politics (iv)

Dear F____ D____, and All:

I really want to thank you, F____ D____, for your vigilance and attention in questioning the intensions of this fashion show. I think this is a really great conversation to have, and I think it should continue.

In response to your well founded concerns, I would like to offer a third lens. This is the lens that sees fashion not as mere fun, but as a site of contestation for the normative symbols that dominate our lives and our bodies. The rewiring, reworking, and rearranging of symbols via the clothes we wear and the way we wear them is a creative act with a deep history in resistance to oppression of all kinds. I'm thinking for instance of the Jonkunno Festival in Jamaica, in which the colonial dress of the white English colonizers was parodied and its symbolic power inverted during the days between christmas and new year in the nineteenth century.

I would argue that in the case of thomas jefferson, there are more oppressions to contest than any one costume can accommodate. The queering of thomas jefferson in the project runway poster for this event is one example of what I mean (while I don't know if this was the intent of whoever made that poster, the fact that you don't have to me a Man to dress like thomas jefferson in this event is enough of a nod in this direction for me).

In sum, we cannot afford to abandon our right to rewire symbols of oppression through fashion, theatre, or any other site where the power of these symbols can begin to slip... off a shoulder say.

I invite you and everyone else to come give thomas jefferson a dressing down.

-s____ d____