France has its elegant couture from, its established ateliers and Italy has its craftsmanship in its storied houses. But America has brands. Brands that make mass- produced, casual, sporty, comfortable clothing for everyone.

And we’re a young country, but when you think about it, our fashion design history is even younger. Like who are the titans of American fashion design? It’s Donna Karan, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren. These designers who are all still alive.

But if you want to look at where these great fashion designers got it all from, there was a great American fashion designer who many of them were looking towards.

Claire McCardell.

She was making throughly modern clothes in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

If you ask Anna Sui, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors or Tory Burch who they admire, they will all say Claire McCardell. She was doing what many of those designers were doing decades earlier. All of her clothes you could wear today. Claire made halter tops and wrap dresses and leotards and pants with big practical pockets, generally. Very cute, totally modern clothes that women would love to wear now.

But they were designed at a very different time. Like this is a designer who was born in 1905.

When Claire lived in New York City,  women still had to have a male signature to get a checking account. Women couldn’t got to restaurants without a male escort.

 So how did Claire McCardell beat the odds? In a time when women couldn’t do anything and American fashion designers didn’t exist? How did she become the great American fashion designer and create so much of what’s in our closets and go on to inspire generations of American designers after her?

And yet still, somehow for a time, get so thoroughly forgotten?

Some answers are in the latest episode.

Of course, I want you to listen to the episode, but more answers are in Elisabeth Evitts Dickinsons’ excellent book Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free.

 McCardell always put her closures on the side or in the front, so women could dress themselves— back in Claire’s time, a lot of dresses required someone else to zip you up or button you in. Claire was a real advocate for independent living, and she herself lived alone until she was 37, which is like shockingly late in her time.

During World War II out of necessity Claire created one of her most famous designs: a wrap dress.

 It’s called the “popover,” because you could pop it over your clothes. It was a little wraparound dress, cute, charming, which could easily slip on for getting a little messier. And this was one of the great wartime inventions and that became wildly famous.

And the legacy of the pop-over continues to this day. As historian and sewing expert Julie Eilber quipped “I guess Prada got the memo because this half-assed Becky-Home-Ecky version is on their website. It doesn’t even have a pocket! Claire’s version was so much cooler.”

And by the way, Julie Eilber helped make a modern version of Claire’s famous “monastic dress” available to anyone with a needle and thread.

It looks just as elegant, just as comfortable, just as timeless, as it did when Claire made it 88 years ago.

But my friend Em Seely-Katz, of the brilliant newsletter Esque, is here to set me straight. Because anime is more important to contemporary high fashion than I realized.

This piece was written by Em, edited by the great Grace Tarducci, and it was a treat for me. Take it away friends

You can almost smell it: sweat-marred graphic tees; cheap plastic purses with transparent windows to show off crowded rows of enamel pins; knee-high socks embroidered with cringeworthy quotes. Anime lovers are not typically known for their fashion sense.

“Otaku” is a Japanese term that can be used on a spectrum from derogatory to affectionate. The word refers to nerds entranced by a specific interest; racecars, computer parts, or in this case, anime. But, despite their bad rep when it comes to style, the last decade has seen the rise of a new subset of otakus whose fixation is split down the middle between anime and fashion, blurring a line that once seemed more like a chasm.

As a dual-wielding anime/fashion otaku myself, I couldn’t be happier about this crossover. But for people who don’t identify with both interests, this may seem like a random, even unholy, union. I’m going to do my best here to assuage any fears as I walk you through the genesis of this intersection, introduce you to a few key figures who have done the work to Make Anime Fashionable, and to a few entry points if you’re a fashion fiend curious about testing the waters of anime1 or vice versa.

If I had to call it, I’d say that the anime world’s first notable flirtation with fashion was in Naoko Takeuchi’s dizzyingly prolific series Sailor Moon (1992), a 90s childhood staple with a monster-of-the-week structure and an overall message of girl power. Like a Benadryl slipped to an unsuspecting dog, Sailor Moon watchers may not have known that they were surreptitiously fed, week after week, references to both street style and high fashion that may still help define their tastes to this day.

Everything from a faithful representation of Christian Dior’s 1992 Palladium Dress bedecking a celestial princess, to several Mugler FW92 pieces worn by a handful of the series’ most lascivious villains, to street stylings that look like a primer for future FRUiTS Magazine models.

