(Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness - Paperback

by Emma McClendon (Editor), Lauren Downing Peters (Editor)

A revelatory new approach to understanding fashion in America that focuses on the stories told by worn, imperfect, and ordinary clothes

2025 Winner of Midwest Art History Society Awards for Outstanding Catalogs

Expanding the history of American fashion, this volume highlights garments that carry material traces of everyday wearers' bodies, such as stains, rips, tears, mending, and signs of hand-craftsmanship. In-depth examinations of ten case-study objects--ranging from activist Jae Jarrell's Urban Wall Suit (ca. 1969) to an unknown child's pair of sneakers found at a migrant pickup site in the Sonoran Desert (2009-10)--reveal the ways worn objects are witnesses to American history.

By foregrounding worn, ordinary, and imperfect garments, the essays in this volume respond to the fact that histories of American fashion have traditionally centered on mass-manufactured American sportswear, notable designers, whitewashed histories of Western wear, and the "American Look." This canon, though familiar, stands starkly at odds with the lived realities of the American experience. Interviews with wearers and makers, family photographs, and detailed object photography illuminate absences and omissions in the dominant narratives of American fashion. (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness thus sheds new light on how fashion and dress have been used to shape and challenge constructs of American identity at the intersections of race, ethnicity, body size, ability, and gender over more than two centuries.

Distributed for Bard Graduate Center

Exhibition Schedule:

Bard Graduate Center, New York
(February 21-July 6, 2025)

Author Biography

Emma McClendon is assistant professor of fashion studies at St. John's University in Queens, NY. Lauren Downing Peters is assistant professor of fashion studies and director of the Fashion Study Collection at Columbia College Chicago.