Fashion, Anxiety and Society: Labor
With Marissa Nuncio, Minh-Ha T. Pham and Elizabeth Wissinger; conversation curated and moderated by Sara Ziff

Fashion, Anxiety, and Society is a conversation series curated by Kristen Owens. Organized in conjunction with Bard Graduate Center Gallery’s fall exhibition, French Fashion, Women, and the First World War, these monthly conversations explore contemporary questions of gender, labor, justice, and subversion as they relate to fashion. This conversation is curated and moderated by Sara Ziff. Other conversations in the series include:

Fashion, Anxiety and Society: Gender
With Margaret H. Darrow and Kate Strasdin, moderated by April Calahan and Cassidy Zachary, creators of Dressed: The History of Fashion podcast
Thursday, September 19, 2019

Fashion, Anxiety and Society: Justice
With Rikki Byrd, Rhea Combs, Tanisha C. Ford and Eric Darnell Pritchard
Thursday, November 14, 2019

Fashion, Anxiety and Society: Subversion
With Lucia Cuba, Fawn Krieger, and Otto von Busch
Thursday, December 12, 2019

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Meet the Speakers
Marissa Nuncio is the director of the Garment Worker Center. Nuncio practiced law as a labor and employment attorney for seven years, and she has been an advocate for worker’s rights for more than 12 years, including as program coordinator for Sweatshop Watch (a co-founding organization of the Garment Worker Center) from 2000 to 2003.

Minh-Ha T. Pham is an associate professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Her research examines fashion labor and power in the contexts of global and digital capitalism. Her current book project examines the roles social media interactions and architectures are playing in regulating the global fashion market through the establishment of cultural and social norms around property and impropriety.

Elizabeth Wissinger is a professor of sociology at City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at Borough of Manhattan Community College, where she teaches fashion studies and sociology. Her research focuses on technology, fashion, and embodiment. She has lectured in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe on topics related to gender and race, media, bodies, and work. Wissinger is the author of This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour (New York University Press, 2015), in which she explores what she terms ‘glamour labor,’ e.g. the work to make one’s physical presence resemble one’s highly filtered and edited presence online.

Sara Ziff is the founding director of the Model Alliance, an organization that promotes fair treatment, equal opportunity, and sustainable practices in the fashion industry, from the runway to the factory floor. ZIff has worked as a model for nearly two decades and produced the feature documentary Picture Me, which chronicles models’ experiences of their industry. She spearheaded and oversaw efforts to extend labor protections to child fashion models in New York State. She also helped to draft and introduce legislation that would create the first federal protections for child performers. Ziff holds a BA from Columbia University and an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Meet the Curator
Kristen J. Owens is an arts administrator, curator, researcher, and archivist with interests in visual culture, fashion, and African American studies. She works at the intersection of material preservation, information access, and arts education. As a curator, she has co-created exhibitions including Performing Fashion: New York City at NYU’s 80WSE Gallery (2017) and Dressed at Rutgers University-Newark’s Paul Robeson Galleries (2018). As a researcher, she has presented papers on African American photography and conduct literature, such as etiquette manuals, at conferences including Fashioning the Black Body in Bondage and Freedom (Brooklyn, 2017) and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference (San Diego, 2017). Owens holds an MA in visual culture: costume studies and an MS in library and information science from New York University’s dual degree program with LIU Palmer. She holds a BA in fashion studies and has returned to her alma mater, Montclair State University, as a lecturer in that subject.

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Leading support for Public Programs at Bard Graduate Center comes from Gregory Soros and other generous donors.