Teaching American Fashion History

From rolled stockings and bobbed hair to afros and dashikis, clothing and appearance serve as indispensable markers of the last century’s sweeping social change.

At UNLV, I teach fashion history in classes that range from first-year seminars to graduate colloquium on American consumerism. My introductory H. 102 courses use fashion to examine issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. As we move through the 20th century. students consult fashion illustrations, oral histories, film, fine arts, material culture, and archival sources to study how our culture has changed and why. 

My teaching considers fashion as a political tool, seen through both early century shirtwaist strikers and the Black activists, the Black Panthers. It considers fashion as central to the redefinition of “masculinity” and “femininity” linked to the emergence of sports culture. My classes explore fashion as a place-based phenomenon with special attention to New York’s Greenwich Village, the American Southwest, and our very own Las Vegas.