Hue Magazine: What is American Style?

What is

American

Wendy Red Star; courtesy of the artist and Sargent’s Daughters

style?

Hue Is New

ELCOME to the premiere

issue of the newly redesigned Hue magazine. Although we loved the old Hue, it was 15 years old and ready for an update. We worked with the designer Alexander Isley and drew on the expertise of the college community to create a magazine that feels like FIT, with all its contrasts and contradictions—big and bold but also small and subtle. Sophisticated and scrappy, elegant and edgy, playful and ... OK, that’s a lot of adjectives (and alliteration), and a lot to live up to.

If we succeed, each issue will be an occasion. We’ll try things we haven’t seen in a college magazine—or any magazine. We'll play with conventions, starting with the Hue name on the cover. It will be treated differently in each issue—a bit challenging, maybe, but definitely fun.

Hue will still be a gathering place for the FIT community to show their stuff, start conversations, and express their inimitable FIT-ness. Our first issue explores a big question: What is American style? It couldn’t have happened without contribu tions from the college’s alumni, faculty, and students. But we know that Hue’s appeal goes beyond FIT; it’s for anyone who appreciates creative visual storytelling.

We hope Hue will make readers think and smile and talk to each other—and to us. So please talk back—about the new Hue, American style, or anything else. We’re at hue@fitnyc.edu, waiting to hear from you.

And be sure to check out our new website at hue.fitnyc.edu.

linda angrilli

“Stars and Stripes V,” Morton Kaish, 1995, acrylic on linen, 78 by 66 inches. Kaish, professor emeritus, taught in FIT’s Illustration Department for more than 20 years, and started the college’s summer art program in Florence. His work has been widely exhibited and can be found in major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the British Museum.

What is American style? The answer is far from simple AMERICA THE ARGUMENT

A TOURIST IN TACKY SHORTS

buys a McDonald’s hamburger: That’s American style. No, American style is the freedom to wear, say, and eat what you want. No, it’s a bland, mass-marketed widget. Are you kidding? It’s an ingenious reimagining of workaday materials. No….

So instead, we took a cue from Daniel Levinson Wilk, FIT professor of American History, who called America a debate about itself:

Poll

There’s no consensus about American style. That’s what members of the FIT community at large revealed in our surveys and emails and interviews. In Hue’s online poll, a little over half of you said you loved American style (products, behavior, character), 43 percent called it “Meh,” and a small but significant number answered, “Yuck.”

As we started this issue of Hue, it seemed like a good time to think about America. The past two years have been so disorienting that the fabric of our country sometimes appears torn beyond repair. The pandemic, the racial reckoning, challenges to the presidential election, the rise in violence: Once, we thought the answer to our problems was to come together to realize a common cause. But in our current polarized state, any simple solution seems doomed. We began with the idea of assembling a unified narrative; but we wound up doubting that American style could be conveyed in a single story.

“America has always been a debate about America. Factory or farm, equality or straight-white-male supremacy, more or less government, immigrants (including immigrants from two or more waves back) or natives, jobs or the environment, masks or no masks. The paradox of our country is that it is all of these things at the same time.”

Our coverage recognizes multiple conflicting interpretations of American style.

We curated, of course. We strove for balance and broadness, and sorted responses by theme. We revisited the Sears catalog, a grand retail experiment. We scrutinized five American icons and the ways their makers are trying to improve them. And we profiled two up-and-coming Fashion Design grads. For decades, FIT alumni dominated the field, with the clean, persuasive vision of Calvin Klein ’63 arguably at its apex. Peter Do ’14 and Mimi Prober ’12 are adapting that heritage and making it their own.

So whether you see American style as conformity or independence, youthful ingenuity or capitalist exploitation, we hope you’ll enjoy listening in as our community talks to itself. Do you see America as a delicious apple pie, ready for sharing? We get you. But if you can’t stand the place and want to tear it down? Well, my friend, that’s America, too. Alex Joseph, MA ’15

In anonymous surveys and one-on-one interviews, we asked the FIT community, What is American style?

AMERICANS Indigenous

Parkas by Indigenous designers like Edna Oktokiyuk highlight early American leadership in winter and performance clothing. At the same time, this parka represents undeniable style, with the auklet beaks and feathers creating a rhythmic pattern along the lines created by the seal intestines that make it waterproof. The story of American fashion began with Indigenous designers, and they must remain part of the conversation today.

Justine De Young, chair, History of Art

Dis

I study and teach Indigenous arts of North America. I would say anything called American style would include Indigenous awareness of local materials, especially made to reference animals and trade goods. In this annotated 19th-century photograph, the artist Wendy Red Star names the elements of her family’s clothing that often get appropriated without any understanding of the meaning of feathers and ermine. For me, American style is an ongoing striving for how to be open to live currents and undercurrents from geologic deep time to generations of animals, nonhuman and human, in sun and starlight.

Anna Blume, professor, Art History and Museum Professions; History of Art

QUICK TAKES

THE WHITE T-SHIRT

It is protective, simple, agile (to style), comfortable, not restrictive, ready for personalization, among other concepts. Alum

For the future, the question is, what will we be like in the metaverse? How will our avatars be dressed? That is what every fashion brand wants to talk about with me. Is this American? Well, Meta, an American company, is leading the charge. Being first, constantly evolving yourself, disrupting—that’s very American.

— Karin

Marketing: Fashion

Related

of National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian

photo by NMAI Photo Services; T-shirt: Alamy

Courtesy of Wendy Red Star and Sargent’s Daughters

“Peelatchiwaaxpáash/Medicine Crow (Raven),” Wendy Red

Anthropological

Freedom

APPLES

I love apples and I LOVE apple pie. How American can you get?

Alum

BARBECUE

—Alum

(Apples originated in what is now Kazakhstan. Ed.)

Tourists

I travel worldwide, and you can recognize an American tourist from far away. Functionality and comfort are the two things that make the American style distinct. It provides freedom of choice with a sense of carelessness, as if no one is watching or if they do, who cares.

— Praveen Chaudhry, professor, Political Science

Freedom is intrinsic to the American style of doing business; it’s an ability and willingness to take risks. There’s a lack of tradition; plus, you didn’t have a long history of failure. Many trends start in America—think of the Kardashians. Social media influencers here can achieve a breadth and scale in their audiences quickly. TikTok is a Chinese company, but it produces overnight sensations in America. At Google, where I work, there’s a more free, flexible culture—a “test and learn” mentality. Even at Google offices in India, there’s the same expectations of work life. Of course, that might be about Silicon Valley culture, not Google. It’s hard to say what is really American about business now; we’re so global. The whole notion of American business culture might be historical.

AVIATOR SUNGLASSES

Aviator sunglasses are a perfect fusion of the utilitarian and the glamorous. They work on anyone of any gender and any age, and in any situation. That sense of democratic style is inherently American.

— Michael Kors, Fashion Design alumnus

Artist Nikki S. Lee, Photography ’96, second from left, created projects in which she joined various groups— skateboarders, strippers, schoolgirls—and dressed like them for a time, then had snapshots taken of herself with the group, creating a commentary on identity. Her Tourist Project (9) features her in full American tourist regalia— fanny pack, blinding white kicks, even travel brochures.

— A.J.

“The Tourist Project (9),” Nikki S. Lee, C-print, 1997.

Corey Moran, Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management ’15, Head of Industry, Fashion and Luxury, Google

Steve McQueen popularized aviators in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968).

Self- centeredness

All the debates in politics, and the results of the 2016 election, are about a fundamental belief that the individual does not have responsibility for the community.Thisisparticularly sad because America is such a wealthy and powerful country with the potential to do so much good for each other and for the world, and yet so much of our culture promotes the myth of the individual above all.  Facultymember

CREATIVITY

American fashion is about standing out and being unique in your own way, sending out good vibes and positivity through creativity.

Taylor Dammann, Fine Arts ’18

BUD LIGHT

The simplicity of a casual drink that brings people together. Student

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S FALLINGWATER

Contemporary American style evolves around self-expression, individualism, and experimentation to establish distinction. This is often achieved by mixing simple and complex shapes, materials, textures, and color to establish distinctive looks. The final result suggests an intention of conscious effortlessness or a sort of a planned spontaneous look but with an undercurrent of intelligent design. Elvin Kince, associate professor, Communication Design

Conformity …

Everything Americans do is centered around fitting in, being accepted by the masses, and fulfilling predetermined ideas of success, beauty, and health.  Student

Or individuality?

Real American style isn’t always about fitting in with everyone else, it’s about staying true to yourself and standing out.  Alum

CONTRA DICTIONS

New York, yes ...

Always at the forefront of fashion, culture, food. Diverse. NYC symbolizes what the United States should be and the idea that the country sells abroad.  Alum

Or no?

Remember, this is America. NYC is not representative of America Walmart is. — Alum

Bud Light, Fallingwater: Alamy; selfie: David Crane/Dreamstime.com

Bonnie and Clyde

I associate the American sensibility with breaking new ground, with taking risks, with not being afraid to fail, with changing how the game is played, with being ahead of one’s time, even changing the rules. By that definition, what film could be more American than Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967)? A film that barely got made, a film so ahead of its time that it bombed during its first release only to become a critical and commercial success a few months later during its rerelease following the rave review of film critic Pauline Kael, a fiercely independent maverick also quintessentially American? A film that made such an impact on fashion that designers are still channeling Faye Dunaway’s distinctive edgy look? A film with an editing style so progressive that

editor Dede Allen was originally fired before being rehired (and privately paid for) by star and producer Warren Beatty (the first actor with the audacity to produce his own pictures)?

Allen turned editing into an art form that would be discussed as seriously as cinematography moving forward. She would cut in the middle of scenes, leave out establishing shots, make cuts that

didn’t match the action. She edited emotionally, with her gut, rather than “by the rules.” She was the first film editor male or female to receive sole credit on a movie, and this was for Bonnie and Clyde

The film changed everything in front of the screen and behind it. Cinema would not be the same after.

Dahlia Schweitzer, associate professor, Film and Media

Natural Beauty

The “no-makeup makeup” look championed by Bobbi Brown is the epitome of the relaxed, natural, healthy-glow U.S. beauty aesthetic. It grew out of the “California Look” in the ’80s, and was also a reflection of a simple, elegant, uncluttered aesthetic in American fashion.

—Stephan Kanlian, associate chair, MPS program in Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management

THE AMERICAN DREAM

Allowing individuals the opportunity to be what they dream — without barriers. They have the tools and resources to achieve their own success.

—Faculty member

BRITNEY SPEARS AND PARIS HILTON —THAT’S AMERICA!

Other countries don’t carry on like that.

Cheryl Ann Wadlington, Advertising and Communications alum

B LACK STYLE

Black style is American style. Whether it’s logomania, nail art, or bangles—those styles were made popular by people from the African diaspora and Latinx people. The women standing proudly with Afros and hoop earrings, the men with their pants sagging and their hooded sweatshirts: To not celebrate people of color is not American.

Elena Romero, assistant professor, Advertising and Marketing Communications

FREEDOM

American style isn’t defined by one silhouette, print, or piece. There are no boundaries.

—Student

INNOVATION

IN ALL AREAS , especially originality in pattern construction, materials, science, and technology!

—Alum

Jamel Shabazz makes a sort of vernacular photography— there’s no affectation; he doesn’t get too creative in the way he shoots, and he doesn’t use lights besides the occasional on-camera flash. He lets his subjects express themselves in the way they dress, pose, and address the camera.

His photographs are undeniably American because his subjects are.

Brad Paris, associate professor, Photography

Natural Beauty: Roger Cabello ’85; Sky, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Statue of Liberty: Alamy; test tube: Jon Brown; Shabazz image: FIT Library Special Collections and College Archives, New York, NY USA, reproduced with permission from Jamel Shabazz

Stars and Stripes

Textile artist Ruben Marroquin, Textile/Surface Design ’19, started weaving American flags out of yarn and bamboo about 10 years ago. The pieces were inspired not by simple patriotism but a more ambivalent feeling, says the Chicago-born, Venezuela-raised artist: “I do love this country. I say I’m from Venezuela, but I was always an American citizen.”

Inspired in part by artist Jasper John’s famous (and controversial) encaustic flag paintings, Marroquin took up flags himself because he loved Johns’s use of texture. Surprisingly, he adds, the flag colors have precedents in Native American art. “You see a lot of white, for example, in the hides they used for teepees; they created

red using cochineal insects; and I’m not sure where they got the blue from   maybe indigo plants.”

Though Marroquin’s flags aren’t political, he understands that the symbol is charged  “especially in

New York, people are suspicious of it.” They sell well, but he says he’s not planning to make more anytime soon. “Embroidering those 50 stars is a commitment.”

“American Flag,” Ruben Marroquin, plant-

Black Fashion Designers

In recent years, scholars have reevaluated fashion history and noted the overlooked contributions of Black designers to American style. Couturiere Ann Lowe dressed women from prominent families of the ’50s, including the Rockefellers, Roosevelts, and Du Ponts. She is best known for designing Jackie Kennedy’s iconic wedding dress, an ivory silk taffeta stunner that, according to British Vogue, “remains one of the most imitated styles for brides ever since.” Lowe’s achievement went unacknowledged everywhere except the Washington Post.

Stephen Burrows ’66, star designer of the disco era, rose to prominence for his brilliantly colored, body-hugging “clothes

you could dance in,” says Valerie Steele, director and chief curator of The Museum at FIT. In 1973, he competed at the Battle of Versailles, the legendary fashion contest between American and French designers that America won in an upset, confirming New York as a legitimate rival of Paris. Burrows’s looks exemplified the liberated esprit of American fashion, and he pioneered the use of Black models in his presentation, including Jennifer Brice, pictured here with Burrows. “The French were

swept away by that,” Steele says. Steele says the lack of sustained capital investment in Black designers has prevented any from becoming cultural icons, but brands owned by celebrities like Kanye West, Rihanna, and Serena Williams make a significant impact. And many designers are increasingly influential, for example, Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss, “whose styles are often explicitly political,” and the late Virgil Abloh, “a global success at Louis Vuitton.” —Jonathan Vatner

Harry Naltchayan/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Stephen Burrows ‘66 and model Jennifer Brice in November 1973, days before the Battle of Versailles.

Fabrics

In American fabrics, the big theme is practicality, durability. Our lifestyle wasn’t for the café sitter, but the worker. “Style” was something you got from Europe. After World War II, when there was a shortage of luxurious European textiles, designer Claire McCardell turned to men’s shirting fabrics for her shirtwaist dresses: Dan River Mills, the largest textile mill in the South, turned out colorfast, washand-wear plaid shirts. Pendleton Mills represented the high end of American wool. They make doublesided, felted blankets with “reinvented” Native American motifs, based on the originals. The tribes love them or at least they did. [Today, designs are commissioned from Native artists, who are credited and paid for their work. Ed.] In North Carolina, Karastan made “magic” carpets on machines that replicated hand-knotted wool carpets from the Middle East and Asia. It was such a high-quality product, it took a year to develop a single design. And Americans were pioneers in electronic innovations. IBM’s first patent for software was a textile program. Once CAD became connected to looms, design took off.

Patrice George, associate professor, Textile Development and Marketing

CAPITALISM

Trying to make the cheapest product for mass consumption. Separating the money from the person what’s more American than that? —Student

THE ASSAULT RIFLE

— Staff

Of 400 million firearms owned by American civilians, 20 million are AR-15-style weapons. It’s “the most popular rifle sold in America” (National Shooting Sports Foundation). Ed.

Interiors

In interior design, the average American still aspires to have a contemporary/ modern home rather than a traditional style only the wealthy can afford. We are still searching for that “Black aesthetic” in architecture and design, or the hiphop answer to mid-century modernism.

Eric Daniels, professor, Interior Design

This porch and casual sitting room, located in Long Island’s East Hampton (left), feels like a quintessential American summer room—the awning stripe on the sofa combined with the floral pillows and distressed wood flooring. While this space is close to the beach, it could be anywhere. To us, American style is collected, personal, colorful, and livable.

Mara Miller and Jesse Carrier, both Interior Design ’96, Carrier and Company Interiors

Denim, from Levi Straus to Calvin Klein, best represents American style. Regardless of color or condition, jeans, jackets, overalls, upholstery, bedspreads, pillows: Denim has touched the lives and hearts of Americans for decades.

Kat Sorrentino, Fashion Design ’83

NIKE AIR JORDAN SHOE — Student

American interior design, in the past 20 years especially, has become more focused on good craft and craftsmanship. We have become more makerdriven with furniture, lighting, art, and millwork that is made by hand, made locally by talented artisans, and using more sustainable materials.

Shannon Leddy, assistant professor, Interior Design

GameChanging Ads

In 1982, an ad for Calvin Klein men’s briefs appeared on a Times Square billboard and changed advertising forever. Photographer

Bruce Weber shot Olympic pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus from below, in erotic repose. Neil Brownlee, adjunct assistant professor, Advertising and Marketing Communications, says traditional men’s underwear ads were staid catalog shots. “The model was a middle-of-the-road type, shot three-quarter profile not dead-on with the crotch right in your face.”

The Klein ad’s genius lay in its awareness of a new audience: gay men. “It was mass marketing’s first attempt to bring Christopher Street to Main Street.” Further, Weber’s image highlighted the white briefs against the model’s bronze skin; in good marketing,

“the product is always the hero.” Brownlee, a 40-plus-year veteran of the industry, says the ad exemplifies a key principle: “Advertising that has an emotional rather than a rational effect will resonate.” Named one of “10 Pictures That Changed America”

by American Photographer magazine, the ad confirmed Klein ’63 as fashion’s provocateur-in-chief. As for Hintnaus’s shredded physique, Brownlee says, “We call that ‘aspirational marketing.’”

A.J.

The casualization of daily dress

Mixing and matching old and new pieces, with a variety of textures keeps it fresh and unique. I love not having a cookiecutter dress code!  Alum

Sportswear

by designers like Claire McCardell and Donna Karan’s bodysuit.

Molly Taylor, Fashion Buying and Merchandising ’88, chief merchant, Saks Off 5th

ATHLEISURE

. Student

I don’t think about elegance or sophistication. My mind goes to sweat pants, hoodies

, sneakers.

Comfort.

Faculty member

HAPPY

This fragrance was designed in the U.S. for the U.S. market under Clinique, the best-selling Estée Lauder brand. From the olfactive standpoint, it’s a bright, cheerful scent highlighted by orange notes. It was designed for the optimistic, carefree, life-loving American consumer and anyone inspired by the American dream.

Virginia Bonofiglio, associate chair, Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing

SPECTACLE

Jaws and Star Wars and Hudson Yards.

