Textile Archaeology

It's not about the Devil Wears Prada approach to people-reading via their clothing; fashion doesn't spare any of us, and it shouldn't be treated as a mere hobby. What does it mean about our current mental state as a whole that we continue to speak about textile waste as a blight on the Earth's existence while the Atacama clothing graveyard continues to grow and secondhand consumption ticks upward at the same rate as fast fashion?

Everything we believe about the human past is an artifact of what happened not to rot. We named the eras after stone and bronze because they survived. Had fiber survived, we would call them the String Ages — and we would be closer to the truth, because by hours of human labor, spinning and weaving dwarfed everything we've built our chronology around. Furthermore, the availability of local material shaped the definition of "everyday" and "luxury", but also called to development the heights of human ingenuity in response to our environments and our evolving bodies (decreasing hair, increasing melanin, etc.)

Your tuition will get you the essentials needed to mend your own clothing and some cool take-home materials that correspond with each class, as well as a field session at the MFA or Peabody (TBD).