The Archaeology of Fashion
Explore the relationship between garments and their wearers where secondhand objects are excavated from personal archives, inherited as hand-me-downs, preserved as family heirlooms, and recontextualized through stylization.
About The Book
Table of Contents
About The Author
Using inherited garments, how is the choice of clothing significant in the context of the wearer’s surroundings and culture? How does it communicate one’s self-identity as a first-generation American?
When we dress ourselves, we are visually narrating to the world how we wish to be seen. Therefore, styling is a form of storytelling. It provides a framework to express cultural connections and ethnic pride across place and time; the outfit tells a story. Author Nicole K. Rivas combines visual and material culture to investigate sartorial representations of self-identity from the perspective of first-generation Americans, using garments of the past through contemporary archaeological approaches.
Touching on themes of memory, upbringing, culture, and autonomy, this book is ideal for students of Fashion and Personal Style, Textiles, Art, Material Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, and History.
Using inherited garments, how is the choice of clothing significant in the context of the wearer’s surroundings and culture? How does it communicate one’s self-identity as a first-generation American?
When we dress ourselves, we are visually narrating to the world how we wish to be seen. Therefore, styling is a form of storytelling. It provides a framework to express cultural connections and ethnic pride across place and time; the outfit tells a story. Author Nicole K. Rivas combines visual and material culture to investigate sartorial representations of self-identity from the perspective of first-generation Americans, using garments of the past through contemporary archaeological approaches.
Touching on themes of memory, upbringing, culture, and autonomy, this book is ideal for students of Fashion and Personal Style, Textiles, Art, Material Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, and History.
- Cover
- Half-Title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Abstract
- Note on language
- Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Learning objectives
- 1 Guardians of material memory: Collecting and preserving everyday clothes as cultural heritage
- Personal wardrobes and everyday clothes as cultural heritage
- Storytelling
- What’s worth preserving?
- Why do we collect clothes?
- Transforming into guardians of material memory: The archaeology of fashion
- Recommended projects/assignments/discussions
- 2 Cultivating identity through material traces
- Object biography: Using material culture to trace the origin of a garment
- Narratives: Using human history to examine intergenerational style narratives
- Stylization & self-identity: Using visual culture to create self-portraits
- Ethnographic case study: The Ovando Family Archive
- Recommended projects/assignments/discussions
- 3 The clothes we keep: The closet as a living archive
- Clothing as material culture and memory
- From necessity to choice: Inheritance and agency
- Styling as identity construction
- Garments as heirlooms and ancestral agency
- Ethnographic case study: Inheritance, memory, and professional continuity
- Recommended projects/assignments/discussions
- 4 Living archives in domestic spaces
- Intergenerational memory through objects
- Cultural and personal practice: Styling as a bridge across generations
- Threads across time: Material traces, intergenerational memory, and identity
- Recommended projects/assignments/discussions
- Epilogue: Sacred dirt and the lives carried in cloth
- Recommendations for future research
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Recommended further readings
- Index
Nicole K. Rivas is a fashion and costume historian, archivist, and professor of Fashion Studies at St. John’s University, where she teaches in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies minor program within the Department of Art and Design. Her research focuses on identity, autonomy, and material culture within fashion history. Her professional experience includes exhibition curation, archival work, and collaborations with fashion brands and cultural institutions. Through her interdisciplinary approach to fashion scholarship, Rivas emphasizes accessibility, preservation, and the cultural significance of dress and material objects across historical and contemporary contexts.
