The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Presents a Free Online Class on Fashion: Enroll in Fashion as Design Today

Fash­ion as Design, a free online course by the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA), begin­ning this com­ing week , may not equip you with the skills to bring a fab­u­lous gar­ment to fruition, but it will help you under­stand the con­text behind clothes both worka­day and wild.

Led by Depart­ment of Archi­tec­ture and Design Senior Cura­tor Pao­la Antonel­li, Cura­to­r­i­al Assis­tant Michelle Mil­lar Fish­er, and Research Assis­tant Stephanie Kramer—whose respec­tive fash­ion heroes are actor Cate Blanchett, design­er Claire McAr­dle, and activist Glo­ria Steinem—the course will con­sid­er the his­to­ry and impact of 70+ indi­vid­ual gar­ments.

The pieces can be exam­ined in per­son through the end of Jan­u­ary as part of MoMA’s Items: Is Fash­ion Mod­ern? exhi­bi­tion.

Some of the duds on the syl­labus ben­e­fit­ed from a celebri­ty boost, such as Bruce Lee’s icon­ic red track suit, recre­at­ed with its prop­er ear­ly 70’s cut, below.

Oth­ers, just as icon­ic, can be bought with­out fan­fare in a drug­store or supermarket—witness the plain white t‑shirt, intro­duced to MoMA’s col­lec­tion when Antonel­li was curat­ing 2004’s Hum­ble Mas­ter­pieces: Every­day Mar­vels of Design.

Stu­dents with no par­tic­u­lar inter­est in fash­ion may be intrigued to con­sid­er the threads on their backs through such lens­es as mar­ket­ing, dis­tri­b­u­tion, pol­i­tics, iden­ti­ty, and eco­nom­ics.

Stu­dents will also delve into the life­cy­cle of cloth­ing, fash­ion-relat­ed labor prac­tices, and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. The more con­sumers under­stand this side of the biz, the like­li­er it is that the fash­ion indus­try will be pushed toward adopt­ing more eth­i­cal prac­tices.

Enroll in the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s free Fash­ion as Design course here or stick a toe in with the com­pan­ion exhi­bi­tion’s Youtube playlist or the teach­ers’ delight­ful­ly can­did first-per­son com­men­tary in Sur­face Magazine’s behind-the-scenes cov­er­age:

The Hood­ie

The hood­ie is one of those items that has had a long and mul­ti­fac­eted life, and one that’s become so polit­i­cal­ly charged. But this sweater, with the hood and the string, with or with­out the zip­per, is from the 1930s, from a com­pa­ny that was called Knicker­bock­er Knit­ting Com­pa­ny, before it became Cham­pi­on. Ini­tial­ly the hood­ie was made for ath­letes, to keep them warm before or after train­ing. It was imme­di­ate­ly co-opt­ed by con­struc­tion and cold-stor­age work­ers. Then in the 1970s and ’80s it became city-dwelling kids’ gar­ment of choice when skate­board­ing ille­gal­ly or writ­ing graf­fi­ti or break­danc­ing. There’s an aspect of the hood­ie that’s become a kind of qui­et defi­ance of the system—of want­i­ng to be in the mid­dle of it but some­how away from it. The hood­ie gives you a false impres­sion of being invis­i­ble. All these dif­fer­ent his­to­ries bring us to today. The Trayvon Mar­tin and George Zim­mer­man inci­dent a few years ago trans­formed the hood­ie into this sym­bol of injus­tice. We’re going to have this red Cham­pi­on hood­ie from the 1980s—when it’s at the moment of tran­si­tion. But it’s going to be there by itself and we’re hop­ing it’s going to be real­ly res­o­nant. It shows the pow­er that cer­tain gar­ments have to become sym­bols for polit­i­cal strug­gle. —Pao­la Antonel­li

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Every Exhi­bi­tion Held at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Pre­sent­ed in a New Web Site: 1929 to Present

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday