Haute Couture In The ‘Ivory Tower’
During the Civil Rights Movement, a politics of adornment was employed to garner media attention for the movement. Images of black activists dressed in their “Sunday best” attire (dresses, cardigans, pearls, and suits and ties) being attacked by white segregationists highlighted the barbaric nature of American racism and the system of Jim Crow. Wearing such fine clothes was a subversive act, in the U.S. South especially. Dressing nicer than working-class whites placed African Americans in danger of being beaten, arrested, or lynched because their clothing was an outward sign of their challenge to southern social order.
By the late 1960s, young African Americans had ditched the Sunday best look and the integrationist politics for a more radical, African-inspired “soul style.” Organizations such as the Black Panther Party and countless black youth in cities across the country donned Afros, dashikis, miniskirts, and ornate jewelry to showcase their cultural pride and their political solidarity. Black women in particular used the soul style look to challenge conventional notions of feminine propriety, which mandated that they wear their hair straightened and dress in conservative clothing. The mainstream fashion industry responded—as it had in the early twentieth century—by appropriating this politically-influenced soul style, selling the look everywhere from department stores to haute couture fashion boutiques.
Clothing still remains an important political tool in the struggle for social justice in communities of color. After Trayvon Martin—an unarmed black Florida teen dressed in a hoodie–was viciously murdered by George Zimmerman, people of various races, classes, nationalities, and genders began wearing hoodies in solidarity, organizing “Million Hood” Marches across the globe to call for justice for Trayvon.
The NYT editors ignored this narrative of American fashion that is entrenched in histories of racial oppression and brutality. Instead, the fashions selected serve as a sartorial shorthand for a politics of adornment within the “ivory tower,” which bolsters notions of white privilege and high-class refinement. Not only is this a dated image of the academy, it is one that effaces the reality that, everyday, faculty of color use fashion (along with their teaching, research, and social justice activism) to challenge discrimination and prejudice within the academy and beyond.
The spread presumes that when a professor walks into a classroom she is a blank slate, a model to be adorned in fine clothing and given an identity. The reality is that scholars of color, women, and other groups whose bodies are read as non-normative have never been able to check their race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation at the door. As soon as we walk onto campus, our bodies are read in a certain (often troubling) manner by our students, our colleagues, and school administrators. Our professionalism and our intellectual competence are largely judged by how we style ourselves. Therefore, we are highly aware of how we adorn our bodies. And, like our foremothers and forefathers who innovated with American “street fashions,” we, too, use our fashion sense to define ourselves, our professionalism, and our research and teaching agendas on our own terms. As a result, we are actively dismantling the so-called Ivory Tower.
Portrait of the author, taken in Ft. Wayne, Ind. Photo: Kimisha Ellis. Courtesy of the author.
So my disappointment was not just about the fact that “we” as professors of color were left out of the spread because the larger issue at stake is not simply about professors. It’s about the seemingly innocuous ways that popular culture is used to obscure and omit important histories related to communities of color.
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