The American Everyday: Resistance, Revolution & Transformation symposium, hosted by the Columbia College Chicago Fashion Studies Department, was held on Saturday February 15, 2020. American Everyday focused on the everyday, participants were asked to think beyond the constructs of high fashion and haute couture.

Building on the recent interest in “everyday life” in the academy in a range of areas including sociology, cultural studies, gender studies and spatial studies, this symposium offers the first opportunity to bring this lens to Fashion Studies and to consider how and why the everyday offers a context for new approaches and ideas.

Drawing upon the insight that fashion is an increasingly integral part of everyday life in the long twentieth century, this symposium does not regard fashion—an institution that exemplifies the tenets of exclusion, aspiration and rarity—and the everyday as diametrically opposed concepts, but rather, as mutually reinforcing. Key questions that this symposium therefore seeks to address include, “How does fashion manifest in the everyday?” and its inverse, “How does the everyday manifest fashion?”

American Everyday featured presentations by MAFS alumni Lauren Downing Peters, Anya Kurenaya, Sara Idacavage, Fiona Dieffenbacher, Alla Eizenberg, Laura Snelgrove and current MAFS student Rocio Sanchez and poster presentations by MAFS alum Emilia Boulton and current students Tzuni Lopez and Maegan Stracy.

American Everyday was convened by Hazel Clark, PhD, Professor of Design Studies and Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design and Lauren Downing Peters, PhD, Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies Columbia College Chicago and MAFS alum.