It has to be a big spectacle to attract people, and it should have an element of capitalism baked into it, like a Yeezy sneaker or a Koons sculpture.

In fashion or music or art, to be American is to be brash, loud, and a little crass.

Troy Richards, dean, School of Art and Design

To me, American style is freedom of expression: how we want to dress, what we want to wear, and where we want to wear it. And the quintessential American designer is RALPH LAUREN.

Vincent Quan, associate professor, Fashion Business Management

Student

SONJA RUBIN: Coming from an Austrian background, I’m always impressed by the American fluidity in navigating different cultures. American style is about ease.

KIP CHAPELLE: American style at its best is a kaleidoscope of cool, and it’s increasingly global.

Rubin and Chapelle, both Fashion Design ’93 and adjunct associate professors, Fashion Design MFA

“Everything leads back to money and the business of ‘desire.’”

The Iconic American Flag Sweater from Polo Ralph Lauren, 1989.

Chapelle names this photograph of Chicano gang members by Joseph Rodriguez as one origin of current American style.

McCardell’s

THE THING ABOUT ICONS — the thing that enables them to be icons — is that they’re shared. Those perfect jeans you loved beyond reason? They’re just nice pants. But when everyone had a beloved pair of perfect jeans, there you have it: an icon. There’s a shared story, a misty-eyed longing for … something. Maybe a past that never really was.

With true American icons, there’s also a cul tural resonance, and sometimes, a touch of rebellion. Denim that evokes the Old West—or James Dean. A convertible Mustang that makes us yearn for adventure, say, a drive along Route 66. Over time, they’ve gained mythic status in our collective memory. They mean something beyond themselves.

Often, American classics originated elsewhere. The master stroke was in appropriating and adapt ing a great idea, and marketing it to the masses.

Barbie, like many Americans, was an immigrant. Icons are complicated; genius ideas can have ugly downsides. Nostalgia can overshadow the harm their production, distribution, and consumption can do to bodies, minds, local econ omies, the environment. In any case, the world moves on, and icons get old. Some transform and survive; others fade away.

Will new American icons arise as audiences continue to fragment? Time will tell. For now, the ones shown here remain iconic. — L.A.

The history and evolution of five indelibly American objects

ICON

In 1915, to block copycat

brands like Koka-Nola, Toka-Cola, and Koke, Coca-Cola launched a competition to design a signature bottle “so distinct,” according to the brief, “that you would recognize it by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.” The Root Glass Company in Indiana won with a fluted hourglass shape inspired by an illustration of a cocoa bean, elongated and subtly ribbed. The embossed logo came about because the paper labels were peeling off in ice buckets.

The drink itself, designed as a substitute for morphine, originally contained cocaine from the coca leaf and caffeine from the kola nut.

It still contains coca leaves, stripped of cocaine at a factory in New Jersey. (The isolated cocaine is used medicinally.)

Through the generations, Coke and its distinctive bottle have become a nostalgic touchpoint, a shared memory not just in the American psyche but also globally.

UPDATE

Coke containers have evolved consistently since that first 6.5-ounce bottle. Aluminum cans hit the market in 1960. In 1978, the company introduced the plastic bottle, then considered a more environmentally friendly option than glass, which is breakable and also heavy, consuming more fossil fuels to ship.

As the environmental harm done by plastics becomes increasingly clear, Coke is embracing glass again. This year, the company pledged that 25% of its containers will be refillable or returnable by 2030. They are producing more refillable glass bottles and adding soda fountains in stores, so consumers can dispense Coke into their own containers—because the most sustainable bottle is no bottle at all.

“There was really clear conceptual thinking from a marketing and design standpoint,” Marianne Klimchuk, professor of Packaging Design, says. “That is critical in how iconic the brand has become and what keeps it relevant for generations. Coke is the best of the best.”

— Jonathan Vatner

ICON

The venerable hamburger, that staple of American grub, is “a portable meal that’s efficient, accessible, self-contained, and generally not shared,” says Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams: A Journey Through the Heart of America’s Fast-Food Kingdom.

The burger’s origins are disputed, but most accounts suggest it was invented in America by tucking a German fried beef patty, or Hamburg steak, between slices of bread. The toppings arrived shortly after.

Nearly every culture has a ground-meat dish, but perhaps none has rooted itself as deeply into a national ethos as the American ground-beef-and-bun combo. Chandler notes that beef “connects directly to the cattle trails of the frontier and the homestead, which are parts of the core American mythology.” In the 20th century, car culture and the concomitant need for on-the-go food cemented its ubiquity.

The burger also “speaks to a deep national desire to be democratic,” Chandler adds. They’re served at fast-food joints and haute spots alike, notably Vanity Fair’s annual Oscar Party, which sources its burgers from the beloved California chain In-N-Out Burger. J.V.

UPDATE

As many Americans look to reduce their consumption of animal products and as the cost of meat steadily climbs, vegetarian options have flooded the market. The Impossible Burger is a convincing, soy-based substitute, as juicy as rare beef. However, diners are becoming aware of just how processed it is, says chef Jesa Henneberry, a Fashion Design alum who competed on Food Network’s Big Restaurant Bet, which debuted this spring. Maize, Henneberry’s globally inspired Mexican restaurant, opens this fall in Westfield, New Jersey.

Instead of turning to factoryproduced patties, the proud flexitarian converts beef lovers with homemade veggie burgers. She also blends beef with sweet potatoes, beets, lentils, or black beans.

“There’s so much flavor and texture you can achieve using plant-based ingredients from scratch,” she says. “My burgers will satisfy any carnivore.”

ICON

What gives the 100-year-old Chuck Taylor All Star sneakers their staying power? Vulcanized rubber, says Kevin Rivera ’09, adjunct instructor of Footwear and Accessories Design and the design director for the Foundation, a company that builds fashion brands. Converse launched the precursor to the All Stars, featuring the material in its outsole, in 1917.

Semi-professional basketball player Charles Taylor joined the company as a salesman and began holding basketball clinics at high schools and colleges to help popularize the shoe. He made suggestions for the design, and Converse added his name to the shoe’s ankle patch in 1922. The diamond pattern on the sole, which gave Chucky T’s a better grip on the court, comes from a mold, but the rubber foxing tape that connects the sole to the canvas upper is applied by hand. “They’re still handcrafted,” Rivera says, and that’s key to their appeal. The red, white, and blue ankle patch conveys “Americanness.” In the ’60s, sneaker technology advanced, and players began to opt for kicks with better support. The Cons soon transcended their sporty origins, however.

Starting in the ’70s, the minimalist style was de rigueur for rockers and skateboarders, and even developed an unfortunate association with notorious LA gangs: “Bloods wore red ones; Crips wore blue,” Rivera says. A.J.

UPDATE

Update Chucks? Why? The original is as popular as ever. Converse has fabricated Cons in leather and other materials, collaborated with brands like Comme des Garçons, and, in 2015 released the Chuck II, made from a tougher, more sustainable canvas with a memory-foam tongue. But as long as the likes of Rihanna and Alexa Chung keep wearing the original, it’s gold. Says Rivera with a laugh, “It has survived like the cockroach.”

For a new take on an innovative, celeb-aligned athletic/fashion shoe, look to science. The next revolution, Rivera says, is ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA), a rubberlike substance that can be blown into a mold to create sturdy yet flexible shapes. The earliest EVA shoes were the distinctly dowdy yet wildly popular Crocs. Then Salehe Bembury, a Versace and Yeezy alum, infused the Croc with chic (sort of). Rivera says EVA isn’t sustainable yet, but companies are working on it. The trendiest shoe at the moment might be the head-spinningly futuristic foam runner by Yeezy (above), the Adidas/ Kanye footwear collab. Made from EVA composed partly of algae, it calls to mind the graceful, ultramodern architecture of Zaha Hadid — or maybe the Batmobile.

ICON

It’s not clear where blue jeans originated. The sturdily woven twill cloth may have come from Dungri, India (hence, “dungarees”), Nîmes, France (“de Nîmes” became “denim”), or Genoa, Italy, where a comparably tough fabric was used for boat sails. Levi Strauss, a Bavarian immigrant and dry goods merchant, is sometimes credited with inventing jeans; in reality, he was the first to market them. As the PBS documentary Riveted: The History of Jeans recounts, Strauss came to America for the California Gold Rush. A tailor approached him with an idea for pants reinforced with copper rivets, and the first pair of 501s was patented in 1873. But the indigo-dyed fabric was probably around earlier.

A mysterious pair of trousers featuring denim patches was on view in The Museum at

FIT’s 2015-16 show, Denim: Fashion’s Frontier; the curators dated them to the 1840s. The workforce of a rapidly industrializing American economy created a significant market for durable pants in the 19th century. Late in the 20th century, designers

Yves Saint Laurent and Calvin Klein turned them into a fashion statement.

Today, perhaps half the world’s population is wearing jeans at any given time. A.J.

UPDATE

It takes 2,000 gallons of water to make a single pair of jeans, and bleaching and dyeing require chemicals that harm crops and the supply of drinking water. Yet as Preeti Arya, assistant professor of Textile Development and Marketing, explains, the industry has developed a greener technique: foam. Instead of running denim through vats of dye and squeezing it through rollers full of chemicals, foam is spread evenly on the fabric, producing the same colors and finishes. The foam evaporates quickly, conserving water and energy.

