Academic Dreams, Chocolate Eclairs and Velvet Tams

I have become someone who loves to study and write about fashion. I like to wear it too but in a performative way, much the way I like to write. Fashion is full of metaphors that help me explain my ideas about life. Today I find writing a memoir is like working with a brocade. Deep reflection and closer observation reveal the way the threads weave together to create the contours and colors of the final fabric. Brocade has a rare beauty that only fully emerges when one looks at the textile from afar. Sometimes, I am surprised by what I see up close, as the threads weaving together do not create the same beauty as when seen from afar. Somehow, you must reconcile the two perspectives in order to love a brocade.

Writing a memoir allowed me to find deep emotional truths that I couldn't see during the time I lived them. Truths that like errant threads can only be discovered and plucked away when looking at a fabric or a life after putting it aside, and then, upon closer examination. One of the vagabond threads I discover when I wrote my book was that I never grieved the loss of my academic career. When I realize this, the magnitude of my grief staggers me. While much of my unhappiness before the pandemic was because of the loss of my authentic self, it also corresponds to the time I left academia. I never quite felt whole after that. Now I understand my academic self, the researcher, the writer, the teacher is my missing part. I need to weave this thread back into the brocade. But not in the same way it was when I left. Because I am not the same person who I was then. I don’t want to work in academic institutions either, I just want to visit.

My resuscitated academic self has been slowly revealing itself through my actions, such as responding to the start of a new academic year by creating a syllabus for a new “course”. My interest in the connection between fashion and social theory, is reflected in the books that appear in a pile on the desk in my shed. Covers and spines reveal titles like, What Artists Wear, Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress, and The Fashioned Body. I am eagerly waiting for Charlie Porter’s new book, Bring No Clothes: Bloomsbury and the Philosophy of Fashion, to arrive in the mail. There are journal articles in my Books app like, Tilda Swinton: Performing Fashion by Karen de Perthuis and What’s in a Narrative? Interpreting Yohji Yamamoto in the Museum by Alexis Romano.

 While ostensibly these texts are about fashion, I enter the frame as someone who studied social work, not a discipline but rather a profession that draws upon many theoretical lens and other disciplines to inform its practice. Which is why I have always thought that the knowledge part of social work allows for far more complexity than any other profession. Bureaucracy, specialization and how it is regulated in practice often dumbs it down. Social work draws upon the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, ecology, psychology, neuroscience, political science, economics, critical theory and law. There are probably more and also includes subsets of those that are already mentioned. Social Work’s knowledge base for me is like an optometrist’s trial lens case. You have multiple lens that can work together to correct errors in your vision. It allows for multiple ways of “seeing”.

What I mean to suggest here is that I am already familiar with many of the theories I discover in these texts about fashion, including postmodern ones. My area of research and teaching was interdisciplinary education and practice. I was required to take electives in other disciplines at the CUNY Graduate Center to complete my PhD. The Graduate Center offers almost 50 programs for master's, doctoral, and certificate programs in a variety of fields. A veritable candy store for someone like me who is easily bored. My program chair finally ordered me to stop taking electives so I could get on with my dissertation and settle on a topic. Now, after 10 years of being a part of the fashion system, I also bring lived experience to the theory and practice of my new area of study: fashion.

What I read, events I attend, meetings I have, and experiences I seek out shape the contours of this older and wiser academic self. During this fashion week, I reunite with old friends who appear in my book and attend an event celebrating books made by artists, designers, and writers. I’ve had a relationship with a school of fashion design in the city since 2016. Initially, it was students who outreached and pulled me in to model their collections. I went to their shows and visited graduation exhibitions. I attend the runway shows of alumni who have become successful designers. My book talks about a co-design project I did with students and tutors before the pandemic that made me remember why I love fashion and its power to disrupt. By interacting with students and alumni, I got to know faculty members, deans and administrators.

I and a particular faculty member, known for her ardent support of students and skill in engaging the community, share a common interest in Chinese designers. There is a fashion week photo of us both wearing different colors of the same coat designed by Angel Chen, our outfits not planned in advance. She is strikingly tall. We have kept in touch during the last four years. We are both at our best when we are in collaboration with others. An invitation to meet her for breakfast appears in my in-box. Something about a project.

Over poached eggs and cold brews, she suggests a collaboration between myself and the program she now directs. I’ve been watching her Instagram, and she has developed an engaged and creative community of faculty and students, one I am now invited to enter. Like my not fully realized old academic self, what this will look like is not yet formed. The loose structure will be public conversations, collaborations with faculty, co-design projects with students and, yes, writing. We agree to continue the conversation, the brainstorming that has only just begun.

 Two hours felt like a minute, and I literally float across the city to meet Calvin. I am so excited. When we get home, I rummage around upstairs to find the old wallet that contains artifacts from when I lived in the city, my New York City Public Library card and my CUNY Graduate Center alumni card. Both have on-line fashion databases. Both have physical structures that are New York City historical landmarks. Both reside in close proximity, on Fifth Avenue. The Grad Center used to be the iconic B. Altman department store. I find this now somewhat ironic. At some future point I’ll get dressed in some Yohji, what I wore when I taught, take the train in and visit. Perhaps I’ll write about the building I took all those electives in. The one that used to be a mecca for fashion. It has an interesting history.

Sixty years ago, my grandmother took me shopping in that very same building for a watch plaid coat with a velvet collar and matching velvet tam. The hat puts me in mind of the deep cobalt blue, eight-sided tam with a gold tassel that sits on a shelf in my closet. Below hangs the same color blue gown trimmed in velvet and together they make up my doctoral regalia. I wore it at my own graduation and for another 20 years, at the commencement ceremony of my students.

Bags at our feet, after shopping, my grandmother and I shared a chocolate eclair in the store's café. We spoke of our favorite books and the frequent travels that took her away from me. When I return to this building again, now that I am 70, My mouth will recall the taste of chocolate and cream. I will remember the academic dreams I dreamt there and the sweetness of the treat that was a day among clothes with my grandmother.

I’ll end this ramble with a quote from someone far more articulate than I have been and who properly sums things up.

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Soren Kierkegaard