Heike Jenss 

Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture
Bloomsbury

Image courtesy of Bloomsbury

We’re proud to congratulate Heike Jenss on her newest published research. Jenss is an Assistant Professor in the MAFS program with a focus on fashion and temporality.

Based on in-depth ethnographic research including participant observation and interviews with sixties enthusiasts in Germany, who relocate British mod style into the twenty-first century, Jenss examines the practices and experiences that are part of the sartorial remembering of “the sixties,” from hunting flea markets and eBay, to the affect of material and mediated memories on vintage wearers.

Jenss offers unique insights into the fashioning of time, cultural memory, and modernity, tracing the history and current appeal of vintage in fashion and youth culture, and asking: what kind of experiences of temporality and memory are enacted through fashion? How have evaluations of second-hand clothes shifted in the twentieth century? Fashioning Memory provides a unique insight into the diverse use of fashion as a memory mode and asks how style is remembered, performed, transformed, and reinvested across time, place, and generation. – See more at the Bloomsbury.

Aria Darcella
KATIE MCCURDY AND KATHY LO ARE NEVER GOING HOME

Image courtesy of Opening Ceremony

Second-year student Aria Darcella reviews the photographs and opening night of the exhibition Never Going Home by Katie McCurdy and Kathy Lo for Opening Ceremony’s blog.

Never Going Home spans the globe, capturing glimpses from Thailand to Ibiza, New Mexico to Niagara Falls. While the images were clearly taken by professional photographers, there is a certain personal quality that linked them—as if they were the shots taken before, after, and in-between the snaps of posing family members, that are hidden on the roll of film. – See more at Opening Ceremony.

Rikki Byrd
This Designer Stopped Everyone in Their Tracks With a Fashion Show About Police Brutality

Image courtesy of Mic

Second-year student Rikki Byrd attended the Pyer Moss show during New York Fashion Week and wrote a review for Mic.

“If you’re going to put me in this ‘black designer’ category, at least let me tell a story,” Jean-Raymond said.

It’s serious business, and the somber tone of the crowd reflected the difficulty of reliving the brutality. What was evident in the designer’s disposition after the show, however, was his confidence. As he laughed and joked with friends, hugged his niece and amiably shook the hands of strangers, it was clear that this show was Jean-Raymond’s contribution to breaking some of the chains that have shackled, and continue to shackle, black bodies.

“I feel a little freer after this,” he said. – See more at Mic.

Erika Butler and Lauren Sagadore
Global Circuits of Fashion and Beauty Symposium Review
International Journal of Fashion Studies

Image courtesy of Intellect Books

MAFS alumnus Erika Butler (‘15) and Lauren Sagadore (‘15) contribute their review of the Global Circuits of Fashion and Beauty Symposium–which took place at New York University in the Spring–to Volume 2, Issue 2 of International Journal of Fashion Studies. Purchase the newest issue here.

Erika Butler in the Man Repeller
Dispatch from Paris: Chanel and Valentino

MAFS alumni Erika Butler (‘15) was interviewed by Man Repeller on a piece about appropriation in Valentino’s Milan Fashion Week runway show.

Here’s one to get you started that a writer named Erika Butler wrote to me: if your collection is a celebration of African culture, close the show with black women. See more at Man Repeller.

Eliza Dillard
I Asked 18 Tinder Guys “Netflix and Chill?”
Styleite

Image courtest of Styleite

Eliza Dillard puts popular culture to the test in a piece on the newest phrase “Netflix and Chill”? to gage responses from male Tinder users.

I was curious, though. Was this an actual 21st Century mating call or just another overused phrase to throw on a t-shirt like “on fleek” or “yas queen” that people don’t actually say when they want to be taken seriously?

So, I put the phrase to the test. I sent 18 Tinder guys “Netflix and chill?” requests just to see what would happen. I’ll admit I felt absolutely ridiculous, like an Amy Poehler trying to fit in with The Plastics level of desperation to be relevant in Tinder culture. See more at Styleite.

Author: Rikki Byrd