The Thought Project - Episode 41 - Interview with Elizabeth Wissinger

CUNY Graduate Center

To explain the fashion world and some of the recent controversies involving racism during an age when fashion trend setting Michelle Obama, one of the most prominent African American woman on the planet, we are joined today by Elizabeth Wissinger, professor of Sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and The Graduate Center, CUNY where she teaches Fashion Studies and sociology. Professor Wissinger’s research focuses on technology, fashion and embodiment. Her current research of how wearable technology genders bodies, research though which she is affiliated with the think tank, Data and Society. She is author of This Year’s Model: Fashion, Media and the Making of Glamor (NYU Press 2015). During the podcast Professor Wissinger points to changes in the fashion “industry [that] has been trying to catch up with the changes in what is considered beautiful and fashionable that came about before social media was a force...fashion blogging made a space for totally different images to be fashionable that were not endorsed by Vogue…”