Harajuku syle, named for the Harajuku railway station in Tokyo, is a high saturation streetwear movement that’s been going strong since the late 80s. The ancestry of the fad can be traced back to the western occupation of Japan in the 1940s-50s. After WWII, Japan’s economy grew at an unprecedented rate, reaching its peak in the 1980s and ultimately crashing in the 90s. This craze was the visual identity of Tokyo’s rebellious youth movements of the 1990s, a time known in Japan as “The Lost Decade.” Throughout the years, Harajuku has come to include many of its own subcultures such as urahara, Lolita, kogal, gyaru, and cosplay. Sailor Moon prominently featured the streetwear style, and Fashion, from the pages of Vogue to the street stylings of the Harajuku district, was a defining feature of one of the most iconic franchises in animation history.

If Naoko Takeuchi and Sailor Moon made the first move in the steamy fashion and anime affair, Ai Yazawa sealed the deal with her aughts-spanning works Paradise Kiss, a show so style-focused that its plot centers around fashion school students. Yazawa’s more widely-known show, however, is Nana, where the titular punk superstar wears Vivienne Westwood’s iconic Orb necklace and armor ring. Yazawa had been infatuated with the clothing of Vivienne Westwood since before she started writing manga, so it was only natural for her to draw her heroines wearing pieces ripped off Westwood’s runways.

Beyond jewelry, almost every page in both Paradise Kiss and Nana bears the mark of Westwood’s influence, whether designs were copied directly from Yazawa’s personal stash of clothes or simply influenced by Westwood’s proclivities toward asymmetry, tartan, safety pins, and a rebellious spirit against the homogenous, traditional norms of Japanese style before the subcultural revolutions of the aughts.

Although Westwood passed away in 2022, the interplay between her work and Yazawa’s lives on, most recently through a collection of “Nana-inspired” jewelry and ready-to-wear clothes in honor of the story’s 25th anniversary. Alas, I and many other fans saw the capsule as cheap and cash-grabby due to its lack of attention to onscreen detail (for example, Nana’s always-silver jewelry was rendered here, for no apparent reason, in gold), but the fact still remains that the Yazawa x Westwood connection is a central point around which the fashion and anime worlds continue to visibly merge.

You may be under the impression that the anime-fashion pipeline is strictly on the feminine side of style, but menswear has become just as, if not more, intertwined with anime in the past few decades.Yohji Yamamoto’s sub-brand Ground Y has collaborated with animes from the ‘90s staple Neon Genesis Evangelion to a 2020s cult favorite, Chainsaw Man, specifically picking shows that jibe with the brand’s already-established aesthetic filled with moody, flowy streetwear and gothic color palettes. The clothing is subtle enough that most fans, let alone non-otakus, wouldn’t clock that you were wearing anime-inspired clothing.

In 2023, MSCHF’s Astroboy-esque red boots terrorized the internet with their omnipresence, but looking past the gimmick, these shoes can be considered one of the best examples to date of a high-quality, high-fashion replica of anime wear. The backlash to their introduction was nothing more than growing pains as the worlds of anime and fashion began the next phase of their fusion.

This style of collaboration has trickled down to a robust market of not-quite-bootleg designers such as Goni and VeesClothing who create pieces that cleverly and subtly reference characters’ designs and outfits for price points that are far more attainable than the high-end Yamamoto togs. Below, a faux fur-lined hoodie with armorlike paneling and purple embroidery translates the tattoos and ridiculous get-up of Katakuri, a beloved One Piece antagonist, into a casual piece of outerwear.

A black tie with a triangular cutout at the tip nods to both the uniform worn by Chainsaw Man’s Denji, and the chainsaw pull that sprouts from his chest.

Anime’s attitude of defiance toward hegemonic power has attracted many subcultures throughout its time in the western world. One of the most consistent of these subcultures being Black otakus. Anime has had a strong following of Black American fans since it was first introduced to the United States. The history of this fandom is a bit of a complex phenomenon that not enough serious scholarship has focused on, and I won’t pretend to have the knowledge or wherewithal to fully break it down here, but this cultural tie truly can’t be overlooked when it comes to anime fashion’s cool factor. Black American style helped shape Japanese streetwear; Harajuku fashion borrowed copiously from 90s hip hop culture, most evidently in subcultures such as gyaru, and mainstream American style today owes much of its debt to the same aesthetic movements. When it comes to anime and high fashion, Black American otakus are leading the charge, with, as usual, the rest of the world following.

Nigerian-American model and stylist Wisdom Kaye has garnered a social media following of millions, an invite to the 2024 Met Gala, and the holy grail of high-fashion closets. One of the main draws of his content is his use of anime as inspiration for designer outfits. He translates, with both visionary precision and a rakish creative license, outfits worn by characters like Luffy, the pirate protagonist of the epic tale One Piece, into looks that would make Anna Wintour’s heart stop (complimentary).

Wisdom’s outfits, as well as the bootleg designers’ wares above, veer into what I would deem “casual cosplay,” (cosplay, noun: the art of dressing up as an anime character, typically for events like conventions).

