Research Seminar: A Genealogy of Festival Fashion

Through analysis of fashion media and marketing discourses, Rachel Lifter provides a short history of festival fashion - a 21st-century invention.

Please note this event will be held online via Microsoft Teams. To request an invitation to this event, please email mediaresearchsupport@leeds.ac.uk by 3pm on Wednesday 4 November.

Her story travels from a muddy Somerset farm to a Californian sun-bleached desert to a Brooklyn city park with Manhattan skyline views. What becomes clear is that festival fashion - far from just a trend - offers an access point into a reassessment of the gendered and racialized politics of popular culture in the 21st century, wherein "subversion" is a dominant fashion ideal. 

This talk is the first in a two-part series based on Dr Lifter’s recent book Fashioning Indie: Popular Fashion, Music and Gender (Bloomsbury 2019). The second, to be held at London College of Fashion on 18 Nov 5:30pm GMT, is called 'Making "alternative" in 21st century popular fashion'.

Rachel Lifter is Clinical Assistant Professor of Costume Studies and Director of the MA Costume Studies program at NYU Steinhardt. She is an expert in the social and cultural analysis of fashion, with a specific focus on the politics of historical and contemporary popular fashion cultures.