As a final project for the MA Fashion Studies program’s Fashion Curation course, led by Jessica Glasscock, students were asked to build a video virtual exhibition using widely available digital collections such as those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress, as well as contemporary fashion from the Parsons MA Fashion Design and Society’s digital collections and other designer resources. The resulting work covers a wide range of fashion studies topics and serves as a laboratory for exploration and teaching through online collections.

The Origin of Transparency explores the idea of transparency as “see-throughness” throughout the history of dress. The examination of transparent dress as portrayed in different art forms and fashionable materials brings to light discussions surrounding visibility and identity of the clothed body. Clothing by itself carries loaded meanings, yet the clothed body conveys a much more complex message of the dress and of the self.

Body norms are institutionally enforced. Be it in the museum, in the fashion industry, or in the field of science, institutional spaces imbue particularities of the body with value. Institutionalized Teeth bridges the gaps between each of these institutional spaces by considering the role of scientific thought on the fashionable norms of teeth from a structural perspective that decentralizes the museum as the primary means of exhibiting critical thought.

The Jacquard loom was the textile industry’s first connection to the digital world. IBM’s website credits the success of their first computations to Joseph Marie Jacquard, calling his work “an integral part of 20th century data processing machines.” This connection would set a precedent for textile processes to be used across technological disciplines for the coming digital age. Each process holds multiple benefits; Fashion designers seek out processes for their aesthetic value while textile engineers experiment with performance. New technologies in textiles have allowed many disciplines to improve their products’ performance double fold, meaning they improve multiple qualities of the product at once.

Black men are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible to wider society, Black dandyism is about confounding expectations of how black men should look through an idolized European lens. The black narrative is almost void and stripped back solely focusing on an exploited figure used for personal gain and entertainment. One may argue the fact that dandyism is inherently superficial, but when applied in social terms, it isn’t just about style; it transcends into politics.

“To Wear or Not to Wear” is a reflection on the shift from corset to brassiere. Throughout history, continuous change in cultural mores and aesthetic preferences has affected what women wore around their breasts. Amid the endless chase after the fashionable dress and ideal figure, corsets and brassieres have become women’s “silent” words.

Although this 19-century divine beauty died in the last year of her century, her carefully-choreographed personal mythology reaches across the boundaries of time and territory. She still glitters exotic and unyielding shining light.

BIAS, the Journal of Fashion Studies is a student-run publication originating from Parsons School of Design, The New School. BIAS uniquely fills a void in fashion studies scholarship and practice by supporting and showcasing the work of rising fashion scholars, artists, and designers. It is a platform for everyone to engage in fashion practice and theory.

Fashion is often synonymous with the beginning of something; new trends are integral to the production and dissemination of fashion, but to propel the new forward, does the old have to die? When we chose the topic of Fashion and Death for the seventh issue of BIAS, we had no indication of where we would be in the first few months of 2020. At the time of writing, the BIAS team is working remotely while universities move to digital classrooms, social events embedded in the everyday experience are indefinitely postponed and countless industries attempt to prepare for the unknown effects of a global pandemic. We are left to ask; how will this change the fashion industry? Will the established, outdated fashion calendar finally buckle under decreased fabric supply and limited production capacity? Will independent and small-scale designers lead us through uncertain times to more sustainable outcomes? Or will isolation measures further sediment the dominance of multi-national conglomerates?

Death is inherent to fashion; a consistent re-fashioning of the self leaves behind outdated identities while an everpresent obsession with youthfulness neglects the aged while privileging the new. In this issue our contributors examine the physical, emotional, cultural and spiritual implications of death, the inevitable rebirth and its multiple manifestations. Fashion Studies is by nature an interdisciplinary field, it exists at the intersections and margins, it encompasses academia and theory, fashion practioners, designers, artists, creative writers and consumers. In this time of imminent change, we aim to provide a brief moment of interchange and collaboration when community seems to be the only constant.

MA Fashion Studies Students and BIAS Co-Managing Editors, Nate and Maegan, give us an inside look at the new BIAS Journal, Issue 7.

Building on “Fashion Studies: Key Concepts” and “Fashion, History and Mediation,” completed in the first semester, this course reflects critically on empirical research as a practice and a process. Students will engage in methodologies that are employed in fashion studies and reflect on how research findings are produced and interpreted. Informed by this critical methodological analysis they will pursue their own case-studies in which they research and interpret fashion as material culture and cultural practice. Students will develop a field study of fashion and engage in intersubjective research such as observation and interviews and position their own findings in relation to the scholarly discourse of fashion studies. The aim of the course is to challenge students to advance their research and analytical skills, to cross disciplinary boundaries and to develop new and original perspectives towards future fashion research. Combined with the lecture “Fashion Cultures,” which opens up global perspectives on fashion as culture, system and industry, the course prepares students for the advanced study of fashion in the second year.

This panel features some of our Second Year MAFS graduating students speaking about their masters thesis research and writing process. Their audience includes our first year students in the core required methods course, Interpreting Fashion.

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