Youth Culture Spawns Street Fashion Revolution
Department: FSAD
Contact: John Lamson
Read the Ithaca Journal article.
Ithaca, home of do-it-yourself fashion: Youth culture spawns street fashion revolution
By Linda Stout Journal staff
Ithaca, a fashion capital? British design anthropologist Van Dyke Lewis sure didn't think so five years ago when he came here from Oxford.
“When I moved to Ithaca, I thought, ‘My God, I've gone back in time,'” he said.
Lewis embarked on an ethnographic study of what kids were wearing on Ithaca's streets. Student assistants approached young people on the street who became study participants and “informants.” That study was the starting point for the new exhibit “Street Fashion and Youth Subculture: An Ethnographic Costume Exhibition,” curated by Cornell faculty member Charlotte Jirousek and student Denise Green.
“What's interesting about the project is people are fashioning themselves because there is no fashion here. Not everyone needs Marc Jacobs to make fashion,” said Lewis, an assistant professor who teaches in the fiber science and apparel design departments at Cornell.
In general, not just in Ithaca, there's a movement toward rejection of the fashion industry, he said.
“People don't need the clues. In that sense, Ithaca is ahead,” he said.
Street fashion involves the wearer creating or modifying any or all pieces of the outfit to express their own style or as part of a subculture. That could mean painting on a t-shirt, wearing jeans until they are uniquely ripped or getting artistic in patching them.
Green is intimately familiar with street fashion. Asked about a typical outfit, she described wearing a vintage western shirt with an oversized collar that her cousin found for her at a thrift store in Chicago and a pair of Doc Marten Mary Janes she has worn since ninth grade.
Green went to her friends for advice on the exhibit and, through her research with Lewis, struck up friendships with study subjects and likely donors around Ithaca. These people advised her along the way, contributed their own clothes and bought sample outfits for the exhibition, which includes highly modified styles like vintage hippie and neo-hippie (it was difficult to distinguish the era of jean jackets decorated with quilting, patches and beads; they ranged from 1969 to 2003), vintage punk (with chains), vintage hipster as well as store-bought “American princess” attire (a fitted velour sweatsuit topped with an oversized designer denim jacket) and hip-hop styles.
Study informant and exhibit donor Kirby Fowle, a former textile and apparel design major and now a developmental sociology major, contributed spider-webbed tights she distressed to resemble the pair she has worn almost daily for seven years as part of a look she called “female dirt bag.” The tights look like something between rags and fishnet stockings with oversized and uneven gaps.
“I loved that I could take what I was wearing and put it on the wall,” she said, noting that museums have usually devoted themselves to high couture.
The rest of the donated outfit was comprised of a modified Delias tank, tie-dyed pink and blue and covered in lyrics by the rapper Eminem, over a fishnet long-sleeved top she bought in New York. The fishnet top “was really expensive,” she said, although it looks like it could have been homemade out of fishnet stockings.
Lewis and Fowle agreed that what's happening in Ithaca and many other places — the customization of clothing — is slowly going mainstream. Jeans can already be ordered to custom-fit, and T-shirt printing or designs are often custom-made.
“The fashion industry is going to have to take it on,” Fowle said of the movement toward custom-made clothing, noting that body-scanning technology could change things as much as the sewing machine did.
Lewis said he thought one of the most creative outfits in the exhibition was the “cross-dressing woman,” no Victor-Victoria garb, but an outfit with a thick knit winter cap, men's glasses, an oversized men's sweatshirt worn over a skirt topped with a little satin slip.
“We deny fashion, but it's so key. It permeates our lives,” he said.
He said Women's Wear Daily recently called Cornell the least fashionable campus, one characterized by hiking boots and backpacks. There was once “a Cornell look,” Lewis said, with a blazer that was very strict, and he met an alumna who returned to visit wearing her jacket from the 1930s.
“Clothing is our most personal environment,” Jiroursek said. Even for people who don't care much about appearance, they're not going to let somebody else pick their clothes. When you walk into a room, you pick what people you want to talk to, get to know, and it's not about personality because you don't know them. It's about appearances.”
Originally published November 30, 2006