A conversation with Kimberly Jenkins
In March, I interviewed anthropologist Sandra Niessen for this newsletter. Sandra, who throughout her career has focused on the textiles of the Batak people of North Sumatra in Indonesia and the anthropology of fashion, wrote a paper last year in Fashion Theory calling for the rewriting of fashion history. In it, she wrote that we need a "broader scope in the study of fashion." Suggesting, "Another kind of whole world history of dress is needed, in which the obscured side of fashion gains equal voice, and the consequences of the links between fashion and non-fashion are explored, including textile crafts, industrial garment production, and expanding consumption of industrially-produced fashion in indigenous settings."
This week I spoke to the lecturer, researcher, and consultant Kimberly Jenkins, who has been doing this work. Over the past six years, Kim has actively aimed to decenter the history of fashion, moving it from a white, predominantly male standpoint to include indigenous design and an understanding of the intrinsic link fashion has to colonialism.
With the first course she created called Fashion and Race (2016) at Parsons School of Design, Kim explored how a social construct like race has shaped the aesthetics and business of the fashion industry. This important work led to a consultancy post at Gucci to support their cultural inclusion and diversity efforts. In her current position as Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies at Ryerson University, Kim has developed a course called Refashioning History, where she told me she began by asking herself, "if we're going to decolonize and decentralize this conversation, where do we start?"
Alongside teaching, Kim created The Fashion and Race Database as a site "to center and amplify the voices of those who have been racialized (and thus marginalized) in fashion, illuminate under-examined histories, and address racism throughout the fashion system." The database is a rich and invaluable resource, where Kim, and the researchers she works with, aim to provide a roadmap to lasting change in the fashion industry. I talked to Kim this week to learn more about her approach and ask her how we can join together to revise the way we teach fashion.
I teach a course on the history of fashion photography as part of my role as faculty at the School of Visual Arts, where the MA fashion photography students will apply what they learn into the images they create. I encourage them to think critically and deeply about the industry, bringing the conversations I have in this newsletter into the classroom. Still, as Kim outlines, we need to join together as a community to do more work to revise the way we are teaching fashion studies.
To accompany the interview, Tyler Mitchell kindly allowed me to use a selection of images from his shoot 'Black Nonsense,' which appeared in Vogue Italia's September 2020 issue. A collaboration with playwright Jeremy O.Harris, the photos feature a cast of characters whose bodies interact with O.Harris' reflections on fashion and its role in contemporary society in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Indya Moore. Image by Tyler Mitchell, words by Jeremy O. Harris, Vogue Italia, September 2020.
Shonagh Marshall: I want to start by asking about Fashion and Race, the course you taught at Parsons School of Design in New York. Could you talk about how the course came into being and what the aims were? Was it a critical moment for you in developing your practice and your thinking?
Kimberly Jenkins: I developed it three years after I had graduated from my training on the Fashion Studies MA at Parsons. Up to that point, I had studied and begun teaching fashion history and fashion theory in all of the forms that we teach it. Conceptually, something that had interested me when I was a student and as a graduate was how underdeveloped the examination of race and fashion was. By that, I mean how a social construct like race has lasting implications and has shaped and influenced aesthetics and the business of fashion.
Even personally speaking, the field of fashion studies lacked the experiences of non-white scholars and students. So when I started developing the syllabus for the course, it was self-serving in a way. I was developing the syllabus to understand this subject and expand my research; while conducting research in front of students and bringing them into the conversation. When I taught it for the first time in the fall of 2016, it was a laboratory for ideas. I shared with students what I had found so far on fashion and race, and I was thinking through a possible framework for examining fashion and race.
It also became a therapeutic space for students drawn to the course because they knew that it would provide a space for them to address things on their minds that were frustrating them in the public, the industry, and social phenomena, such as cultural misappropriation. I wanted to use the class to expand my research into ways of teaching fashion studies. I was interested in how fashion studies can create a space for students to learn about fashion and race and acknowledge some of the critical issues that were happening in society, current events, and how it was having a harmful impact in the business of fashion. I was trying to expand the field, impart knowledge, and share resources with my colleagues globally. As more people learned about the course, it had a positive impact because I would hear from graduate students worldwide saying, Thank you for introducing this course and creating a website to go with it.
