Thanks for being a Patreon subscriber! Below you’ll find an extended list of what we’re reading and questions to spark further discussion about fashion, disease and how we talk about pandemics.
Listen Now
Sara and Elise have had a long fascination with how questions about disease and the body intersect with fashion and consumer culture. In this corona/quarantine episode of Fashion Cats & Cocktails, they talk about the long-standing relationship between disease and fashion; the way illness functions in our cultural narratives, and explore the ways that public health has shaped our lives in the past and present.
Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts (Spotify, Stitcher, Apple, etc.)
An Extended Reading List
Fashion and Disease
“Why Plague Doctors Wore Those Beaked Masks” in National Geographic
Renaissance England and the Materials of Memory by Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass
The Prettiest Way to Die by Christina Newland for LitHub
How Tuberculosis Shaped Victorian Fashion by Emily Mullin for Smithsonian
Fashion at the Edge by Caroline Evans
COVID-19 Might Change the Way We Dress Forever by Kristen Bateman for Teen Vogue
Clarisse Pillard’s rumination on her experience in France, “I Went for a Walk and Left My Mask in My Pocket” and Erika Veurink on “Dystopian Movies, Real Crises, and How to Dress for the End of the World” both right here on Dismantle.
Sara’s essay for Catapult about housecoats past and present, class, gender and what counts as housework, to inspire your Work From Home wardrobe (if you’re lucky enough to be working from home!).
Disease Metaphors
The complete text of Susan Sontag’s classic, Illness as Metaphor.
The folks at On The Media talking about the role of war metaphors in public health crises.
Public Health and Consumer Culture
An excellent history of the relationship between public health, disease, consumer culture and scientific knowledge in the 20th century: Scientific Authority and 20th Century America edited by Ronald G. Walters.
An article that shows how the history of “conquering’ disease is part of the colonial project: Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Politics of Pollution by Warwick Anderson in Critical Inquiry.
A Time Magazine article about Public Health advertising during the Spanish Flu.
The Economics and Class Privilege of Social Distancing
Social Distancing is a Privilege by Charles M. Blow for The New York Times
When Middle Class Values Determine What’s Essential by Bobbi Dempsey for The Atlantic.
Discussion Questions
What do you imagine as the fashion response to the current pandemic?
What if we thought in different metaphors (other than “war”)? Would we respond differently? For example, in the episode of On the Media, they talk about some epidemiologists using “education” metaphors to describe infection.
Discuss the ways that the pandemic both exposes and exacerbates dominant ideologies and social inequalities.