Redressing the Body: A Panel Discussion and Fashion Showcase

Join us for a captivating conversation with fashion designers and academics hosted by Fashion Design MFA program. The conversation will highlight how their work weaves together personal stories, memory, and loss. In addition, students from the Fashion Design MFA program at FIT will showcase original designs commissioned specifically for this event, which draw from their own cultural background. Together we will unpack the role of dress in rituals of death and memory. Big questions of gender, race, and class, and how all of these play into (end-of-) life experiences will be woven into the discussion. After the event, guests are invited to a presentation of specially commissioned fashion showcase by the graduate students from the Fashion Design MFA program.

Participants: 

Keynote Speaker: Mark Mitchell, an Arizona-based artist whose handknitted shrouds were shown in 2013 at the Frye Art Museum. Mitchell continues to create custom-made shrouds and textile sculptures that explore themes of death, burial, and mass incarceration.

Anastasia Edwards: Fashion Design MFA candidate, School of Graduate Studies, FIT, “Living with Loss” graduate thesis

Patrick Boylan: adjunct professor, FIT Fashion Design, Grace Liturgical Vestments owner and designer

Jonathan KYLE Farmer: Chair, FIT Fashion Design MFA, School of Graduate Studies, “Shrinking Fashion” mental health, death, and fashion

Moderator: Keren Ben-Horin: fashion curator, historian, and author, adjunct professor, Department of Textile Development and Marketing and MA program Fashion and Textile Studies: History, Theory, Museum Studies

This event is free and open to the public; RSVP here.