May 03 2022 33 mins 14
All white, top hat, Sunday best, black beret, denim - these have been tools of protest and catalysts for change throughout history. Now we’re unpacking the relationship between what we wear and what we believe. Featuring Angela Tate, Richard Thompson Ford, Elizabeth Way and Miko Underwood.
Syllabus:
- What does anti-Blackness and anti-transness have in common? The groundbreaking scholarship in the book, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, reminds us that true justice must be fought at the intersection of race and gender.
- What did Black people wear when they were ready to make a political statement? Guest Angela Tate gives us an idea in her essay, “Fashioning the Protest.”
- Before there was Venus and Serena, there was Althea Gibson. Back in the 1950s, the tennis star made an impact when she decided to wear the same athletic uniform often worn by the White, tennis club elite. Guest Angela Tate introduces us to Althea Gibson's Tennis Whites as a pivotal moment in fashion history.
- Historian Tanisha C. Ford’s award-winning scholarship in Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul shows us how Black women in the 1960s through the 1980s used beauty culture and their style of dress as a tool for liberation around the world.
- A material that has touched every one of our lives and holds a turbulent labor history, we provide a short profile of “Cotton,” locating its various origins, and how Black creatives are reckoning with it.
- The book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, is a bookshelf essential, as it provides a thorough survey of modern, global capitalism’s most necessary clothing material.
- Learn more about guest Miko Underwood’s journey through fashion and justice through her essay, “Red, White and Indigo: The Hidden Commodity of the Slave Trade” (published on Juneteenth) where we also include a link to her fashion film, Red, White & Indigo: The Untold Story of American Denim.
For a transcript of this episode, please visit https://fashionandrace.org/database/ep3-statement-piece/
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