Research

Research and Academic Work.

My fashion research, which has been presented in America, France, Italy, and England, typically centers around three categories: eccentric and enigmatic style icons, East-meets-West, and above all, dress history’s overlap with the history of fine and decorative arts.

In fall 2016 I returned to NYU as a part-time master's candidate in Steinhardt's Visual Culture: Costume Studies program where I completed my thesis on artist Giovanni Boldini and two of his muses, the Marchesa Casati and Rita de Acosta Lydig. Obtaining my MA while working full time in journalism was easily one of the best decisions I've ever made – it affirmed my passion for the intersection of fashion and art history. This program has empowered me to write confidently about fashion, past and present, and it also brought me several unique research opportunities. Additionally, I co-curated a public exhibition, presented at an international conference, and was published in two academic journals.

Below, discover my recent scholarship and presentations, as well as my graduate degree highlights.

Contact Me

Fashion Photography: The Magazine as Canvas (Online Course taught for the Barnes Foundation, April–May 2024)

In conjunction with the Barnes’s "Alexey Brodovitch: Astonish Me" exhibition, I taught a weekly online course to about 40 students. This course surveyed the key photographers — and the editors who dared to hire them — who elevated the field of fashion photography to an art. With an emphasis on the 1930s through 1980s, this course charted how artistic movements like Surrealism heavily influenced fashion and editorial creative direction at large. By also examining the work of today’s preeminent photographers, their predecessors’ profound legacies were further illuminated.

Critical Costume Presentation: Sweeping Statements: The Cape in American Cinema, 1920–1935 (Los Angeles, March 2024)

Critical Costume 2024 will take place from 6-9 March 2024 at the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television in Los Angeles, California, USA, hosted by the David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design

The Journal of Dress History Exhibition Review: “Designing Women: Fashion Creators and Their Interiors” at The Museum at FIT (Summer 2023)

Read full review

Dress: The Journal of the Costume Society of America Exhibition Review: “Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art” at Museum of Arts and Design, New York (Fall 2022)

With its 2022 exhibition, "Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art," the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York, New York, entered uncharted territory as the first global survey exhibition dedicated to the use of clothing as a medium of visual art. (Read full review)

Mary Sibande, The Domba Dance, 2019. Life-size fiberglass, bronze, cotton, and silicone, 157 1/2 × 98 × 118 1/8 in. (400.1 × 248.9 × 300 cm). Photo by Jenna Bascom; courtesy the Museum of Arts and Design

Keynote Speech for Parsons Paris MA Fashion Studies Symposium (Paris, April 2022)

Invited to be a keynote speaker, alongside renowned curator and professor Judith Clark, at the Parsons Paris MA Fashion Studies symposium focusing on Fashion, Heritage and Media. As the event description reads, “Fashion heritage is increasingly attracting the attention of players outside the sphere of academia. This can be observed in the communication strategies employed by luxury fashion houses as well as the growing resources invested in their archival departments. The questions we aim to address through this symposium concern the perspectives of fashion archives’ activation through media channels and the consequent redefinition of heritage. As heritage and archives increasingly cover the marketing needs of fashion houses, what are the discourses that may be built by the digital commodification of heritage? How do public media and fashion journalism position themselves in the digital expression of fashion heritage? How has the idea of heritage being disrupted?”

Association of Dress Historians Presentation: Gimmick or Gain: Juxtaposing Contemporary Fashions with Old Masters in the 21st-Century Museum (Turin, October 2021)

This paper examines the extent to which Old Master paintings merely served as a backdrop for contemporary fashion versus a valuable vehicle for storytelling in four 2017–2019 exhibitions: “The Hats of Stephen Jones” at the Saint Louis Art Museum, “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Balenciaga and Spanish Painting” at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, and “An Enquiring Mind: Manolo Blahník at the Wallace Collection”

Installation view of “An Enquiring Mind: Manolo Blahník at the Wallace Collection,” London, in 2019. Courtesy of the Wallace Collection

The Journal of Dress History Exhibition Review: “Ravishing: The Rose in Fashion” at The Museum at FIT (Summer 2022)

As the first socio-cultural examination of the rose in fashion, this 2021 exhibition endeavored to include not just a visual encyclopedia of flower-inspired garments and accessories spanning centuries, but it also contributed to conversations on sustainability, gender, and labor exploitation, among other subjects. (Read full review)