Foam dye under a microscope. Unlike liquid dye, foam is mostly air, saving water. The dye sits on the surface of the bubbles.

To get the distressed look, workers use sandpaper or even sandblast jeans, but inhaling sand can cause the deadly lung disease silicosis. Lasers, Arya says, create the same effects safely. And while acid washing requires toxic bleach, the same finish can be achieved with the oxidizing agent ozone, reducing water and energy use. Conscious consumers can look for a GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) label or other label that denotes products that meet specific environmental criteria. The next update may not be jeans at all. Yoga pants—cool, comfortable, and cheap—have surpassed jeans in production, but they’re made from petroleum and may take up to a thousand years to biodegrade.

Yana

Hong Yu et al., Coloration

ICON

The toy industry, says Judith Ellis, founder and associate chair of FIT’s groundbreaking Toy Design program, is “a beacon of innovation,” consisting of “pioneers whose ideas flow from a maverick confidence.” Barbie   one of quintessentially American whose origin wasn’t American   is proof. She was created in 1959 by Ruth Handler, a founder of Mattel, whose brilliant insight was that girls would love to play with an adult doll, not just the baby dolls that were the norm in the ’50s. Toy execs and buyers   all male   hated the idea, but Handler persisted.

those ideas strictly

Barbie’s Black “friends” were produced as early as 1967, but in 1980, Mattel introduced a Black Barbie actually named Barbie. (Tagline: “She’s black! She’s beautiful! She’s dynamite!”) After Barbie’s unrealistic proportions were criticized as harmful to girls’ selfesteem, Mattel introduced “curvy” Barbie in 2016. Now, inclusiveness is the name of the Barbie game, with a range of races and ethnicities, body types, and physical abilities and conditions (including baldness, vitiligo, a prosthetic limb, etc.), promoting the idea that every girl can see herself in Barbie.

She modeled Barbie on a German doll called Bild Lilli, a novelty item marketed mostly to men. Mattel tweaked the design and called her a “teen-age fashion model.” American girls were enchanted. (Ken came along in 1961.) A surefire marketing technique helped ensure success: Sell the basic item (Barbie in a simple swimsuit) at a low price, and then sell accessories forever (outfits, Dreamhouse, and eventually, countless licensed products worldwide). L.A.

DELIVERY

For 100 years, the Sears catalog was American merchandising at its best.

Now it’s gone. What did we lose?

merica is the land of consumer seduction, and for most of the 20th century, the Sears catalog was its capital. It was a 1,000-page cornucopia of lively artwork and enticing copy, an astonishing array of products, everything new and seemingly essential.

“It was the American dream in this one book,” Instructional Services Librarian Maria Rothenberg says. You could buy clothes or a sewing machine to make them yourself. You could buy dishes and a dishwasher to clean them. You could even buy a house, though it came in modules that you or a builder would assemble.

The Sears catalog was “the first Amazon,” Rothenberg tells students in her course about American products back to 1900. Shawn Grain Carter, associate professor of Fashion Business Management, tells students that the Sears cata log and its rivals were the origin of every direct marketing

BY DANIEL LEVINSON WILK PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY

OPPOSITE: The cover of the fall/winter 1946–47 catalog.

CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHT :

The cover of the first Sears catalog, from 1907; furs often included the animal head, fall/winter 1938–39; Western-style costumes, fall/winter 1950; getting girls started early on housekeeping, fall/winter 1934; a house kit circa 1920.

technique used today. Indeed, the catalog fig ures prominently in a number of FIT courses. And the Gladys Marcus Library has nearly every issue, mostly in Special Collections.

Leslie Blum, retired assistant professor of Communication Design, says Sears was a champion of cutting-edge industrial design. For example, Raymond Loewy redesigned the Coldspot refrigerator for Sears in 1935, with clean lines and simple controls. It created a new aesthetic for home appliances, tripling the company’s refrigerator sales and boosting the profile of industrial designers everywhere.

And those Sears house kits were a major innovation. The Arts and Crafts–style homes featured in the catalog were simple, sturdy, and more affordable than similar homes in Britain, Blum says. Their floor plans reveal a lot about American habits in past decades, Rothenberg says. “In the earlier homes, there’ll be no closets, because people didn’t have a lot of things. There’ll be no bathroom. People bought their refrigerator before they did their bathroom.” Eventually the era of

outhouses and chamber pots ended, and the house kits started including a room with a toilet.

There were earlier experiments in mailorder catalogs Ben Franklin circulated one that sold books, and seed catalogs for farmers were popular in the early 1800s but historians generally date the modern industry to a single page Aaron Montgomery Ward mailed out in 1872, listing 163 items for sale. A quarter century later, the Montgomery Ward catalog neared a thousand pages and sold $7 million of goods each year.

Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck followed in 1888, with a catalog that offered watches and jewelry. They diversi fied their goods in the early 1890s and became Ward’s main competitor, even tually beating him in sales.

Sears always tried to keep its catalog a little thinner than Ward’s. “Mr. Sears knew,” Rothenberg says, “that when housewives straightened up, they put their Montgomery Ward catalog under the Sears catalog, so the Sears catalog would always sit on top. Pretty smart, right?”

Sears borrowed department store innovations: sell a wide assortment of products, standardize prices and ban

made

and silk

LEFT : A larger-than-life

from

haggling, offer satisfaction guarantees. But catalogs added important new advantages. By using the federal postal service a vast, gov ernment-subsidized system of transport and communication—they could serve rural areas and enable farm families to access the bounty of mass market capitalism. It was a long buggy ride to Chicago to browse fashionable shops, so rural customers stayed home and browsed through the catalog instead.

And anyone could dream over its pages. Novelist Harry Crews, who grew up dirt-poor in Bacon County, Georgia, wrote, “The federal government ought to strike a medal for Sears, Roebuck Company for sending all those cata logs to farming families, for bringing all that color and all that mystery and all that beauty into the lives of country people.”

The catalog sold everything one needed for a well-appointed home. Fall/winter 1950.

evaded Jim Crow discrimination by shopping the catalog. Some still own their Sears catalog homes.” Catalogs allowed Black customers to avoid indignities imposed by racist store clerks price gouging, humiliating treatment, refusal to sell products deemed too fancy for them, credit restrictions. White supremacists saw Sears Roebuck as a threat, accusing the founders of being Black men and holding Saturday night bonfires to burn the catalogs.

LEFT : An early washing machine from July/August

BELOW : Traps tailormade for a range of animals, in the fall/ winter 1953 catalog.

Like e-commerce today, catalogs reduced the contact between workers and customers. You had to share your name, address, and purchasing choices with some strangers in Chicago, but you didn’t have to see anyone face-to-face, not even your mail carrier if you timed it right. This appealed to poorer and less literate shoppers, whom clerks some times treated with “supercilious haughtiness,” as department-store historian Susan Porter Benson noted. Sears-home-office employees would do their best to interpret your order form, and if they got it wrong, you could send the item back. If you wrote in another language, Sears had employees who could translate.

Less contact was especially appealing to Black customers, Carter explains. “[They]

Julius Rosenwald, Sears’s second CEO, did even more for the Black community after being introduced to legendary educator Booker T. Washington. Rosenwald donated matching funds to build more than 5,000 schools for impoverished children across the South, educating the likes of Maya Angelou and civil rights leader and politician John Lewis. There were limits to the company’s commitment to social justice, though. Sears stores in the South followed Jim Crow laws, limiting African Americans to employment as

LEFT

ABOVE

RIGHT : In this Sears Readers book club ad from fall/winter

popular titles were rendered as melodrama.

janitors, cooks, servers, or other behind-thescenes roles.

Starting in the 1920s and accelerating after World War II, Sears opened more stores because Americans were buying cars, moving to cities, and venturing into suburbs, mak ing the nation less rural, less isolated, and less reliant on mail order. Department store sales grew over the decades, and the tradi tional Sears catalog was finally discontinued in 1993, one year before Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. With the rise of online shopping and changes in consumer habits, Sears stores are disappearing.

Vincent Quan, associate professor of Fashion Business Management, attributes Sears’ problems to its “inability to pivot effectively to e-commerce. In addition to the assault from e-commerce and Amazon, competition from Walmart and other big-box retailers resulted in an organization unable to compete.”

Today, with only 23 Sears stores reportedly left in the U.S., the catalog remains an icon, a reflection of mass material culture and con sumption over a century. It is a talisman of the American heartland that we mythologize as the moral center of our national experiment. And it lives on in our collective memory.

Matthew Petrunia, associate professor of English and Communication Studies, was fond of the Sears Christmas Book. “I remember feeling jealous of the kids pictured in the catalog with their cool roller skates, guitars, wooden chess sets, and especially the ones lucky enough to have themed NFL bedrooms—everything from the bed sheets to trash cans plas tered with your team’s colors and logos.”

The catalog is indispensable for design ers looking to evoke the past. “It’s crucial for unlocking accurate period details,” says costume designer Jeriana San Juan, Fashion Design ’04, who recreated looks for Netflix’s series Halston. Otherwise, it lurks in attics and archives, a nostalgia trip. April Calahan, MA ’09, Special Collections associate and curator of Manuscript Collections, says, “Growing up in the late ’70s, I remember flip ping through the pages. I don’t think there’s any substitute for that.” 

Daniel Levinson Wilk, professor of American History, is on the board of directors of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition and writes about waiters, elevators, and the history of the modern service sector.