Toni's Family Portrait. Images by Tyler Mitchell, Vogue Italia, September 2020
Shonagh: Yes, I want to ask you more about that. You created The Fashion and Race Database as an extension of the course. This was a globally accessible website. Why did you decide to do that?
Kim: Yes, I created a website for me to research in public. Its original name was The Fashion Race Database Project. I purchased an out-of-the-box website where I started posting all of the books, articles, exhibitions, and panels I found on the internet exploring fashion and race. It was my attempt to categorize, organize and catalog these things. Students worldwide started to reach out and say, Thank you, you just made my dissertation or thesis research a lot easier.
Photographer Tyler Mitchell on set with hair stylist Jawara, model Alek Wek, make-up artist Raisa Flowers and stylist Carlos Nazario, Vogue Italia, September 2020
Shonagh: It is such a rich resource. Could you talk me through the structure of the database? How is it organized, and how is the research conducted?
Kim: I set it up in 2017. It was just a one-woman show, just me uploading things that I was finding. That's what the database was until June 2020. Once I had accepted a full-time professor position at Ryerson University in Toronto, it enabled me to access research funding that could take my work further and do things that I couldn't do before.
With this new research funding, I decided to hire a web developer who could turn this website into something a little less flat and more robust, rich, and immersive. I found a web developer in San Francisco specializing in digital humanities projects for scholars and I explained to him what I wanted. By July 8, 2020, we unveiled a new Fashion and Race Database Project, which became The Fashion and Race Database.
Really what turned things up or accelerated things was timing. Honestly, had I relaunched this newly designed Fashion and Race Database any other year than 2020, I don't know if we would even be having this conversation. The launch followed the murder of George Floyd, and the month after I launched it, racial tensions were high, especially in North America. Suddenly I was thrust out onto the front lines, along with anyone else who was speaking about or doing anything engaged with race, discrimination, diversity, and inclusion. Here I was with a fashion and race database, which couldn't be any more conspicuous.
The climate accelerated everything in terms of people donating to the site and wanting to learn more. That led to me needing assistance with expanding the research, which I wanted to do anyway. I began by hiring two of our first interns—they were undergraduate students at Ryerson University. I allowed them to take a couple of months to work on the database and familiarize themselves with it to see if they could build and add to the research in ways that I couldn't, by exploring research connected to their own unique lived experiences.
At this stage, The Fashion and Race Database is a platform that is certainly not just for me or even just the Black experience. It is for various experiences that have been touched, impacted, or oppressed by the construct of race and colonization. So, for instance, our first two interns were focusing on Indigenous identity, Arab identity and Asian identity—they were able to sit down in this virtual laboratory and research to their heart's content. Then they published all the resources they could find specific to that; these focuses may not be at the front of my mind because that's not my lived experience. I think that's what has made The Fashion and Race Database so rich.
Since that successful experiment in the summer of 2020, I've been able to hire new research assistants to come in and use the space for their explorations, all in effort to benefit society and serve our field. I want them to examine things that are nourishing to them. For instance, our latest research assistants explore Black and queer identity, Latin American fashion history, and decolonization. It's really exciting that now The Fashion and Race Database is a space for various identities.
Aaron Philip. Image by Tyler Mitchell, Vogue Italia, September 2020.
Shonagh: I want to ask you about your teaching. Fashion history is taught through a Eurocentric lens of fashionability. You are working on teaching a different narrative when you teach fashion history and theory. I wanted to ask you about your approach—if you don't mind sharing that with me—how do you map out fashion historically? Do you incorporate indigenous dress into your teaching?
