style has become a tradition and an ongoing concern for a wide swath of sportswriters, broadcasters, journalists, and fans. In general, however, whereas the sports media has often seen Westbrook’s style choices as a sign of inauthenticity, the fashion industry has almost unanimously embraced these same choices as sign of authenticity.
Since its rise to fame, Vetements and its post-Soviet aesthetic, has been embraced by streetwear aficionados and high fashion connoisseurs alike. Their ability to appeal to a broad range of audiences stems from the dichotomous approach they’ve taken to their business strategy and design sensibilities.
After almost a decade in the industry, Ethel began to envision an American fashion system that worked independently of French influence. For her, education was key. Her own early career was fraught with difficulty and self-described “heart-ache” as she lacked any formal training and had to learn the trade through trial and error.
Though the Cylinder suit jacket itself saw limited sales, Cardin used it to set a mass market template that allowed him to incorporate influences from outside the fashion capitals. Democratizing fashion in this way reinvigorated the menswear industry through the ideas it communicated: new-look masculinity, cultural inclusivity, and a massive generational shift.
Sabyasachi Mukherjee sells aura over object, lifestyle over product. He de-emphasizes the commerce of his business to a point where it is not even visible anymore. But conversely, the images used to advertise the products create a perceived sense of cultural authenticity that I call his “Colonial Dreamscape.”
When I reflect on luxury fashion, one of the last things I tend to think of is sustainability. This is not uncommon though, as while luxury fashion organizations commonly seek visibility and attention, sustainability is often not part of their raison d'être.
Alongside the continual expansion of the ready-made clothing industry, women’s national position was indeterminate and peripheral, situated as they were at the end of a twenty-year period that saw no legislation for women’s rights (between suffrage in 1945 and the amendment of the marriage law in 1965). Imagery in the fashion press and distribution in boutiques foregrounded this new clothing culture, and symbolized the potential for women to shape their selves and lifestyles during a time in which their autonomy and agency hung in the balance.
Possessing a peculiar manner of epistemic functioning, an invitation made out of a fabric sample, a press release written in the shape of a poem, or a blurred image of a garment printed in a catalogue can trigger sensorial knowledge about fashion.
With the word “cool” completely drained of meaning — used today in an excessive, inflationary way — it seems extraordinary that coolness can still be linked with specific garments and characteristics. Indeed, no other garment has been so continually associated for so long with coolness as the black leather jacket. At once, it is part of the fashion industry’s mass-market repertoire yet, barely having changed form over the last century, it stands as a classic symbol of affectlessness, individuality, and non-conformism.