“The catalogs can serve as an encyclopedia of their time.”

Costume designer JERIANA SAN JUAN Fashion Design ’04

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT : “It’s fun to be a ventriloquist” and a kid-size typewriter, both from the 1960 Christmas catalog, and a Christmas 1970 ad for Shindana Toys, a pioneering Black-owned company (their Talking Tamu used the same technology as the popular Chatty Cathy).

LEFT

Students in Levinson Wilk’s Sales and Service in World History class helped source the catalog images.

The New Guard

The changing face of American fashion

WHO’S THE QUINTESSENTIAL AMERICAN FASHION DESIGNER?

Fashion being what it is, this changes with every era. No one designer is the sole embodiment of American style, but a few capture the zeitgeist in a special way.

In the ’50s, Claire McCardell (1905–58) acknowledged women’s changing roles at home, at work, and at play, with sportswear that was casual, comfortable, and practical. Halston changed fashion in the ’60s and ’70s, creating simple, elegant silhouettes, and bias-cut dresses and pants that were perfectly proportioned and perfectly modern.

From the 1970s on, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren two Bronx-born sons of Jewish immigrants   could legitimately claim the “American designer” mantle. Klein, a 1963 Fashion Design alum, made his mark with slinky minimalism and provocative ads as influential as his clothes. Lauren upscaled the cowboy look, with artfully faded jeans and flowy prairie skirts shown on outdoorsy models. His Polo brand went full Americana by putting the flag with its original 13 stars and stripes on a sweater.

Klein left his company 20 years ago, while Lauren, 82, remains executive chairman of his firm. Both venerable brands carry on, along fairly familiar paths. Meanwhile, American fashion, like America itself, faces daunting challenges. Inevitably, new ideas, materials, and designers will emerge.

SO WHO’S THE NEXT GREAT AMERICAN DESIGNER?

With the fashion business in flux, it’s hard to say. Will there even be megabrands with big-name designers at the top? Maybe there’ll just be niche brands that fans discover on TikTok (or whatever social media platform comes next).

Fashion may not produce another Calvin or Ralph. But there will still be designers   including FIT alums   who astonish us with their vision and their clothes.

In 2021, New York magazine bestowed the “great American designer” label on Peter Do ’14, a 30-year-old New York–based immigrant from Vietnam. With a team of collaborators, all of them Asian American, he creates sophisticated looks that are making their way onto red carpets and into fashionistas’ hearts.

Mimi Prober ’12, like most of today’s young designers   and consumers   is committed to sustainability. Her patchwork jacket (see pages 38–41) is on view in The Met’s exhibition In America: A Lexicon of Fashion. No minimalism here: Her pieces layer details, embellishments, and history into garments that are fresh while evoking the past.

What’s next? We’re not psychic, but we think these two alums are staking a claim to the future of American fashion. The following pages tell you why. L.A.

THE NEXT GREAT AMERICAN DESIG

BY RAQUEL LANERI

ETER DO does not do ball gowns. Roomy trousers with lots of swagger, yes. Sharp, knife-pleated skirts with irreg ular hems, yes. Sleek leather shifts with pockets, yes!

But when Instagram’s direc tor of fashion partnerships

Eva Chen asked the New York City–based designer to create her ensemble for the Met Gala   the ritzy benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute held each May   he couldn’t refuse.

“Do is the Halston ofthe next generation.”

functional, but I think we’ve gone too far. It’s maybe too comfortable!”

“technical” school. “I was like, that sounds great!” Do says with a laugh.

Do and his team came up with a floorlength, cream-colored silk jacket with a dramatic train. Chen wore it over a short strapless dress and one of the brand’s sig nature asymmetrical wraparound pleated skirts. The jacket-gown had pockets, and the train   per Chen’s Instagram     had “three hidden finger loops sewn into it so I could navigate easily.”

“The end goal for me is always [to create] something that is useful and functional,” Do says of his designs, from his expertly tailored jackets to his more fanciful see-through blouses with ties and slits. “It has to be grounded in some sort of reality: Can you wear it more than once? Does it have pockets? Those are the questions I’ve been interested in since my student days.”

When Chen posted the result on Instagram, she extolled Do’s sartorial pragmatism. “We love a practical designer king,” she wrote.

Practical designer kings (and queens) used to rule New York fashion: Halston and his simple Ultrasuede or jersey dresses, Calvin Klein and his cool minimalism, Donna Karan and her ingenious mix-and-match “seven easy pieces” wardrobe. Yet in the past couple of decades, they’ve pretty much disappeared. American fashion had either gotten fussier (arty experiments, couture-worthy dress-up clothes) or sloppier (streetwear, sweats).

“I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an American designer lately,” Do says. “I think it’s that ability to take things from other places and make them comfortable and

That’s why Do’s label     elegant, adult, and polished, with a bit of an edge   has struck a chord. After stints at Celine and Derek Lam, he started the label with four friends in 2018. Last year, New York magazine crowned him “the next great American designer.”

Christopher Uvenio, a Fashion Design pro fessor who had Do for his AAS portfolio class, agrees with that pronouncement. Uvenio says, “Do is the Halston of the next generation.”

Do was born in Biên Hòa, Vietnam, and moved to Philadelphia with his family when he was 14. At his new high school, his American classmates made fun of his outof-date hand-me-downs, and he quickly saw clothes as a way to assimilate and survive, adopting an anonymous style.

“I noticed that the moment you change up how you dress, you can pretend to blend into society,” he says. “It was my coping mechanism.”

Do first became interested in fashion through his high school art club. Project Runway was growing in popularity, and Do thought the club could stage a fashion show with clothes made of discarded materials to promote sustainability. His mother bought him a sewing machine for $20 at Kmart, and Do taught himself how to sew dresses out of napkins and trash bags.

“No one would wear the stuff I made,” Do says of those experiments. “But it made me realize that I really loved making clothes.”

He initially enrolled at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute   “I was really intimidated by Manhattan,” he confesses   but he got frus trated by all the theory classes the first year. “We weren’t making clothes; we weren’t drap ing,” he says. When he decided to switch to FIT, friends warned him that it was a

His first year at FIT was really tough, he says. “You’re sewing all the time. There are so many projects, so many different types of techniques and constructions. It was almost like boot camp.” Still, Do progressed quickly. His hunger for knowledge and feedback prompted him to create a Tumblr account, where he began posting process photos of his designs for class and eventually amassed 50,000 followers.

“I knew from the day he walked into the classroom that he was a star in the making,” Uvenio says. One assignment required 10 to 20 thumbnail sketches for a collection; Do came back with 40   all beautifully rendered. “He took his work very seriously. His portfolio was so beautiful and well-researched it could have been a coffee table book.”

Do’s aesthetic was already sleek, sophisti cated, and modern: white vinyl raincoats and hand-painted jackets worn with severe black turtlenecks. As a student, he won a CFDA scholarship, a critic award for his senior thesis collection   for which he whipped up an astonishing 20 looks   and the inaugural LVMH Graduates Prize, a major honor that landed him a job at Celine, in Paris.

As much as Do learned from Celine direc tor Phoebe Philo and, later, the New York designer Derek Lam, he chafed at the lack of creative freedom. “I wanted full control. I didn’t want to work so hard for it to be just a part of someone else’s vision,” Do says, adding that it was particularly hard to have a garment that he poured his heart and soul into dismissed or passed over. “It was a really difficult experience. I just wanted to be free, completely free, to do what I want.”

On nights and weekends, he and four close friends   including fellow FIT grads

Jessica Wu, Advertising and Marketing Communications ’16, Fashion Merchandising Management ’14, who styled Do’s senior the sis collection; and his longtime roommate Lydia Sukato, Fashion Design ’14   hatched a plan for their own fashion brand. (Do met his other two collaborators, Vincent Ho and An Nguyen, through Tumblr.) The five founders — all Asian American   share ownership of the business, which is run as a collective. Wu handles press, Sukato is the operations manager, Ho is CEO, and Nguyen is the image director.

“To build a brand or company, you need more than one person,” Do explains when asked about the collective business model. “I feel like for so long, there’s this narrative in fashion that a designer starts a brand [by themselves] and then it just happens. But I know this would never happen if there wasn’t a team behind me.”

In February 2018, they launched a line of T-shirts; by June, they showed a full collec tion to buyers in Paris.

“We were a bunch of kids   we were so naive,” Do recalls from that trip. “We didn’t understand how these things worked. We just figured everyone would be in Paris [for Fashion Week] and that we would just go there.” They got cheap plane tickets, rented an Airbnb, and showed up with no appoint ments. When their fit model couldn’t get into France, press agent Wu donned the clothes. Amazingly, Net-a-Porter, who had seen Do’s clothes on Instagram, bought the entire collection. “We honestly just got lucky that it all worked out!”

Nearly four years later, Do’s star is still rising. Beyoncé, Solange, and Zendaya have worn his clothes, and First Lady Jill Biden’s office has asked for pieces. In 2021, he made his New York Fashion Week debut; that November, the CFDA nominated him for Womenswear Designer of the Year.

Do loves that people want to wear his designs but dreads the attention that comes with such success. He actively avoids the limelight. In photos, he obscures his face by wearing a balaclava, putting his hands out

Double-face wool camel oversized blazer with scarf and pant from fall/winter ’22.

in front of him, or merely looking away from the camera. He often brings team members to press interviews. At the 2022 Met Gala, after dressing Eva Chen and K-pop star Johnny Suh, Do walked the red carpet in a mask and shades (and a chic deconstructed suit).

“I feel like I expose myself so much with the brand that I want to keep something for myself,” he explains. “I want to have some thing that’s private, that only the people who know me know. Though I don’t know how long I can keep [that] going.”

After all, Do   who loves clothes so much he even designs in his dreams and will sometimes create those garments when he wakes   plans on staying relevant for many years. His label continues to evolve. He has not wavered from his initial tailored, grown-up aesthetic; his four-piece suit, which includes a jacket, vest, skirt, and pants that can be worn in various combinations, remains a perennial hit. But lately he has loosened up. His fall 2022 col lection featured snuggly sweaters and capes (in a soft, washable wool) and ripped, widelegged jeans.

“When I first started out, I felt like I had a lot to prove, and things were really structured,” Do says. “But now, I feel like people know us for our tailoring, so I’m getting softer. I’m exploring a different side of strength.”

He has a growing number of custom cli ents   particularly men who want versions of Do’s women’s wear that will fit them   and hopes to eventually have some kind of physi cal presence in New York, a store or hangout for fans.

“I want to meet the people who wear the clothes   I’m interested in their stories,” Do says. “And I want to know, ‘Is this too much? Why don’t you want to wear this? What do you need?’ That way, I’m making clothes that people actually need and not clothes that I just assume they need.”

Raquel Laneri is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Her articles have appeared in the New York Post , The New York Times , the Daily Beast, Time, and more.

LEFT: Tuxedo shirt and pleated maxi-skirt.

RIGHT: Looks from Peter Do’s fall/winter ’22 collection.

MIMI PROBER’S ETHOS OF SUSTAINABILITY AND EXQUISITE HANDCRAFT MAKES FOR TIMELESS

FASHION

Marc Baptiste

Ballet star Misty Copeland danced in Prober’s thesis garment at a photo shoot.

MOD ERN HEIRLOOMS

Mimi Prober, Fashion Design ’12, still has one of the showstoppers she made for her critic awardwinning senior thesis collection — an ethereal gown made with scraps of antique lace and a vintage corset.

“Misty Copeland danced in it,” Prober says, referring to the American Ballet Theatre star who donned the dress while whirling about en pointe for a photo shoot. Several other women have put it on since. Most recently, singer-songwriter Alexa Ray Joel, Prober’s client and good friend, wore it at an event in 2020 right before the coronavirus pandemic hit New York.

“It’s had a history,” Prober says.

You can say that about all of Prober’s pieces. The Miami-born designer stitches and drapes antique lace, 19th-century friendship quilts, and vintage woven textiles into exqui site modern heirlooms: funky patchwork motorcycle jackets, exuberant embroidered tapestry coats, delicate-but-tough tie-dyed neo-Edwardian lawn dresses. Each element has its own unique story and tie to the past.

She credits her French-Moroccan grand mother for her love of old things. “She always had the most fabulous vintage pieces,” Prober recalls. “Her original clothing from when she was in Morocco was custom-made from a family seamstress, and I think she carried

that appreciation and value of the handmade to me.”

In high school, Prober enrolled in fine arts, and mainly did abstract painting and some collage. In her spare time she haunted thrift stores, searching for discarded treasures she could deconstruct and transform, and she continued to work that way at FIT. While her classmates went to Mood for their fab rics, Prober attended auctions, searching for hand-stitched lace from the 18th to early 20th centuries, which she used for her romantic dresses.

“Sustainability wasn’t really defined [at that time],” says Prober, who uses every last scrap of fabric, leaving no waste. “It was kind of like an intuition for me.”

Since launching her eponymous label in 2014, Prober has expanded her zero-waste methods beyond vintage materials. Now she works with artisans, farmers, and mills to create her own textiles, too always with an eye toward the past. A recent example is a collection of T-shirts screenprinted with the poster art for a 1971 Return of Spring concert

BY RAQUEL LANERI

featuring the Grateful Dead and other bands that her hippie father created and produced.

“The vintage textiles are very important and they’re near and dear to me to preserve that history,” Prober says. “But I also want to make sure we’re bringing it forward and pre serving these crafts.”

Antique bedclothes

One of Prober’s most prized possessions is an antique, handwoven coverlet, dark blue with a cream floral pattern, signed by the weaver and dated 1835. “What’s really special about these coverlets is they were woven on large floor looms in the 1800s, sometimes woven by families or traveling weavers,” who passed down the craft from generation to generation, Prober says. But since they’re close to 200 years old, they’re a bit time-worn.

Prober preserves these coverlets and turns them into luxurious coats, which remain some of her best-selling items. One example has the weaver’s signature and the year 1842 stitched on the corner. It’s definitely a state ment topper. “It makes such an impact and hopefully will pass on from generation to generation, too.”

Farm-raised felt

Prober works with various artisans and farms to create textiles and natural pig ments, including Japanese indigo grown on an upstate New York farm belonging to Jeffrey Silberman, retired professor of Textile Development and Marketing.

For her soft, hand-felted coats, Prober uses wool from the paco-vicuña—similar to an alpaca—raised on a family-owned sustain able farm in Missouri. “They’re not only super, super sweet, but they have the softest fiber,” Prober says. “In the textile world, it’s as valu able as gold.”

Prober ships the paco-vicuña wool to an upstate New York farm to create a unique, hand-felted textile that has some of her antique lace bits embedded within. “I go to the farm to hand-felt, and it’s just a beauti ful experience to really see where your fiber comes from,” she says. Nomi Kleinman, chair

THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE

FROM LEFT: The “Corinne” floral jacquard upcycled cotton coat, a corset gown housed at The Museum at FIT, and a felted lace detail.

OPPOSITE: The crazy quilt motorcycle jacket in the Met’s show and a corset gown from spring 2022.

of the Textile/Surface Design Department, wove one of these paco-vicuña garments for Prober. “Obviously my connection with the school didn’t end at graduation!” Prober says.

Crazy quilts

“If I were to pick a textile that says everything about our philosophy, it would be the crazy quilt,” Prober says. “It’s really the first zero-waste textile.”

Crazy quilts  made primarily by women starting in the 1800s are made from leftover scraps of other textiles and quilts, intri cately pieced together. These quilts can take years to finish, and often include signatures and other mementos that make each

Corinne coat: Nick DeLieto, felted lace and corset gown on runway: Randy Brooke, crazy quilt jacket: Minh Cao, corset gown: Lily Cummings

finished product idiosyncratic and personal.

“It’s such an important textile,” Prober says. But while the best of these quilts now hang in museums, plenty more are too worn, frayed, or damaged to be displayed on their own. Reviving these much-loved pieces and the tradition they come from “is really special to me,” Prober says.

Prober used portions from two 19th-century crazy quilts to create a patchwork motorcycle jacket, displayed through Sept. 5 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.

“I liked the idea of bringing an antique tex tile into a classic modern silhouette,” Prober says of the jacket. On the front is an embroi dered “M”; on the back is the date 1913, from one of the original quilts. “I love it when I find [pieces] with my initials [on them].”

Lace fragments

Mimi Prober, the brand, started with lace. Prober keeps a collection of preserved antique lace in her atelier, including a sam ple made by a 10-year-old girl named Nancy Lovett around 1787.

For her first corset gown, created at FIT,

Prober stitched together dozens of lace snippets that she found at various auctions and shops along the East Coast, some dating back to the late 1600s. “These are tiny, tiny fragments,” she says. “There isn’t one textile on here that is newer than the 1920s, and most of it is from the 1800s.” She draped these bits onto a late-19th-century corset that she spent hours preserving and restoring handembroidering and reinforcing its structure using antique thread, a skill she learned in her haute couture techniques class at FIT.

The lace corset dress has become some thing of a signature style for the brand, and Prober released an updated take on the gown using natural-dyed lace in her latest spring collection.

“I think it says something that my thesis piece is still very meaningful to me,” Prober says. “It’s not something that’s been thrown in the back of my closet or up in an attic. It’s still very much alive.”

“It’s just a beautiful experience to really see where your fiber comes from.”

—Mimi Prober

7

HIGH Fashion, HIGH Drama

After two years of virtual presentations, FIT held its iconic Future of Fashion runway show outdoors on May 11. Shown here are gowns by Special Occasion critic-award winners: In front, Yawen Chen’s peach-pink satin gown with fabric flowers, the bustier embellished with lasercut lace and beaded floral embroidery; behind it, a pink and red ensemble by Jiawen Hou. Take in all the looks at fashionshow.fitnyc.edu.

Gala Raises $1.5 Million

On April 13, FIT hosted its 2022 Annual Awards Gala fund raising event at The Shed in New York City, raising more than $1.5 million for the FIT Foundation, which supports the col lege and funds student scholarships. The honorees were tennis legend Serena Williams; cosmetics exec Aerin Lauder; TV and film producer Debra Martin Chase; and Brandice Daniel ’12, founder and CEO of Harlem’s Fashion Row. The event was co-hosted by Nina Garcia ’92 and Michael Kors, also an alumnus.

