What’s Slow About Fast Fashion?

A Kahn Institute Short-Term Project

Monday, January 13 from 4 to 7 p.m.
Tuesday, January 14 from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Organizing Fellows

Elisabeth Armstrong, Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Kiki Smith, Theatre

Project Description

Embedded in the question-title of this project—the slow—is a reminder about what is hidden in the critical term “fast fashion.” What is slow are the complex histories and daily lives of people making clothes on a global assembly line, the slow work of ensuring human rights, living wages, and dignity in this labor, the slow processes of the planet absorbing ever-increasing discarded clothing, dyes, and remnants of production, even the relatively slow shipping containers transporting finished goods across oceans. Taking the “slow” and the “fast” together, this Kahn project will explore how online shopping, instant gratification, and swift-moving trends also span generational and epochal timeframes.

We will launch our work together with a visit from Liana Foxvog, Director of Supply Chain Strategies at Worker Rights Consortium, on Monday, January 13, from 4 to 7 p.m. On the morning of Tuesday, January 14, we will meet at the costume shop to examine items from the Historic Clothing Collection alongside fast-fashion items. A sample maker for forty years in New York’s Fashion (7th) Avenue, Germaine Lamothe will speak about garment creation as a craft and an art form: how they are made, where the corners were cut, and why these choices were made from the point of view of production. After the morning at the costume shop, fellows will return to the Kahn for lunch and discussion.

Statements of interest are due Thursday, November 7. Fellows will be notified no later than Friday, November 15.