Kim: Yeah. I'm still working through it. It's an exciting time to do this work. I, along with other scholars, like Victoria Pass, have been working through this in the classroom and trying to expand the narrative of fashion history by naturally incorporating diverse styles of dress practice and costume into fashion history.
In the courses that we have, the frustrating thing is that there isn’t enough of us doing this work--there is a sort of a deficit. We have fashion history classes taught at numerous institutions where the narrative starts with Charles Frederick Worth and highlights and deifies the Christian Dior's, the Yves Saint Laurent's, John Galliano's, and Marc Jacobs' as if that's all that fashion is about. We don't include Elizabeth Keckley, Ann Lowe, Willi Smith, or Patrick Kelly in the story.
What I have been working on at Ryerson University is a new course called Refashioning History. I'm not trying to make myself singular here; I'd be excited to know if there are any other professors right now who are also doing this work and expanding the way they teach fashion history. But this is an essential class because it is not an elective, where students can decide whether or not to take a non-Western fashion history class; this is making the requisite fashion history survey course one that all the students have to take in order to see the broader narrative of fashion history. It’s a project in itself, so I'm working through this as we speak.
Now I am working on the arduous task of saying, Okay, if we're going to decolonize and decentralize this conversation, where do we start? I'll tell you now; I think it will take more than a semester. I am just coming off the back of a one-semester attempt of teaching Refashioning History, where I did a whole, broadened perspective of fashion history, and it was pretty difficult. It's like trying to teach art history in a concise, decentralized way. Oftentimes, we start in ancient times and Egypt, but we could also begin in prehistory within various parts of Canada, where we find things that were used for hooks or fasteners and things like that.
How do we start this work? I suppose I’m answering your question with another question: where do we begin? Especially in terms of prehistory--our knowledge of history is only as good as what remains and has been preserved. So I've started looking at Canada, and SubSaharan regions of Africa, various areas, in terms of where fashioning or dress begins. When we're moving through the centuries, it's sometimes a question of origin and significance. How do we cover all of these continents and dress practices? How do we categorize what is dress and when does dress begin?
What is interesting in exploring all of this is that we see waves of colonization happening in centuries past and thus dress practice becomes very fluid. It's tough to categorize a specific region or group of people because there's colonization after colonization, cross-pollination after cross-pollination, influence here and there. So it's challenging for us to explain to students that there’s just one neat category of dressing for different ethnicities, cultures, and regions.
Also, I think we have to ask ourselves as educators: when does "fashion" begin? Do you start talking about fashion in the 19th century as soon as tailoring popular? Or do we go a couple more centuries back when some scholars in my field would argue fashion starts happening when marketing, a marketplace, and advertising emerges? I think we have a ways to go. As scholars, we need to put our heads together and think through the new framework for teaching fashion history. For those of us who teach in institutions, we need to ask if it will take more than a semester to examine that.
@Junyawrk. Images by Tyler Mitchell, Vogue Italia, September 2020
Dusty Rhodes @sidewalkUniversityRecords. Images by Tyler Mitchell, Vogue Italia, September 2020.
Shonagh: I have also been thinking about your work in the context of teaching fashion design. In design courses, students are taught to reference trends from history and other cultures. Do you think we need to rethink this? The Fashion and Race Database has a section called Objects That Matter, where you take an object from a particular culture and explain how it is traditionally worn, its history. Then you list some of the ways it has been appropriated or misappropriated in fashion. Have you thought about fashion design specifically, and do you think there is another way that it should be taught?
Kim: I think this is something we have to reckon with. When it comes to the politics behind that question and thinking this through, we need to ask who's doing the taking? For instance, there could be forgiveness in taking or having inspiration when it comes from a group borrowing from their own culture or a group that has been historically oppressed. They're given a pass in some ways, for lack of a better word, when it comes to borrowing from other cultures, especially non-Western cultures or marginalized cultures. Not always. But we have that to consider.
