It’s a Barbie World, We All Just Live In It

By: wornette

From a young age, the line “Being plastic is fantastic!,” always associated with Barbie, was ingrained in my head. I never thought too critically about it—it was a catchy little rhyme—but as I grew older, I began to see just how warped the message being sold to my Barbie-obsessed friends and me was. To this day, I maintain a love-hate relationship with Barbie: the girl’s got style, and I can’t help but admire her determination to experiment with every career from veterinarian to pizza maker; however, her body type has been proven multiple times to be beyond realistic, a narrowly idealized figure being sold to young girls as the pinnacle of beauty. It’s not just that Barbie and friends lack diversity in their shape: her form is downright impossible to achieve.

You can imagine how excited I was to stumble upon Margaux Lange, a New York-based jewelry designer who seems to share my sentiments. She created The Plastic Body Series: a handmade accessories line which pays homage to pop culture’s fascination with Barbie by salvaging old doll parts and transforming them into wearable art. As sweetly nostalgic as they are creepily Lynchian, the accessories themselves are a psychedelic gaggle of doll heads dangling from necklaces and disembodied eyes peaking out of rings. While one typically wouldn’t think of “dismembered female body parts” as empowering, it somehow works when the body in question was totally artificial to begin with. By reworking different Barbie parts into pieces, including a necklace that is a mash-up of different plastic chests, the result feels like a wearable statement forcing society to critically examine those plastic body parts constantly deemed beautiful. Plus, Lange’s work has given me the ultimate D.I.Y. inspiration for how to transform the Barbies that I was never able to purge and alter them to fit my teenage self. Perhaps next up will be decapitating Furbies for a new accessories line.

text by Emma from The Emma Edition

The Low Down on Downs Designs

By: Max Mosher

At first glance, we seem bombarded with clothing options. Never before in history have there been so many stores and styles to chose from. Don’t like the ‘fast fashion’ of the malls? There are vintage shops a-plenty. Having trouble finding a specific item you see in your mind? Go online and you’ll probably uncover something similar.

As clothing has become more and more central to our identities, styles have multiplied exponentially, like molecules in a petri dish.

But not everyone is represented in the innumerable items on the rack. As Jeanne Beker recently wrote about a friend of hers who uses a wheelchair, many people still get left out of the fashion industry despite declarations of democracy.
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Inquire Within: Fashion and Research

By: wornette

Do you remember that moment when you realized you really liked fashion? That transition when your interest in dress, adornment and clothing went from a passive form of enjoyment to an unquenchable curiousity?

Perhaps it happened with an article that gave you the history and context of a particular style, a detail on a pair of pants that you knew must be modeled on something rather old but couldn’t quite place, a list of required classes for a fashion degree, obscure titles cited in the pages of magazines (including, ahem, Worn Fashion Journal). You found questions you never knew you could ask. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to put on the dress; you needed to know its conceptual and cultural story. There are the questions you start to obsessively ask:

Did fashion play a part in any of the suffragist movements? Why does the human brain like repeating patterns, and why do we put them on our clothing? What are the socioeconomic demographics behind modern hipster fashion? How many shoes would your average Victorian lady have owned in her lifetime? What about her maid? And why? And where did we get that rule that horizontal stripes are not slimming?

These are the questions that have been plaguing many of the fashion students, journalists, history majors, artists, and other individuals amongst you. What are your research options? Who are the gatekeepers to the information you might be interested in? How far could you take your search? With this series, we aim to help you find the next steps, to get your vintage brogue-clad foot into the door of fashion research opportunities.

Part 1: Fashion and Research
Mapping Your Path
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Fashion Nerds Converge

By: Max Mosher

“I always sit in the front row,” I overheard a young woman tell her friend. “I’m a nerd.”

I could relate. A nerd myself, I arrived early at Convergence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Fashion, Ryerson University’s first Fashion Studies graduate symposium that took place last November, and observed the over-caffeinated presenters as they organized their notes, unpacked their laptops and scurried about.

Other snippets of conversation that could be appreciated by WORN readers surrounded me:

“What are you wearing? I can see the Peter Pan collar!”

“There has to be a certain number of left-handed desks in the room. It’s called equity.”

“I’m going to wear my hat during my talk. I’m going to wear it until Wednesday.”

“You have every right to squeal; tutus are a sight to behold.”

“I’m not putting a name tag on silk.”

As the students, professors and guests took their seats, Sarah Portway, a Ryerson graduate student and one of the presenters, discovered her PowerPoint presentation would not load properly.

“It’s like I tell my students,” she said. “If there’s one thing that will screw you up, it’s technology. Late last night, I decided to be funny and create a pictogram. This is my punishment. Maybe it’s because my computer’s made of wood.”

I asked her if this was true. “Yeah, the outside is bamboo. My talk is about sustainability, so I should put my money where my mouth is.”

During her introduction, Associate Professor Dr. Alison David Matthews explained the title of the symposium. ‘Convergence,’ she said, means to ‘bend towards.’ It was a good metaphor for the diverse but overlapping topics discussed throughout the day.

Caroline O’Brien inspects a tutu for her talk on the Ballerina in Western Culture

From harem pants in interwar Paris to style blogs in the digital age, the presentations touched on the conflicts inherent in the study of fashion. Is fashion decorative or protective? Superficial or indispensable? Frivolous or feminist?
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