Fashion and the Construction of Race

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In the second episode of this miniseries, Portrait of a Young Woman, Erica Moiah James discusses the importance of fashion in understanding this portrait and the life of this woman. She speaks with historian of fashion, Amelia F. Rauser, Charles A. Dana Professor of Art history at Franklin and Marshall College, whose book The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s was critical for Erica’s research. As Amelia has importantly argued in her text, the “objection of the enslaved Black body and the plantation culture and inhabited, stalked neoclassical dress, which could not escape the material traces of its manufacturer.” Erica’s research on the young Black woman in this portrait draws on Amelia’s work on Caribbean dress, and they will discuss the role that fashion had on the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. In particular, they explore the ways in which women and particularly women of color use fashion to claim power through self-representation.