When we talk about taking or appropriation, I can't help but think of subcultures like Hip Hop, for example. There’s this act of leaving your mark as a graffiti artist in a space that you "shouldn't." It’s the audacity of making a mark in a particular space or taking something out of its context and appropriating it for your own use. There's something kind of exciting about that when we look at subcultures, and it's why they have this enduring appeal.
But there are also colonial associations or connotations regarding taking and appropriating things as your own. Again, it comes down to who's doing the taking. So when it seems that there is a major fashion brand or a large museum that appears to be "doing well for itself" and couldn't be farther from being oppressed, we're going to be less forgiving about that. We're going to take them to task for misappropriating, which can be considered a form of assault, harm or flaunting privilege.
When it comes to what is perhaps the most popular or critical exercise in fashion design schools, which is to source inspiration and tap into something, this prompt or exercise has become political and fraught. Students are cautious now, as they hear about this when they are following Diet Prada they're thinking, I don't want to be part of this problem. They know what happens to people who take, and they don't want to be seen as an example.
This is something that educators will have to reckon with when encouraging students to go off and get inspired or appropriate something. These sorts of exercises should be fully explained in the classroom beforehand, before students can do any harm. By that, I mean students can learn best practices when it comes to being inspired. This might mean having a checklist that they keep in their back pocket, where they consider: Before I go off and get inspired by something, to prevent misappropriation or harmful appropriation, I need to make sure that I search my sensitivity checklist. This will prevent them from harming by taking something socially or culturally significant or sacred or politically significant or rare in some form. I wouldn't want to stifle students from getting inspired or wishing to perform some montage, but they're going to have to know how to do it. We need capable instructors who can prepare them so that they don't wander into that territory and learn how to defend themselves.
Paloma Elsesser. Image by Tyler Mitchell, words by Jeremy O.Harris, Vogue Italia, September 2020.
Precious Lee, Paloma Elsesser, Ayesha Sesay, Lineisy Montero, Eniola Abioro, Mari Taylor, Toni Smith. Image by Tyler Mitchell, Vogue Italia, September 2020.
Shonagh: Thank you so much for talking to me today. My final question is if you could wake up tomorrow in a fashion utopia that you've created, what would that look like? What would be in place, and what would "fashion," whatever your definition, look like?
Kim: A fashion utopia, that's a tough one. A quick answer would be that there isn't harm being done in terms of the labor to make things, from humans to animals—that there isn't suffering involved.
It's tough because there are many glamorous aspects of fashion that I love, but now, as a fashion scholar for ten years, you see the glamour quickly gets chipped away when you realize everything behind it, hence the word glamour. There are aspects of luxury fashion I would want to keep; I love the performance and the theater of fashion. But I would love for it not to involve suffering or harm: animals being killed needlessly, people being paid next to nothing, or being in harmful workspaces to produce that sexy bag that you're carrying around, or that dress that you're wearing. A fashion utopia for me would be that everyone's being treated respectfully and fairly compensated.
Also, I would like it if we had more circularity and that people held on to things longer and knew how to mend things. But when we start wandering into the ideals of sustainability, it can quickly become tone-deaf or not cognizant of what the modern world of fashion has created for us. It's nearly impossible to get everyone to sit around and mend things or shop slowly and carefully. We live in a world that moves at a neck-breaking speed and where there's tremendous class disparity, and that's the last thing that some people can worry about.
I would also tell you that I wish we were wearing more vintage or secondhand fashion, but that could be tone-deaf, too. There are various cultures or groups of people who find secondhand clothing vulgar, filthy, or it's “catching the spirit” of someone deceased.
I'm working through what a fashion utopia is because I'm thinking about the enormous complexities that this modern life has brought us. I can't articulate my dreams and ideals without considering diverse lived experiences in that response. It's created such a precarious life for many of us: desire and aspiration, wanting, wanting, wanting, and then throwing away. The disposability of it all shows that some of our values hinge on aspiration and impulsive desires. Fashion studies can take you into a “dark” place when you know too much about all that modernity involves. You end up sitting around in secondhand or vintage clothes like me, disappointing people’s dreams about fashion.
