Fashion is Power

\merican author, filmmaker, psychologist, and educator Roberta Degnore who teaches a world-first course called The Psychology of Gender, Perception, and Self-Expression in Fashion at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology argues that fashion is anything but frivolous.

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What you wear can get you killed. Or laughed at, loved, or ignored. But fashion isn’t a one-way street of being looked at. What we wear seeps into our biology. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it’s the wearer who feels its effects.

In the 70s, I dressed like a traitor to my gayness, and it showed up in a conflict on a New York City bus heading down the Bowery. A tall woman in a paleblue sheath dress, white pumps, and handbag couldn’t hide the dark shadow on cheeks that needed shaving. And when that figure exited, a woman rushed to a window and screamed insults at the frightened person in that pale blue dress. Other passengers joined in the jeers. Stop it! That’s not right. I stood up from my seat as I shouted at them. Me, a gay woman, just another rider on the bus, had been passing as ‘normal’ to these strangers. And now they didn’t like it. Jeans, sneakers, oversized men’s white dress shirt knotted at the waist: a look that expressed my own nonbinary ness—and desire for comfort. But this had been interpreted by those passengers as an arty look, probably because I boarded the bus in my Soho neighborhood, So, you’re like that, too! They snarled their discovery. It wasn’t the first nor last sting for being me. But years later, in the 2000s, that otherness could be an asset sometimes. I was teaching psychology classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and my otherness brought me the opportunity to develop a gender course with colleague Steph Anderson. But I didn’t want to do it. Anderson was an expert in gender theory.