Welcome to the final week of Fashion as Design.
Expression.
Every time we put something on, we're obviously communicating something, even if we're communicating
that we don't wanna participate in fashion.
We're saying something, it's a decision we make to put on clothes.
And so that's why we're concluding the course with this particular subject because it's
sort of a culmination of everything that we've been looking at.
But we've chosen a handful of items that we feel conveyed just a little bit more of a
meaning perhaps.
One of my favorite items of the course is the doorknocker earring.
The doorknocker earring takes on a lot of different forms, but the most salient aspect
of it is that it's big.
It's meant to look like a door knocker when you go to visit a friend.
It could be a hoop, it could be a square, it can just be something very large that dangles.
It's something I first discovered when I started getting into hip hop as a kid, and Salt-N-Pepa
famously wore his big, huge earrings.
Do you remember it?
Actually I was in the UK at that point in time, so Salt-N-Pepa, I didn't know so well.
Sort of came to them later.
But thinking about the ways in which that style has now traversed, I came to them from
"Sex and the City."
Ah, okay.
And so that was an appropriation of some sort.
Yes.
So that's really what we're going to be focusing on when we look at the door knockers this
week.
They are very much so at the forefront of a conversation about appropriation.
So they're an earring that has had deeply rooted cultural significance to women of color,
Latino women and black women.
And in 2001, the American television show "Sex and the City," the star of that show,
Carrie Bradshaw, was outfitted in a pair of door knocker hoops that said, "Carrie," right
across them.
And it was sort of viewed as an insensitive form of appropriation because this is an earring
that meant very specific things to certain people.
Right.
And so when we think about expression, it's not only about expressing ourselves, but who
else we might be expressing when we put on certain items of clothing or accessories.
Right.
So we move from appropriation to subversion in terms of expressions.
This is a favorite of yours.
Really a lot of my favorites in this week.
So this slip dress is one of my all time favorite items of fashion.
I am a big Courtney Love fan.
And as many of us know, she often wore slip dresses while performing.
It sort of looks a bit like an undergarment.
And so for that reason, at its core, it's a very sort of sensual garment.
But the women who have worn it and have made it kind of codified its meaning as something
that's a little more tough, are women that have worn it with leather jackets and boots,
and they really kind of subverted this idea of a sexualized feminine body.
They took the received or expected expression of the slip dress which is feminized, soft,
sensual, and they completely flip that expression on their heads as a recourse to power around
their bodies in public and in private.
Very well put.
You taught me everything I know.
So we'll then, look at message, and so one of my favorites of this entire course is the
lapel pin, something that I think is tiny but mighty.
And so you may be wearing one right now or you may have one on your coat that you wear
it out of doors.
You might think of the cross ribbon, often most associated with the early 1990s and the
AIDS awareness campaigns.
And so it becomes this very powerful signifier, really powerful sartorial symbol of messaging
and therefore expressing one's, perhaps identity, allegiance, remembrance, or other types of
emotions.
So we'll end this week thinking about identity.
And one of the garments that we'll look at is kente, something that has had a real significance
on the west coast of Africa, specifically in Ghana and Togo for many centuries, but
really came to prominence in many ways in a kind of global Pan African consciousness
after independence in Ghana in 1957.
And so we will look at the ways in which expression at a national level can be made through specific
types of clothing and dress.
And kente stands as a lens through which to have that conversation.
Michelle: So to conclude this week, and indeed the course, we're going to be going to the
studio of Asher Levine who's here in New York, and we'll look at him and his creation of
a biker jacket.
We looked at the biker jacket in the Coutures week, and here we'll look at a prototype that
he's made.
He is someone who designs, not only in fashion, but designs costume for very well known performers
as well.
And so often what he's thinking about is how these can be read on stage as signifiers of
very large expressions.
And the biker jacket that he's created is beautiful.
It's white and it looks almost like a kind of a molten scaled texture through which glows
certain colors.
He's thinking about it for practical reasons when one's on the back of the motorbike.
You can signal which way you're going by using the light function that's inherent to the
biker jacket.
But it's also much more about expressing a certain type sartorial style.
So we hope you've enjoyed this final week in the course, and that you've learned a little
bit about how expression and fashion go together, and indeed confirmed many of the ways in which
you yourself express through clothing.