Illustration by Ti Xu, Illustration MFA; High Fashion: Smiljana Peros; Gala: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images

CELEBRATIONS Five Supreme

UNDERGRADUATE  COMMENCEMENT

exercises for the class of 2022 were held in Central Park this year in five ceremonies over two days, May 24 and 25. The keynote speakers, all FIT alumni and all distinguished leaders in their fields, were:

• Ken Downing, Fashion Design, chief brand officer of Hearst Luxury Collections E-Commerce

• Laure Heriard Dubreuil, Advertising and Marketing Communications ’01, founder and creative director of The Webster

• Stacy Flynn, Textile Development and Marketing ’99, CEO and co-founder of Evrnu

• Ralph Rucci, Fashion Design ’80, founder and designer of RR 331 LLC

• Karin Tracy, Marketing: Fashion and Related Industries ’93, managing director, Fashion, Luxury, and Retail for Meta Rucci was granted an honorary degree, and the others received President’s Awards.

A separate commencement and hooding ceremony was held on May 18 for the School of Graduate Studies. At that ceremony, held on campus in the Haft Theater, the speaker was Sarah Holbrook, Global Fashion Management MPS ’17, a renowned public speaker, strategist, and writer who specializes in retail innovation and long-term strategy.

NEW Academic Building UPDATE

The first new academic facility on FIT’s campus in more than 40 years is under construction on West 28th Street, opening in spring 2024. The 10-story, 100,000-plussquare-foot structure will feature 26 smart, energy-efficient learning spaces, a double-height knitting lab, a student commons, and a light-filled atrium connecting it with the Marvin Feldman Center. The building, to be sustainably constructed and fully accessible, will change the landscape of 28th Street. Visit fitnyc. edu/nab for biweekly construction updates and a virtual tour.

New Alumni Council Helps Guide FIT Engagement

FIT’s Alumni Advisory Council, formed in January, is a diverse coalition of 14 successful grads who help steer the college’s alumni engagement strategy, making events and other programs more meaningful and relevant to the widest possible audience. The group has helped plan FIT’s Entrepreneurship Summit, to be held next year at Spring Place, an exclusive club in Tribeca.

Members include Marielle Bobo, Fashion Merchandising Management ’01, editor-in-chief and senior vice president of

programming at Ebony Media; Corey Moran, Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing and Management ’15, head of industry, fashion, and luxury at Google; and Molly Taylor, Fashion Buying and Merchandising ’88, chief merchant at Saks Off 5th.

“It really feels like we are starting something big,” says Liz Manalio, director of Alumni Relations for the FIT Foundation. “They are changing the face of alumni engagement at FIT.”

FIT Tops the Rankings

In its 2022 rankings, CEOWorld magazine named FIT the top fashion school in the U.S. and No. 2 in the world. To compile this data, the magazine surveyed 185,000 fashion executives, graduates, global fashion influenc ers, industry professionals, fashion school academics, employers, and recruiters all over the world. CEOWorld also named FIT one of the four best colleges for shoe design in the U.S. and one of the top six for interior design.

CLOCKWISE FROM

TOP LEFT : The 28th Street facade, a flexible classroom, the fifth-floor student commons and a light-filled atrium connecting the new building with the Feldman Center.

Q

Peter G. Scotese: Giving back. There’s a therapeutic value in giving to others. It’s much more than selfsatisfaction; giving keeps you going. When you’re focused on helping others, there’s not a lot of time to concern yourself with your own problems. Einstein says we were put on this planet to help others. Be like Einstein.

Scotese, retired president and CEO of Springs Mills, and chairman emeritus of FIT’s Board of Trustees, has lived a long, adventurous life characterized by inventiveness and philanthropy. He calls FIT “my love for more than 50 years,” and established a charitable remainder trust to benefit the college.

Ze-Enna Jenkins

International Trade and Marketing ’22

Whom do you admire most, and why?

The person I admire most is my grandmother Beatrice Faulkner [below, second from left].

She was so ahead of her time, intelligent, classy, modern, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, and service-oriented.

ABOVE: Scotese in his Manhattan apartment, sporting an FIT tie.

LEFT: Scotese, seen here in 1945, was awarded a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts for bravery in World War II.

Grandmother worked with and was great friends with some civil rights giants, like Vernon Jordan, Whitney M. Young, and Ron Brown. She worked for the Urban League affiliate in Milwaukee, and then she moved to New York and worked with the National Urban League. Eventually, she retired from ExxonMobil in Houston, Texas, where she worked closely with engineers. She encouraged me to be responsible with my money, volunteer, and involve myself in community service and social justice. I had the pleasure of working at the New York Urban League in Harlem for three years, and every day I was reminded of how she paved the way for many people, including myself.

BELOW: Jenkins’s grandmother, second from left, worked for the Milwaukee Urban League before

the secret to living to 102?

A Rare First Edition of Edith Wharton’s Interior Design Manual

Years before publishing her first novel, Edith Wharton penned what may be the most influential book on interior design ever written by an American. A screed against the “superficial application of ornament” (italics hers), The Decoration of Houses (1897) deplores vulgar Victorian frippery and promotes instead a proto-Modernist aesthetic of refined simplicity. In a way, it presages the stripped-down American look that dominated 20th-century style—right up to the sans serif logo and minimalism of Calvin Klein ’63.

The Gladys Marcus Library’s Special Collections holds a rare first edition of Wharton’s book among an enormous bounty of extraordinary materials related to

the college’s academic programs. Born Edith Newbold Jones, Wharton grew up in a family of considerable wealth. (The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” came to be associated with them, perhaps mistakenly.) Later, their fortune dwindling, her parents rented out the family properties to raise revenue and then took Edith to Europe. Visiting the luxurious “great houses,” she discovered the virtues of architectural proportion and refined her inherent aesthetic sensibility. She once wrote that as a child, “I was always vaguely frightened of ugliness.” Wharton’s house, which she built in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1902, reflected her design principles. (Called The Mount, it’s now a cultural

center that hosts literary events.) A collaboration with architect Ogden Codman, who co-authored The Decoration of Houses, the house references classical French and Italian style. No detail was left unconsidered. Though her career began in the Gilded Age, it would be a mistake to think of Wharton as

its proponent. Poverty has tragic consequences for Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (1905). The Custom of the Country (1913) satirizes New York high society and its avatar, American striver Undine Spragg. Wharton realized a gentler version of the theme with The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Meticulously rendered settings and furnishings often feature in her fiction. The editor Maureen Howard says, “Wharton conceived of houses, dwelling places, in extended imagery of shelter and dispossession. Houses—their confinement and their theatrical possibilities … are never mere settings.”

A.J.

The drawing room at The Mount, Wharton’s home. She wrote, “Proportion is the good breeding of architecture.”

ALUMNI NOTABLES

Kitchen Wisdom

Alexis deBoschnek, Fabric Styling ’12, Fashion Merchandising Management ’10, is a problem-solver in the kitchen

Cooking requires creativity. For example, what do you do when you don’t have access to traditional kitchen tools?

When you find yourself with a surfeit of wilting herbs? Alexis deBoschnek, culinary influencer and author of the cookbook To the Last Bite, has answers.

Her journey to writing a cookbook was circuitous, but she’s always been obsessed with food. “When I was growing up, my mom would make me these beautiful lunches with marinated peppers, pâté, avocado,” deBoschnek says. She didn’t consider a culinary career until her junior year at FIT, during a trend-forecasting internship. “I was in a meeting, and they were talking about the Pantone color of the year like it was truly life-changing,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life.’” Books by the noted food critic and editor Ruth Reichl inspired deBoschnek to complete an International Culinary Center certificate in culinary techniques.

She moved to Los Angeles and landed at BuzzFeed’s cooking site, Tasty, in 2018. She became part of its talent program, which featured both famous chefs and

rising digital stars experimenting with content. As part of this job, deBoschnek hosted Tasty’s “Chef Out of Water” video series, during which she had to make full meals using household appliances like irons and coffee makers.

In 2019, deBoschnek went freelance and soon landed a book deal with Simon & Schuster. She describes her recipes as “easy and approachable,” so it makes sense that one of her favorites is rice albeit zhuzhed with sautéed shallots, white wine, and stock. In To the Last Bite, it’s called “Weeknight Rice,” but her friends call it the rice. DeBoschnek admits that beyond flavor, “I’m thinking about color and texture. That’s the art school coming back,” she says. “Having different textural elements in a meal is so important … something crunchy, something creamy. It needs to be multidimensional.”

Her cookbook is filled with comforting options like a riff on shrimp cocktail, spatchcock

chicken, and Creamsicle-esque orange meringue semifreddo. It’s also designed so readers can cook efficiently and reduce waste. Each recipe has footnotes explaining how leftover ingredients like herbs, onion, and buttermilk can be used in other recipes in the book. Prior to its April 2022 release, To the Last Bite received mentions in Thrillist, BookRiot, and TIME DeBoschnek still occasionally makes “Chef Out of Water” videos in a recent episode, she cooked with a wax warmer. This involved nearly six hours of cooking and an entire roll of tin foil for heat retention. And yet, she produced tomato confit, poached tuna, and chocolate bark. “When I’m with these weird tools,” she says, “something clicks and my creativity comes out.” — Vanessa Machir

Mumbai Chic

Riya Khanna, Fashion Business Management ’20, and Amruta Behera, Fashion Design ’20, launched a popular streetwear brand midpandemic

Like many of their fellow 2020 grads, Riya Khanna and Amruta Behera, friends who met as roommates in FIT’s Alumni Hall, looked forward to jobs in the fashion industry. Instead, after graduation, they found themselves back home in Mumbai under lockdown.

Khanna and Behera created Rising Among in the most challenging of circumstances.