Association of Dress Historians Presentation: Sweeping Statements: The Cape in American Cinema, 1920–1935 (Virtual, June 2021)

Drawing on Salomé (1923), Madame Satan (1930), Dishonored (1931), Cleopatra (1934), and The Gilded Lily (1935), this paper analyzes and theorizes why the cape was the ultimate tool for conveying feminine power and exoticism during a critical period of cinematic history

Alla Nazimova (1879–1945) in Salomé (1923), a Silent Film Directed by Charles Bryant (1879–1948), a Film Adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play, Nazimova Productions Photograph by Arthur F. Rice, File Reference #33371 548THA, Image ID PMB532, Contributor: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/ Alamy Stock Photograph, Photographer: PictureLuxDate, Photographed on 1 January 1923.

The Journal of Dress History Book Review: Antonia Keaney’s 2019 book, A Passion for Fashion: 300 Years of Style at Blenheim Palace (May 2021)

This book is based on a spring 2017 exhibition of the same name that the author, Antonia Keaney, curated at the famed Oxfordshire landmark. Keaney joined the palace in 2008 as a member of its Education Team and currently serves as its Social Historian and Researcher, a role in which she has curated numerous exhibitions. In this book, she combines both her professional knowledge of the palaces and the Spencer–Churchill family’s complex history with her personal experience mounting a fashion–based exhibition of this stature for the first time. (Read full review)

Thesis: Fashion’s Favorite Painter: Giovanni Boldini and the Two Muses that Defined His Singular Style (New York, Spring 2019)

One of four students whose abstract was selected by a blind panel to present thesis at the 18th Annual Richard Martin Costume Studies Symposium

At the Rijksmuseum's High Society Exhibition with Giovanni Boldini's iconic 1908 portrait of the Marchesa Casati

Exhibition: The Eye of the Beholder: Decade-Defining Lids, Lashes, & Brows (New York, Spring 2018) (view exhibition site and virtual tour)

Editor and co-curator of public exhibition at 80wse by seven NYU Costume Studies students; overseen by NYU Costume Studies alumna, Mellissa Huber, Assistant Curator at The Met's Costume Institute
Exhibition surveyed the American products, advertisements, and icons that have contributed to cosmetic lid, lash, and brow trends from the 1900s to the present day
Conceptualized, designed, acquired loans, etc. all in less than four months – notable loaners included archives of Maybelline New York, Coty, Max Factor, and Cover Girl
Received press by Vanity Fair, Artnet, The Skint, Mi-Anne Chan of Refinery29, among others
Interviewed Kathy Peiss, author of Hope in a Jar, for The Fashion Studies Journal (view clip)
Presented at exhibition symposium about the Marchesa Luisa Casati as an eccentric “eyecon” of the 20th century

The signature image for The Eye of the Beholder exhibition. Greta Garbo by Cecil Beaton, 1937.

Research and Collections Experience:
Booth Moore’s American Runway (The CFDA & Abrams), Research Assistant (Freelance, Spring 2017)

Compiled primary sources, particularly from WWD Archive, to fact check and support historical references

M.J. Rose, Research Assistant for New York Times best-selling historic fiction writer (Freelance, Spring 2018)

Researched NYC jewelry and fashion industries during late 19th/early 20th centuries for her novel, Cartier's Hope (2020)

Jill Lasersohn Private Textile Collection, Collections Assistant (New York, Summer 2017–Winter 2018)

Invented a digital archival system for collection of 3,000-plus textiles from the 13th to 21st centuries

With Booth Moore at her New York book launch for American Runway.

Association of Dress Historians Presentation: Creativity Amidst Conflict: How Marchesa Luisa Casati Fashioned the Avant–Garde in Wartime Rome, 1915–1918 (London, October 2018)

After Italy entered the war in May 1915, the Marchesa Casati fled to Rome and became a muse and advocate of an itinerant avant–garde group that transformed the city into a hotbed of cultural activity. Casati forged collaborative friendships with artists and courtiers such as Serge Diaghilev, Léon Bakst, FT Marinetti, and Pablo Picasso, contributing to the creation of revolutionary works, including Parade (1917), Les Ballets Russes’ radical Cubist production. This paper illustrates the sartorial and stylistic legacy of an unconventional woman who devoted her life to art.
Published in ADH’s The Journal of Dress History during spring 2019 (Read full paper)

Presenting at the ADH World War I-themed conference at the historic Art Workers' Guild in London.