Similar to DisneyBounding (have fun opening that can of worms), the lines between dress-up and simply dressing up have blurred in the wake of stylists like Wisdom and other influential figures such as Michael B. Jordan, who created a Naruto capsule in collaboration with Coach, and perhaps most famously, Megan Thee Stallion. Interpreting characters’ looks with varying degrees of fidelity and an ever-present level of hotness, Megan has subtly referenced deep cuts (like the protagonist of The Disastrous Life of Saiki K.’s pink hair) sometimes for an occasion like Halloween, sometimes just for fun. With her varying degrees of cosplay, one of the most talented women in the entertainment industry has helped officially cement anime as inextricable from the world of style.

From Sailor Moon in Chanel to hypebeasts lining up down New York City streets for pill-adorned Akira jackets to the virality and impact of Black fashion otakus like Wisdom and Megan, the verdict is in: the anime world is now officially a fashionable one to occupy. Gone are the days of the stinky T-shirt, here are the times of the designer collab. I hope your interest is piqued―you have a lot of homework to do if you want to get caught up on One Piece.

Esque

Imagine a fashion newsletter. Now forget I said anything.

By Em Seely-Katz

That’s why I’m so grateful that my friend, Brooklyn-based artist Danielle Durchslag is using fashion to work through questions of identity, history, and belonging. Not to mention, her work is also fun and campy in a way that feels appropriately semitic.

Danielle’s been kind enough to take the time to walk us through her work and her process, ahead of her upcoming solo show. What a treat.

Take it away, Danielle:

Jews and clothing are inextricably bound; but we usually see that relationship through images of overworked 19th century immigrants bent over sewing machines. This narrative, of garment workers on the Lower East Side, emphasizes Jewish American poverty and “otherness,” while ignoring the issues of class, whiteness and assimilation rooted in the way we, as Ashkenazi Jews, have come to dress. It’s also woefully, aggressively, non-fabulous.

As an artist, I’ve decided to change this. Inspired by Jewish ritual and fashion history, I design costumes and embody characters of my invention with distinct, at times oppositional approaches to contemporary Ashkenazi identity. Collectively, these characters tell the story of Jewish life and disagreement, but through a joyful, feminist, fashion-focused lens.

I first began this endeavor, oddly enough, on Easter. At the 2022 NYC Easter Bonnet Parade, I witnessed a dynamic, buoyant celebration of chapeaus of all kinds, from traditional Easter bonnets to beautiful, surprising head coverings with themes completely outside the holiday. Paradegoers showed up wearing original headgear of all shapes and colors, personal expressions engaging with politics, fashion history, and identity.

That day on 5th Avenue, I immediately knew I’d return the next year, wearing an ambitious headpiece of my own.

This party of a hat does more than meets the eye. In addition to its striking looks, it also serves as a commentary on “passing” in Ashkenazi life, and my personal tribute to that most glamorous, Caucasian, and hat-loving of Jews, Elizabeth Taylor.

Taylor converted to marry the singer Eddie Fisher, a faith she kept after the union quickly fell apart. Less than a decade later, she starred in a movie called BOOM! which features my favorite clothing item ever of hers: an iconic white tower atop her head designed by Alexandre of Paris. The film stinks, but the hat, as you can see, is divine:

Over the course of 12 months, I constructed my tribute hat / costume, titled Taylor Bonnet. My headpiece appears deceptively similar to the one in BOOM! , but if you look closely, you can see it’s actually a celebration of Passover, made with matza wrapping paper, fake parsley, and many fabric eggs; all facsimiles of Seder table items. Knowing Passover, like Easter, celebrates spring, and the Last Supper was a Seder, this Pesach headpiece made for an ideal Easter Bonnet.

Over those months in the studio, to my surprise, I got to know the woman meant for this hat: someone unlike me, with elements of Taylor. A popular “non-political” Ashkenazi socialite, living on the Upper East Side, proudly Jewish but not very religious. A devotee to WASP aesthetics, she avoids challenging topics in Jewish life, especially the Israel / Palestine discourse, and never examines her personal privilege.

I attended the next Easter parade in 2023 as her, in character. Acting like the parade’s annual host, I happily posed for, and with, giddy locals and tourists for hours. That joyful experience illustrated the power of clothing as a vehicle to access distinct perspectives and explore thorny aspects of Jewish life. I’ve been making clothing-centered work ever since.

For my next character, I turned to another Elizabeth: Queen Elizabeth I of England. Typical of the era’s anti-Semitism, Elizabeth officially banned Jews from her realm, though she never expelled the tiny community of Sephardic Jews who’d fled the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition, only 80 or 90 people, secretly living in her kingdom.

Queen Elizabeth’s grandeur reminded me of the most famous queen in Jewish life, The Sabbath Queen. This invisible, holy entity supposedly visits Shabbat tables on Friday nights to begin the holiday; all the fine china, candlesticks, and challah set out each week honor her.

Nothing about Queen Elizabeth I closely tethers her to Jewishness, really, until, that is, you examine her sleeves. I only realized the visual connection between these two queens while looking at this famed portrait, from around 1575:

The protruding shoulder pieces in this painting reminded me of challah bread, so I decided to fabricate a headpiece for my new queenly character made of this blessed, braided carb.

Bread, famously, does not want to be a hat. Somehow, though, after 5-plus months of technical failures, and my home studio stinking of rotting bread and resin, I improbably had a truly wearable challah headpiece for my Sabbath Queen.

I next chose to use challah covers for the bodice and sleeve details. Embroidered challah covers, like many Jewish ritual objects, often copy ancient Christian royal aesthetics, making them a seamless visual fit for Tudor court fashion. Working with the wonderful artists at Flatiron Tailors, I created a gown made with embroidered fabric portraying candlesticks, challah, and kiddush cups alongside Elizabeth’s signature Tudor rose. Hundreds of fake pearls, Elizabeth’s signature jewel, each one adhered by hand, capped off the ensemble.

Sabbath Queen references not only Queen Elizabeth I’s looks, but also her politics: specifically her central role in encouraging and funding the beginnings of the British empire, a decision with tragic implications for the displacement of Palestinians centuries later. October 7th and the genocide of Gazans began while I worked on this character, emboldening me to make a bigger, louder political statement.

Whereas my Taylor Bonnet parade performance functioned mostly on vibes, I wanted The Sabbath Queen to make a proper public address, a clear declaration of her supremacist worldview. My queen is a haughty, religious, superior, imperialist, right-wing Zionist: an intolerant, lethally confident monarch. She’s my satirical critique of the contemporary Jewish relationship to conservative political power.

In 2024 I premiered her at a conference for the leftist magazine Jewish Currents, in queenly style. Chiseled men, wearing only yarmulkes and speedos, carried me slowly into the venue on a large palanquin, while I coldly waved to the surprised crowd. Once deposited onto the stage, I addressed the audience in character, deriding them for their traitorous progressive beliefs and accusing the event of being sponsored by Hamas. The audience roared. As a non-actress it proved the scariest, funnest, most empowering night of my professional career.

While the American-supported horrors in Gaza continued, I approached my next, and most recent, costume project.

In conversations with other leftist friends at that time, we talked about our outrage and sense of isolation from mainstream Jewish life, due to our opposition to Israel’s actions. I struggled to find the right outlet for my upset: I’m a nice middle-aged lady from Illinois, raised in the Midwestern tradition of Be Polite And Don’t Bother People. My internal response to global horrors runs more toward despair than ire.

So I decided to make my next persona someone both passionately identified with Jewishness, and strongly opposed to the crimes being done in its name. Someone like me, but bolder. For this I needed to channel a fashion movement charged with anti-establishment frustration and embodied rage. Naturally, I landed on early London punk.

This new character, titled Pesach Punk, is a rebellious, intense, pained, anti-Zionist political activist; my wearable interpretation of Passover’s Angel of Death. To realize her, I immersed myself in the visual world of Vivienne Westwood, the punk movement’s aesthetic originator.

Pesach Punk’s pants and crown showcase an original black and white matzo bread pattern inspired by Westwood’s bold plaids. Her legendary “God Save The Queen” shirt gets an updated, Jewy nod as well. At the end of Passover meals, Jews traditionally collectively exclaim, “Next Year In Jerusalem!” My tee design for this character portrays Netanyahu rather than any monarch, his head crowned by the words, “Next Year in Jail.”

A fabulous punk ensemble requires a mohawk, so I began fabricating one made of flowers and leaves, to reference Passover’s marking of winter’s end. Over months I learned paper flower-making, the craft behind those large blooms on Anthropologie store walls. This old technique, often associated with women makers and dismissed by the art world, alchemized, in my studio, into a confident fine art object. Of course, unlike traditional examples, the Punk’s pulp-based blossoms visually embrace fury, covered in threatening nettles and doused with neon spray paint.

While Pesach Punk and I share politics, our temperaments could not diverge more. But accessing this persona freed me to feel, and project, wrath. I decided to write, direct, and star in a short music video as Pesach Punk for her world premiere, based on the classic Passover tune “Dayenu”. In my incensed, radical re-interpretation, titled Die(Ayenu)!, the Punk’s lyrics critique the many conservative sins of contemporary Jewish life.

Ripping up an AIPAC sign and screaming, “Shove Your Men’s Minyan Up My Pussy!” on camera hadn’t originally been on my dance card for my 44th year, but I cannot recommend it enough.

I’ll always feel grateful for that fateful day, years ago, at the Easter Parade, and the weird, wonderful, Jewish, fashion-history oriented path it inspired. These projects embrace a range of techniques and themes, but all share one element at their center, to me perhaps the most important, and illusive, factor necessary for successful art making: permission.

Danielle Durchslag is an artist and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. A large solo exhibition of all her costume / character work described in this essay, titled JEWESS, will be on view this spring. Curated by Lucien Zayan and co-presented by The Invisible Dog and La MaMa Theater company, JEWESS opens the night of March 13th, 2026, from 6 to 9pm, at the La MaMa Galeria in Soho. RSVP here.

The show runs until April 12th.

danielledurchslag.com / @ddurch

But here on Substack is something completely different.

I can’t say that I’ve ever really watched wrestling - or even thought about it at all. But Scarlett Harris, author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment, has opened my eyes.

There’s a huge match coming up tomorrow- the Royal Rumble in Riyadh. And in a country with strict modesty laws… what are women wrestlers supposed to wear? It’s a rich and complicated answer.

Take it away, Scarlett:

Everyone knows wrestling matches are predetermined. WWE even acknowledges this in their Netflix docuseries. Borne of carnival tents and traveling circuses, the concept of “kayfabe”—maintaining the suspended reality that wrestling is real—persists today. Still, the spectacle of the show matters. Especially when you’re looking at women in the ring, and what they are wearing.

In the late ’90s and 2000s, many women in WWE were untrained models. Women’s “wrestling” often consisted of little more than slaps and hair pulling. Usually these were bikini contests masquerading as wrestling competitions.

Still, some athletes managed to stand out, like Lita, who dressed like a fly-girl in baggy pants, fishnet arm sleeves and an exposed thong—not unlike what can be seen in the Y2K fashion renaissance today.

Women’s wrestling has been taken more seriously in recent years, and so some wrestlers have amped up the performance aspect in their intricate outfits, bringing in elements of their heritage, pop culture and cosplay. Some even make their own gear and dedicate themselves to never repeating an outfit—current WWE star Bianca Belair does both!

McKenzie Mitchell, ring announcer for WWE and TNA and author of the forthcoming book Threads of Triumph: Professional Wrestling’s Most Iconic Looks, is excited by “how far we’ve come in professional wrestling in these women’s gear.” As Mitchell puts it, the sport has gone beyond looking for a reason to put a woman in a thong bikini- “ it’s taking them seriously as true performers, as true athletes who don’t have to be in bikinis or doing a wet t-shirt contest. They’re able to show up as actual athletes which is what they deserve in the ring.”

This conversation was started anew in 2019, when WWE premiered women’s wrestling in Saudi Arabia. Given that the kingdom had only recently permitted women to drive and to vote (and to this day, women are still unable to marry, divorce, travel, or get elective surgery without approval from a male guardian), it was shocking that there was a publicly viewable women’s match, between Natalya and Lacey Evans.

In observation of modesty laws, the two women wore oversized t-shirts over long-sleeved tops and pants: a marked difference from the often scanty-yet -utilitarian gear women often wrestle in. Since 2019, women have wrestled frequently in Saudi Arabia, including in the fast-approaching women’s Royal Rumble match.

This weekend, during the Royal Rumble, 30 female fighters will enter the ring at two-minute intervals, all desperately attempting not to get thrown over the top rope and remain the last woman standing.

With the added limitations in Saudi Arabia, women wrestlers have upped the ante with their gear. “We can’t use plunging necklines, for example, because they don’t want to imply overt sexiness,” says Lori Gassie of No Gimmick Gear, who freelances for WWE. “If there is a sheer element, we have to put a true color behind it.” Given these constraints, Gassie put Tiffany Stratton in a space camp-meets-sleepover bodysuit emblazoned with her catchphrase, “Tiffy Time.” In 2024 Gassie designed a Britney Spears-inspired red catsuit for wrestler Liv Morgan.

Allegations of “sportswashing” aside (though I’ve been critical of this practice elsewhere including in my book on women’s wrestling), we’ve come a long way since the XXL t-shirts of the first women’s matches, baby.

While the kingdom’s strict modesty laws nominally apply to men, WWE’s male wrestlers have never actually been required to adhere to them (because sexism), and still perform in glorified underwear briefs.

So this begs the question: since women have to completely rethink and readjust their fabric-intensive costumes for the Saudi market, should women wrestlers receive a bonus in their paycheck? Given that 30 women will be wrestling in Saudi Arabia as part of the Royal Rumble, is this something that has been factored into their contracts for the event?

According to an anonymous wrestler speaking to the wrestling news site Fightful, women wrestlers are “responsible for paying for and having our own gear made for the show to fit those parameters.” Just as they presumably do not receive a “glam” allowance for the makeup, hair extensions and self-tanning that are required to perform on international television 52 weeks a year because there is no off-season in wrestling.

When top female star Bayley was being interviewed by Kristine Leahy for Fox Sports in a since deleted clip, Leahy expressed surprise that the wrestlers were not unionized. Wrestlers are considered independent contractors, which means they have to pay for their own health insurance and travel—you can bet your bottom dollar this includes forking out for their own clothes and makeup.

Yes, male wrestlers are also required to buy their own costumes and to be in top physical shape, but let’s be real: the beauty standards are unbalanced. And while wrestlers who perform on high-grossing cards, such as WrestleMania, usually receive a bonus, the majority of the women’s roster will be competing in the 30-person Royal Rumble match that stipulates that only they be covered, so wouldn’t it make sense to just put it in all women’s contracts?

“I wouldn’t break it down to a nickel and a dime and say that it’s costing this much more,” McKenzie Mitchell says, “In professional wrestling you’re going to be spending money to invest in your character regardless. I see it as an investment rather than an expense going to Saudi Arabia.”

In fact, designer Lori Gassie estimates that the modest gear doesn’t actually require as much fabric, time and effort as one might imagine. “I would say it’s probably an extra yard of fabric,” she says, noting that regular wrestling gear already covers the legs and arms with kick pads, knee pads, arm bands and a variety of smaller garments. However, Gassie says. “The rhinestones can get a little out of control, though!”

I’m not surprised that no one wants to speak ill of WWE. Even though WWE has been embroiled in a sex trafficking lawsuit with its former boss, Vince McMahon, the company remains the pinnacle of the wrestling business. Many former employees are hesitant to speak critically about WWE, in case they have a chance of working there again. Similarly, there isn’t a lot of criticism about the requirements stipulated by their host country. No one is batting an eye that the temporary stadium for The Royal Rumble event was erected in just three weeks (I bet you can guess using what kind of labor).

The modest looks for Royal Rumble will be another way for wrestlers to invest in their characters and careers. “The Royal Rumble is like a fashion show for sports,” says Mitchell. “Sometimes you have only five seconds to be memorable in that moment and that really boils down to your gear.” Like everyone else, I’ll be observing the fashions and admiring every wrestler’s 5-second debut. But the hidden costs will always be in the back of my mind.

The Scarlett Woman

A Substack newsletter from Scarlett Harris featuring cultural criticism and author interviews.

By Scarlett Harris

Being part of a community of faith or something, is really important for times like this. Especially when, if your core identity is being an American, that’s no longer what you thought it was. We have the Constitution. Right? Well, that’s not being followed at all. We don’t even have the Second Amendment anymore,

You should have higher aspirations than, and higher ideals than, Americanness.

And everyone should have something that is a north star- a compass in their life- that’s beyond what authority is telling them to do.

Please join me in supporting Pastor Zach’s work and community by donating to ISAIAH

Very long story short- this is about a series of fashion dolls that was made to save the French couture industry after WWII. When materials were in short supply, clothiers and fashion houses wanted to show they could make clothing that was as luxe as ever… but they had to make it small.

But I think—just as interesting as the dolls themselves—is the reason why they currently live in a museum in the middle of nowhere in Washington State.

This story came out in 2020. And there have been so many new developments in the story since. Namely, during the pandemic, a number of brands decided to make their clothing lines in miniature.

The Theatre De La Mode was also mentioned on the Apple TV+ show The New Look.

While miniatures are not entirely coming back in style post-pandemic, the curator at the Maryhill Museum of Art (where the TDLM lives), said that the designer Orlando Dugai has been making visits, looking to make future collections in miniature.

If you check the feed, you’ll see a story called Made in the USA- which is an augmented version of a story called Made in America that aired originally on Planet Money. It’s about what it really means for a garment to be made domestically…and it’s not what I imagined at all.

This story struck me as a perfect little addendum to the military series, which was very much about American manufacture as it relates to the Berry Amendment (which stipulates that all military clothing needs to be made in the US).

However, I didn’t report this brilliant piece, so its not like I have extra pictures or links to add to the conversation. That was all Sarah Gonzales over at Planet Money. But! Here’s what I can contribute.

Sarah first started her research into clothing when she began looking for a plain, simple, ethical shirt. Something she could feel good about wearing, and letting her baby rest on. She still hasn’t found her perfect shirt yet….

And while none of these shirts are perfect- I think they are pretty great.

These are not affiliate links! Just genuinely sharing some shirts I really like. And please, weigh in the comments (or the subscriber chat if you’re a paid member) and let me know other brands you trust. I always like to learn about new companies.

