Conference Call

I felt lucky to be able to attend the recent conference The Golden Age of Gotham’s Clothing Industry: Unraveling an Enterprise, not only because I feel academics should use more puns in their titles (being sarcastic), but also because it was actually very, very interesting. It seems a little too late to give a full review, but I can say that the paper presented by Richard Greenwald and Bernard Smith really summarized nicely why this topic of study is important to historians. Not only did the garment industry at one time employ an astounding 33% of New Yorkers, but the history of clothing manufacture also resists the traditional business history paradigm of modernization. The forces of fashion made rationalization of production methods difficult, and constant style innovations made product standardization impossible. Then as now, it was the availability of cheap labor and not improvements in production methods that kept clothing prices so low. Another highlight of the event was Regina Blaszczyk’s paper on what she calls “fashion intermediaries” – those nameless, faceless multitudes who design products for the masses. In striking comparison to the ‘tastemakers’ that cater to an elite clientele, these proletarians of the creative economy are the people who really shape the aesthetic landscape.

Speaking of tastemakers, the graduate program in Fashion and Textile Studies at F.I.T. is hosting a symposium titled Focus on Fashion Journalism on Saturday, May 12, 2007. Here is the description:

Editors, writers, art directors, web designers, illustrators, photographers, and models all create the first draft of fashion history. Graduate students in the Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Practice program present original research on the people who have made fashion news, from the 17th century to the present.