Fashioning Black Femininity
While gender and fashion are distinct from one another, their abilities to signify, reflect, and shape each other are significant and often important sites of cultural meaning and definition.
Apr 2021 5
Feb 2021 22
Fashioning Black Queer Genders
Fashion and ‘fashioning’ remain crucial parts of gender expression and the performance of identity. Fashion’s potential to signify and convey identity in material form is comparable to the power of words to convey meaning in linguistic form.
Feb 2021 10
Fashion and the Body
The relationship between fashion and the body is integral to our understanding of our social and material lives.
Jan 2021 25
Black Fashion Exhibitions
The museum is an essential space within historiographical discourses because it facilitates, in part, the ways we collectively remember our pasts and the ways in which we create and curate our own histories.
Jan 2021 11
Fashioning Black Hair
Hair is an essential part of visual and cultural identity and this selection from our library explores representations of Black hair throughout art, fashion, and history.
Dec 2020 12
Ranavalona III: The Last Queen of Madagascar
The story of Ranavalona III (1861-1917), the last of the Malagasy queens, and the last monarch of the island nation of Madagascar, is punctuated by complex negotiations of power and colonial hegemony.
Dec 2020 7
Black Fashion in Documentary Film
This list explores moments of Black fashion history as they appear in documentary film.
Nov 2020 23
Spotlight on African Fashion
This week’s roundup centers fashion on the African continent. The canon of fashion history is one that often excludes non-white cultural producers who exist outside of Europe and the United States.
Nov 2020 23
Tignon
The tignon is an 18th century headdress with origins in Louisiana, the Spanish Colonial Gulf, the Caribbean, and West Africa. It is a kerchief that both free and enslaved women of African descent were mandated to wear in the colonies of...
Nov 2020 9
Fashion & Colonialism
Each of these sources analyzes the enduring legacies of European colonialism within the fashion system and the ways in which colonial knowledges have continued to influence hegemonic ideals of beauty, culture, and identity.