Right off the bat, I’ll say my favorite plain white shirt was NOT made in the USA (so points deducted for shipping etc)- but it was designed and made in Australia, which is home to one of my favorite brands, Art Club. I love that their pieces are numbered in editions and often signed by the sewists who made them. I mean this cotton waffle t-shirt is not cheap, but I find it very chic and I wear it over and over again.

Another standby of mine that I wear constantly is the Little T Shirt from FM 669. Again, I’m not saying Made in the USA is perfect but I do like that the cotton actually comes from Texas (ingredients matter!) and it was designed and made in New York. It has this sleek edgy boxy fit that makes me feel like Patti Smith. It comes in other moody colors like black, grey, and taupe.

Did you know our friends over at Buck Mason took over a shirt factory in Pennsylvania? That’s where they make this super soft plain T shirt. It comes in many colors other than white.

I also love that American Giant is very honest about its entire domestic supply chain: they use domestically grown raw cotton, which is cleaned and prepared at Enfield Gin (Enfield, NC), spun into yarn at Parkdale Mills (Gaffney, SC), and then the yarn is knit into fabric at Clover Knitting (Cover, SC), and cut and sewn into a finished product at Eagle Sportswear (Middlesex, NC).

Spoiler- I’m planning on joining them for a future cotton harvest and following their supply chain. But ultimately, their final product shirts are also extremely soft and comfy

There are a number of black cotton farmers who are reclaiming their connection to the crop. The leader of this movement is Julius Tilley, who is a 5th generation cotton farmer from North Carolina. While his t-shirts are not plain, they make a statement. But if you’re looking to support black cotton farms with a plain shirt, the multi-hyphenate journalist Stephen Satterfield’s new project COMOCO is also supporting black-grown cotton

Do you have a favorite plain, simple, relatively ethical t-shirt? I am all ears. But in the meantime, listen to the latest episode. It’s amazing. I won’t lie, I’m a little jealous and I wish I made it.

Update: Ok! Thank you all so much for weighing in! These are some of the shirts that you have written in the comments or sent to me:

Goodwear has been making their t-shirt since 1980s (comes in many cuts and colors!)

Everybody.World seems to be picking up where American Apparel left off, with lots of multicolor made in usa basics

Imogene and Willie’s cotton t is grown and sewn entirely within a 400-mile radius from nashville.

Faan tees are made of organic cotton grown in the US and they’re EXTREMELY ethically sourced, even publishing a list of all their partners and how much they were paid (really interesting)!

Another cradle-to-cradle, made-to-measure Australian brand is Citizen Wolf, who apparently uses AI to make sure that you have a good fit?! (They also use recycled cotton) - makes mens and womens.

Lady White USA-grown cotton shirts come in a two pack! (And it’s not for ladies, despite the name- its unisex)

Wol Hide mades undyed, comfy slouchy shirts and basics (and some of their other styles have an American Apparel sexy vibe to them):

House of Blanks shirts and crewnecks come in a lot of colors and can be bought wholesale (if you are, say, looking to print shirts):

And last but not least, a stylish recco from our friend , in her own words.

Despise Gossip is a very much on-the-rise small operation based in North Carolina, USA, run by a young guy named Jackson Underwood. Here’s DG’s Patreon and Instagram.

This t-shirt of theirs is superb. I feel confident calling it the best white t-shirt I’ve worn. It’s made of linen and just transparent enough. Here are some on-body fit pics I greatly enjoyed modeling:

I’ve been doing this move where I wear a semi-transparent shirt (mainly one of my Gnuhr shag t’s) over a vintage graphic t. It’s a lot of fun and creates dare I say a neat effect, as pictured above.

With this white t, you can customize the torso length and sleeve length which are very nice options to have. Here’s a photo that illustrated the level of sheerness:

This book is, in essence, an existential picture book for adults. You could zone out and look at the pictures, or really start delving deep into the context of each image.

Upon this new years day, this particular page struck me anew.

I don’t know which St. Bernard made up this little word puzzle. There are two main St. Bernards- one from Clairvaux and one from Montjoux. The former looked over beekeepers and candlemakers, the latter over mountaineers and hikers (hence the name of the rescue dog).

No matter which guy this was, I am a lover of both St. Bernards and candles, and so I felt inclined to try to take his wisdom seriously. I took on the project of translating this word “labyrinth.”

To Translate that Translation- these are the five pearls of wisdom from St. Bernard:

1. Never say all you know, for those who say all they know often hear what they don’t want (to)

2. Never do all you can, for those who do all they can often encounter what they can’t trust

3. Never believe all you hear, for those who believe all they hear often believe was isn’t there

4. Never give all you have, for those who give all they have often beg for what they lack

5. Never judge all you see, for those who judge all they see hate what they shouldn’t

Although I’m feeling very proud of myself for translating this (lol) - I disagree with much of this wisdom.

