NYT's Stylish Profs Spread Ignores People of Color (The Most Fashionable of Them All)

Tanisha C. Ford takes to task the NY Times' recent "Class Acts" spread on stylish academics (which featured only white profs). In her article Haute Couture In The ‘Ivory Tower’ Ford states:

"The spread presumes that when a professor walks into a classroom she is a blank slate, a model to be adorned in fine clothing and given an identity. The reality is that scholars of color, women, and other groups whose bodies are read as non-normative have never been able to check their race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation at the door.

Course on Native Adornment

I will be teaching a class at the University of New Mexico this semester for the second 8 weeks.

The class will focus on Native American adornment; the first half of the class will look at traditional attire, and the second half will investigate the contemporary Native fashion world - sign up!

(flier made by graphic artist Keith Grosbeck of Future Phased Design)

Video | My Presentation on Native Fashion

In case you missed, here is a video of my presentation last week at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe on Native Designers of High Fashion -

Of Another Fashion

Check out this blog, Of Another Fashion - An alternative archive of the not-quite-hidden but too often ignored fashion histories of U.S. women of color.

Here's one of their posts:

This is one of my favorite photographs from Margaret Wood’s Native American Fashion: Modern Adaptations of Traditional Designs (Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1981).

Here, the model is wearing a modern adaptation of a 19th century Navajo “Bil” or “Tilma” dress traditionally made of woven wool material.