(Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness

Join us as we celebrate (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness, an ongoing, object-based research project that presents a new framework for understanding fashion in America. This evening of dynamic conversations will feature many of the contributors to this exciting multimedia project—which includes a new publication, an online platform, and student-produced digital media (all published by Bard Graduate Center). Co-organizers Emma McClendon and Lauren Downing Peters will share the scope and goals for their project, which seeks to expand the canon of American fashion by centering worn, imperfect, and ordinary clothes—garments that carry material traces of everyday wearers’ bodies, such as stains, rips, tears, mending, and signs of handcraftsmanship. (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness thus models a new approach to fashion history focused on wear and the wearer in order to illuminate absences and omissions in the dominant narratives of American fashion.

Emma McClendon is assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John’s University and PhD candidate at Bard Graduate Center. While associate curator at the Museum at FIT from 2011–20, she curated numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions including Yves Saint Laurent + Halston: Fashioning the 70s (2015), Denim: Fashion’s Frontier (2016), and The Body: Fashion and Physique (2019). Recent publications include Power Mode: The Force of Fashion (Skira, 2019), and (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness (BGC, 2025).

Lauren Downing Peters, PhD, is associate professor of fashion studies and director of the Fashion Study Collection at Columbia College Chicago. Her interdisciplinary research explores the entanglements of dress, the body, and identity, with a particular emphasis on plus-size fashion and standardized sizing; twentieth-century American fashion; and fashion sustainability. Her publications include Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry (Bloomsbury, 2023), Fashion in American Life (Bloomsbury, 2024), and (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness (BGC, 2025).

Jonathan Michael Square is assistant professor in Black visual culture at Parsons School of Design, the New School, New York. He has a PhD in history from New York University, an MA from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BA from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Previously, he taught in the committee on degrees in history and literature at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was a fellow at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He curated the exhibition Past Is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery (2022–23) at the Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis, and is currently organizing Almost Unknown: The Afric-American Picture Gallery (2025–26) at the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library, Delaware. A proponent of the power of social media as a platform for radical pedagogy, he founded and runs the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.

José Blanco F. is associate professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. He is coauthor with Raúl J. Vázquez-López of the recently published Dress, Fashion, and National Identity in Puerto Rico and the soon to be published Global Perspectives in Fashion and Dress. He is the editor of the fifth edition of The Meanings of Dress (2024). He has contributed chapters to several books and published in journals including Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion; Fashion Theory; Dress; and Fashion, Style & Popular Culture.

Dean Hashimoto is a collector of vintage blue jeans and is interested in how they may contribute to our understanding about the historical development of denim clothing. Dean is a physician and a lawyer. He is a medical director in workplace health at the Mass General Brigham as well as a visiting professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a professor of law at Boston Law School.

Michelle McVicker is associate collections specialist at the Antonio Ratti Textile Study and Storage Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She previously worked at El Museo del Barrio, the Museum at FIT, and the Costume Institute. Her research interests include how material culture, specifically clothing, embodies Latinx representation within the US.