(Re)dressing American fashion: wear as witness

Abstract

"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 handcraftsmanship. 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."-- Front cover flap.

Contents

Bard Graduate Center director's foreword / Susan Weber -- Focus Project director's foreword / Deborah L. Krohn -- Editors' 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 sharecropper'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 leatherman's 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 ; Temple Grandin's western shirt / Interview with Temple Grandin ; Jae Jarrell's Urban Wall Suit / Interview with Jae Jarrell -- (Re)Dressing in practice / Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters -- History: some reflections on access and authorship / Jonathan 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.