They made the best of their downtime, producing face masks in cool, reflective fabric. Bolstered by brisk sales, they deconstructed old jeans to make cute denim tops with the pockets intact. “Every item in the resulting zero-waste ‘denimpocket’ line sold out,” Behera says. “We even used selvage as straps.”

Soon their cottage industry grew into a full-fledged street wear brand: jackets with detach able sleeves, pants that convert to shorts, shirts with buckles and zippers. Their aesthetic is ’90s-era looks in new or upcycled fabrics. “We interpreted styles from New York and juxtaposed them with life in bustling Mumbai,” says Khanna, whose sophisticated, clean silhouettes are enlivened by Behera’s bold use of color. Their customer, Behera says, “is that person who loves to make an impression walking into a room.”

Necessity forced hyperlocal manufacturing: working with Indian craftsmen, resorting to muslin for samples, and later, sourcing fabric from deadstock. They overcame each challenge with ingenuity and persistence.

They called the company RIAM short for Riya/Amruta — and soon reimagined the name as Rising Among.

Alexis

Rising Among’s footwear and jewelry line launched this April with metallic “drip rings,” artisan-cast to look as though they’re melting.

Covid’s barrage of testing and quarantines proved “super scary, but we had ‘risen among’ all that to the next stage,” Behera explains.

Recently, Flying Solo, a brand consortium that was helping Rising Among with sales and marketing, invited them to present at its Paris Fashion Week runway show. In March, the duo showcased their latest collection, Untamed. “Our entire journey is encapsulated in this collection: being uncontrollable, standing out rather than fitting in,” Khanna says.

“We started in peak Covid, and that’s how we learned to work,” she adds. “We had deliv ery and pickup delays, red zones, no shipping to hotspots. Wave after wave, we’d get disappoint ed, but it never kept us from working. Now, even if there are another 500 Covid waves, it won’t stop Rising Among.”

Winnie McCroy

The Victory Is You

It was spring 2020, and Fulya Turkmenoglu needed to pivot fast. The previous year, the entrepreneur launched her medical device brand, Jaiyou, featuring a line of attractively designed, FDA-approved sports medicine supports and braces. Then the pandemic hit.

“I started getting emails: ‘Do you have masks? Do you have surgical gowns?’”

Turkmenoglu got to work. The daughter of a doctor, she grasped the importance of reliable personal protective equipment (PPE), which was in urgently short supply. “We had so many examples in the marketplace that were made of fabric not designed for medical products for furniture covering, for example,” she says. There were alarming reports of pathogen-laden gowns, and masks containing fiberglass and other hazardous substances. “I couldn’t imagine my father wearing something contaminated. That’s insane,” Turkmenoglu says. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we do it in the proper way?’”

This meant securing FDA approval for her new PPE line, Jaiyou Medical Essentials, which includes surgical gowns and both adult and pediatric

masks. All products are made in Turkmenoglu’s native country, Turkey. “PPE is not a simple textile item. It’s a medical device that must be manufactured in a medicalproduct manufacturing facility with cleanroom protocol,” she says. “For our PPE, we use medical-grade, nonwoven fabric that is breathable, flexible, lightweight, noncombustible, and fluid resistant. It decomposes easily and is nontoxic, nonirritating, environmentally friendly, and recyclable. We don’t work with thirdparty supply chains, which means taking responsibility for the entire sourcing, manufacturing, and sterilization practices.”

Having successfully launched both a sports medicine and a PPE line on her own, Turkmenoglu envisions vast possibilities for her company’s expansion.

“You could call it a small business, but I consider it a startup.” At-home Covid-19 tests are in the works. She also sees potential in prosthetics and in apparel designed for people with disabilities.

Jaiyou is a multifaceted company, and its name carries an apt double meaning. In Mandarin, it’s a cheer to support athletes: “fuel it and go!”

While attending yoga classes, Turkmenoglu observed that sessions often concluded with the Sanskrit word jai, meaning “victory.” She recalls thinking, jai-you, the victory is you.

“The idea is supporting your body so you can exceed your own limits. We must protect and support our doctors and nurses with a high level of safety so they can take care better.”

Nora Maynard

TOP: Fulya Turkmenoglu.

ABOVE: The Jaiyou brand is manufactured with the highest standards.

Fulya Turkmenoglu portrait: Dalspicks Photography

Fulya Turkmenoglu, Fashion Design ’14, expanded her medical device brand to PPE

Like Mother, Like Daughter

the shoulders. It started falling off in the middle of the show.”

Barbara McNamara, Fashion Buying

says. “You work very closely with the wardrobe department to find people who look right for a scene, whether it takes place at Barneys or in Brooklyn with hipsters.”

“When

FIT handed out internships, my friends were sent to a glove factory in Brooklyn that had rats, but I was very lucky,” Joan McNamara recalls. She helped a designer an heir to the Gillette razor fortune construct the garments he made for celebrity game show panelists like Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis.

“He had wonderful ideas about design but didn’t know how to sew,” she says. “He made a blouse with a boat-shaped neckline for Arlene Francis, but he didn’t put any elastic around

After graduation, Joan took a job working for the actress Gloria Swanson, who had designed the costumes for a play she was in called Nina. Joan constructed them in Swanson’s Fifth Avenue garment workshop.

“I learned all about her personal life,” Joan says. “She only ate broccoli. She was very upset with her daughter because she had fallen in love with a Frenchman almost double her age, and she wanted her secretary to break up the relationship. The daughter ended up marrying this fellow and as far as I know, they’re still married today.”

After a year, Joan left the industry, got married, and had five girls and four boys. She made all her daughters’ clothes. Her youngest, Barbara, always loved fashion.

“She was always fussy about clothes,” Joan recalls. “She wouldn’t wear pajamas unless the tops and bottoms matched.”

Barbara McNamara followed in Joan’s footsteps to FIT. “My mother has timeless taste, and we always loved going shopping together,” she says. “From when I was a young girl, FIT was the only place I wanted to go.”

In the early aughts, Barbara left the fashion industry for a job casting background roles for Sex and the City

“Background casting has a lot to do with fashion,” Barbara

A few years later, she started her own background casting company and worked on The Devil Wears Prada and 30 Rock. Recently, she’s gotten into principal casting speaking roles for History Channel miniseries, and in 2021 she was accepted into the exclusive Casting Society of America.

“I was on my own for all those years,” she says. “Now I’m part of a group.”  Jonathan Vatner

You Gonna Eat That?

Food photography by Joel Goldberg, Advertising and Marketing Communications, makes everything look delicious

With this kind of photography, details are everything designed, Goldberg says, to “evoke desire.” Consider our burger (on page 3): Red dab of ketchup against golden cheese, crisp ruffle of lettuce, perfect shadow on the bun. And a small but tasty touch: salt crystals sparkling on the fries.

The internet might tell you food photographers use motor oil in place of pancake syrup and Elmer’s glue on cereal instead of milk. Usually not true, Goldberg says. “We often eat the food we shoot. It doesn’t go to waste.”

Unlike many in his profession, he likes the food in his images slightly asymmetrical, a little imperfect: “That makes you really want to eat it.” In his photos, he says, “The most important thing isn’t my camera or my lens. It’s the light how harsh or soft, the color temperature.”

The two big, beautiful burgers in this issue were photographed in the Brooklyn studio of Joel Goldberg, who specializes in food, product, and still life imagery. An Advertising and Marketing Communications alum, he was always a photography hobbyist, but found his calling in the food industry and decided to turn a creative outlet into a career. He now shoots for a variety of brands and publications, including Magnolia Bakery, The New York

He prefers “directional” light, from the side or slightly from behind, unusual in food photos. He thinks it makes his images distinctive. “If something you’re doing is working,” he advises young photographers, “keep doing it.”

His secret weapon is a great team of collaborators: a food stylist, prop stylist, creative director or art director, and all their various assistants. But for the Hue shoot, he worked alone. And as the client, we got to order our ideal burger. Want fries with that? Of course. Tomato? Sure. “And the Coke…” Goldberg said, “fizz or no fizz?” Fizz, definitely.

Linda Angrilli

Times, Food Network Magazine, and more.

TOP

Joan Nielsen McNamara, Apparel

RIGHT : Goldberg in his studio with Hue’s burger behind him

WHAT INSPIRESYOU?

Staging the Dream

“When I think of American style, I think of the drama, the glam, and how everything is a little excessive. More is always more,” says Sarai Garcia, Photography ’20, who has been published in New York, Flanelle, and other outlets. Behind the scenes of that glammy American facade, she points out, are people of less means who make it all possible. Using her Queens apartment as a studio, the DominicanAmerican DIY artist serves as photographer, set designer, stylist, hair and makeup artist, and, in this case, model. The American dream today is arguably just a pretense, but for Garcia, who describes her work as “a celebration of and love letter to women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ identities,” the people who once propped up the dream are finally taking center stage.

A.J.

The Magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology

HUE is published three times a year by the Division of Communications and External Relations 227 West 27th Street, Room B905 New York, NY 10001-5992 (212) 217-4700

State University of New York

LINDA ANGRILLI

ALEX JOSEPH , MA ’15

Storyteller

JONATHAN VATNER

SMILJANA PEROS

Coordinator

ALEXANDER ISLEY INC.

Direction and Design

GOODFOLK AGENCY Web Design

LORETTA LAWRENCE KEANE

President, Communications and External Relations

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Vice President for Communications

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