Fashion-Ing Pedagogies

Abstract

I grew up in a small segregated town along the US/Mexico border. I remember doing my homework every afternoon to the hum of my abuela's sewing machine. Monday through Friday, she welcomed clientele to consult with them on the garments they wished to commission her to design and sew. I remember laughter emanating from her bedroom-cum-sewing room, as the process of designing and fitting a garment invited intimacy, conviviality, and friendship. The 1950s and 1960s were the height of her custom work. She made custom gowns for Mexican-American brides, beauty pageant contestants, and quinceañeras; church wear for African American women; cheerleading outfits for the town's high school; and the latest teenage fashions for my mother and her friends. In her one hundred years, my abuela never learned to read or write, but she had an elegantly developed sartorial literacy. She was an expert in proportion, fit, and silhouette and was sought after for her ability to reinterpret “trend” styles for various body types. I cannot help but wonder what has become of the unique garments she designed as a seamstress for thirty years. I begin with my grandmother's story because this is one of my “style memories,” an autobiographical narration related to clothing and style. It highlights the affective and the material nature of fashion and garments as sites of produced knowledge and recorded memory. I have come to think about the crafting, construction, and fashioning of a garment as a critical literacy of styles, and the body.This issue marks the inauguration of the “Fashion” section in TSQ. As its fashion editor, I think it is critical to sketch out the utility of featuring short academic essays, interviews, curatorial op-eds, and fashion reviews. This reoccurring section seeks contributors whose writing and artistic practice treats fashion as a site for analysis where knowledge by and about transgender phenomena and communities is produced. Fashion is conceived here as a general phenomenon, not restricted to clothing but also concerned with literature, painting, and music as well as style, production, consumption, textiles, and beauty regimes (Barthes 2013: 81; Tulloch 2010: 279). Fashion is understood here as a discursive site where its interpretation is rooted in the materials from which garments are made and in the mass media forms through which fashion is disseminated and proliferated (Parkins 2008: 73).The mutual construction of subject and garment described by Stallybrass highlights the tension between the material and the discursive: whiskering on denim jeans, a well-developed patina on leather shoes and bags, and patches of mended wool on old trousers, jackets, and sweaters. While the garment loses material value or becomes threadbare as it is worn, it may also accumulate affective value. The garment and its materiality—the cloth, fabric—is “both a currency and a means of incorporation. … As it changes hands, it binds people in networks of obligation. The particular power of cloth to effect these networks is closely associated with two almost contradictory aspects of its materiality: its ability to be permeated and transformed by maker and wearer alike; its ability to endure” (Stallybrass 1993: 38). Fashion then is linked to embodiment, a crafting or self-fashioning that is not abstracted from the bodies that wear, look at, handle, and construct garments.The cover art for “Trans*formational Pedagogies” is an embroidered portrait by artist L. J. Roberts that highlights the function of handmade craft. As Jean Vaccaro notes, “handmade objects are not uniform, not exactly reproducible. Connecting transgender corporealities to labor and the politics of the handmade is a way to explore alternate modes of identity production, and to resist … institutionally sanctioned gender formation” (2010: 254). The hand-stitched embroidered portrait features an individual posing with a sign expressing solidarity with a wrongfully incarcerated transwoman, Cece McDonald. This handcrafted embroidery relies on needle and thread to capture a snapshot of a salient representation of trans- politics, protest, and solidarity. The textured portrait, not readily reproducible, makes use of various fibers to depict an instructive moment; it is a “textured and fibrous imprint of bodily difference” (253). The image and form of the embroidered portraiture highlights Vaccaro's incisive observation that the handmade “configures utopic relations between bodies and objects, materializing alternative modes of affective economies and networks of relationality” (257). Alongside this essay, we feature an interview with artist L. J. Roberts, who offers their own “style memory” and the relation of their artistic practice to fashion.As noted by Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, fashion is a complex system of codes and signals that at once represent a manifestation of commodity culture as well as “the manifestation of a long-repressed utopian desire, to be reenergized at a moment of historical awakening” (Wollen 2003: 131). The gesture to utopianism and the possibility of fashion as a means of resistance, transgression, and creativity—especially in queer and transgender communities—is a perfect conclusion here. To return to the notion of fashion-ing pedagogy is to invoke fashion as a site and mode of praxis, a methodology of resistance. I take cues from the role of clothing in social movements in the 1960s, the role of fashion in New York ballroom culture, the use of fashion and textiles in diasporic communities, as well as the use of the zoot suit among Mexican-American, Filipino-American, Japanese-American, and African American youth. As the editor of this section, I welcome essays that hold fashion as ephemeral and that look (fashion) forward, seizing on emergent possibilities.

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