Past Fashion Culture Programs

Friday, December 3, 2021
11:00 am EST

The Museum at FIT’s 25th fashion symposium Stilettos to Sneakers: A Virtual Shoe Symposium brought together scholars and curators and their new research on the social and cultural significance of shoes. Shoes have played an important role in human society for millennia, but interest in them has grown exponentially in the past few decades with Americans—especially women—buying more shoes. A growing cohort of men have begun collecting sneakers. This symposium explored the evolving significance of shoes over the centuries—in real life and in the cultural imagination. In this way, we hoped to show the many ways in which shoes matter to us.

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Fashion journalist, author, and critic Alexander Fury and MFIT Curator Colleen Hill discuss Fury’s latest book, "Vivienne Westwood: The Complete Collections" (Yale University Press, 2021). The conversation includes an overview of highlights from Fury’s personal collection of fashion, which includes designs by Westwood, John Galliano, Christian Lacroix, among others. 

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October 4, 2021

Uruguayan-born fashion designer Gabriela Hearst launched her eponymous label, in which products are made with care and detail, in fall 2015. For Hearst, tradition is more important than trend. There is a purpose to every piece she creates; she calls her works "honest luxury." She is the winner of the 2016/2017 International Woolmark Prize for Womenswear and the 2020 CFDA American Womenswear Designer of the Year Award.

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Artists and performers—from Marcel Duchamp and Fanny Brice to Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain—all helped make secondhand fashion a visual marker for youth in revolt. Jennifer Le Zotte’s book, titled "From Goodwill to Grunge" (UNC Press, 2017), looks at how clothing, style, and commerce came together to change American culture and examines how secondhand goods sold at thrift stores, flea markets, and garage sales came to be both profitable and culturally influential. Le Zotte traces the origins and meanings of “secondhand style” and explores how buying pre-owned clothing went from a signifier of poverty to a declaration of rebellion. Considering buyers and sellers from across the political and economic spectrum, Le Zotte shows how conservative and progressive social activists—from religious and business leaders to anti-Vietnam protesters and drag queens—shrewdly used the exchange of secondhand goods for economic and political ends.

Jennifer Le Zotte is in conversation with Colleen Hill.

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MFIT Assistant Curator Elizabeth Way, editor of the book "Black Designers in American Fashion" (Bloomsbury, 2021), and authors Kristen E. Stewart, Katie Knowles, and Darnell Jamal Lisby discuss the significance of Black American fashion makers from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century. Black designers have always impacted American fashion culture, and these scholars' works reveal their erased histories. 

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