(Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness
Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters, editors
A revelatory new approach to understanding fashion in America that focuses on the stories told by worn, imperfect, and ordinary clothes.
Expanding the history of American fashion, this volume highlights garments that carry material traces of everyday wearers’ bodies, such as stains, rips, tears, mending, and signs of hand-craftsmanship. In-depth examinations of ten case-study objects—ranging from activist Jae Jarrell’s Urban Wall Suit (ca. 1969) to an unknown child’s pair of sneakers found at a migrant pickup site in the Sonoran Desert (2009–10)—reveal the ways worn objects are witnesses to American history.
By foregrounding worn, ordinary, and imperfect garments, the essays in this volume respond to the fact that histories of American fashion have traditionally centered on mass-manufactured American sportswear, notable designers, whitewashed histories of Western wear, and the “American Look.” This canon, though familiar, stands starkly at odds with the lived realities of the American experience. Interviews with wearers and makers, family photographs, and detailed object photography illuminate absences and omissions in the dominant narratives of American fashion. (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness thus sheds new light on how fashion and dress have been used to shape and challenge constructs of American identity at the intersections of race, ethnicity, body size, ability, and gender over more than two centuries.
Table of Contents
Bard Graduate Center Director's Foreword
Susan Weber
Focus Project Director's Foreword
Deborah L. Krohn
Editor's Note
Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters
Prologue
José Blanco F.
(Re)Dressing American Fashion: An Introduction
Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters
(Re)Dressing the American Body: History, Witnessing, and Self-Fashioning
Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters
(Re)Dressing Curating: Displaying American Fashion and Dress
Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters
(Re)Dressing Citizenship: Fashion, Style, and the Body Politic
Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters
Object Dialogues
Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters
A Sharecopper's Jeans
Interview with Dean Hashimoto / Oral History Excerpts with Annie Bell Cheatham and James Eddie McCoy
Leo Baker's T-Shirt
Interview with Leo Baker
Jeri Ah-Be-Hill's Ensemble
Interview with Teri Greeves
Kaku Kumasaka's Jika-Tabi
Excerpts from Barbara F. Kawakami's Japanese Immigrant Clothing in Hawaii, 1855-1941
A Chicago Leathermans' Studded Briefs
Oral History Excerpts with Jack Rinella and Robert Maddox
Fath Davis Ruffins's Headwrap
Interview with Fath Davis Ruffins
Concha Sanchez's Gingham Apron
Interview with Anna Bermudez and Adrian Sanchez
A Child's Sneakers
Interview with Jason De León / Oral History Excerpts from the Undocumented Migration Project
Temple Grandin's Western Shirt
Interview with Temple Grandin
Jae Jarrell's Urban Wall Sui
Interview with Jae Jarrell
(Re)Dressing in Practice
Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters
History: Some Reflections on Access and Authorship
Jonthan Michael Square
Close Looking: Some Reflections on Methods and Practice-Based Research
Ellen Sampson
The Archive: Some Reflections on Collections Care and Cultural Preservation
Michelle McVicker
Checklist
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Photographic Credits
Other Details
ISBN
9780300279160
Page count
214 | color illustrations throughout
Publication date
April 2025
Binding
Softcover with flaps