After spending the morning watching the historic inaugurations of Zohran Mamdani, Jumaane Williams, and Mark Levine, I am feeling so full of hope…and something that feels like delight?

I recognize that this is almost certainly naive (they are, after all, politicians. See Marilynne Robinson’s open-eyed anaylsis). But I’m tired of tampering my expectations. I had started to give up all hope of change. I had succumbed to indifference. I’m taking this feeling of joy and optimism for what it is: a feeling right now in the moment. I feel like a plant who is just being watered for the first time in weeks.

And today, I feel like ignoring most of St. Bernard’s advice.

I want to say all I know and do all I can and give all I have.

(But ok, you were right about numbers 3 and 5, St. Bernard).

Today, for now, I feel like things can change. You can change. We can change.

Or at least, once a year, I get to believe we can. And that’s enough.

Thank you for reading, thank you for listening, and a very happy 2026 to you. May it be full of the change you want.

Sort of. But it’s not that simple. Fashion historian Liv Elniski tells us why.

Skirt lengths supposedly rise when the economy buckles. This theory, referred to as the “hemline index,” suggests a direct relationship between women’s wardrobes and economic conditions. Although skirts did shorten briefly during WWI ( referred to as “war crinolines” by the fashion press, who promoted the fabric- saving style as patriotic and practical), this “hemline index” hypothesis is a little too seductive in its simplicity. While fashion is, and has always been, a reflection of its time, truly there’s not any predictable way that clothes respond to hardship.

In a 2017 essay, The Looks of Austerity: Fashions for Hard Times, author David Gilbert remarks that “the relationship between austerity and the austere is complicated, and any temptation to look for neat correlations obscures the multiplicity of responses.” A person’s wardrobe is not just a mirror of economic circumstance, but a tangible record of adaptation, ingenuity, and coping. Let me tell you what I mean1.

As a student in New York City who works part-time, nearly all of my money goes towards rent and sheer survival. Whatever remains gets funneled into my personal upkeep and aspirations of glamour.

In the oppressive heat of this last New York summer, I met a sixty-something-year-old vintage seller on the outskirts of Central Park East to purchase feathers: a huge bundle of antique ostrich plumes, along with a molting black boa that is now draped, like a decadent relic, around a mirror in my room2. Feathers are just part of my latest affliction.

Over the last year, I have become the kind of person who rouges her lips each day with the same deep plum lipstick (aptly named Film Noir), and who, every two weeks, has their Louise-Brooks-inspired bob trimmed to geometric perfection (I’d be nothing without my hairdresser, Kaitlyn). Somewhere along the way, I also developed a consuming obsession with millinery.

I know where this is all coming from: I’ve become preoccupied with the clothes and accessories of 1920s and 30s films. Recently, I’ve been spending more time in the art house movie theaters that show these films, because there is absolutely nothing like watching Greta Garbo or Kay Francis projected to larger-than-life proportions, suspended in a softly lit frame, dripping in bias-cut silk, and crowned by a perfectly fitted cloche.

Between the late 1910s and 1940, Hollywood produced some of the most tantalizing on-screen fashions in modern history. Extravagant gowns by leading costumers provided a phantasmagoric world-building experience with thousands of shimmering beads and eleven-yard sable borders (like the one that trimmed the opera coat by Gilbert Adrian for Garbo in her 1937 film Camille).

Though these preposterously glamorous screen vixens seem to share little with my life as a student in New York, their highly manufactured visages were always intended to inspire ordinary people. For instance, in her 2017 essay, Signs of Wear: Encountering Memory in the Worn Materiality of a Museum Fashion Collection, design scholar Bethan Bide reflects on how her grandmother constantly evoked early Hollywood cinema in everyday conversation: noting that the woman who read the six o’clock weather reminded her of Joan Crawford, or declaring that the cut of her new jeans were “very Jane Wyman.”

For women like Bide’s grandmother, Hollywood starlets provided a template for dressing and living fashionably—and for imagining an alternative glamorous life. While few regular people could afford the clothes worn on screen, they could certainly emulate their effect through hair, posture, and makeup. As Bide writes, her grandmother’s fascination with silver screen style “enabled her to transform the post-war London landscape into a glamorous place …through the way she wore a new belt or the positioning of a hair clip.”3 It’s little gestures that make all the difference.

Although Bide’s grandmother’s life in 1940s post-war London and my comfortable life in Brooklyn are worlds apart, in our own contexts, we are engaged in a similar ritual of daily world-building. Both of us use style, gesture, and self-presentation—to inhabit a world that feels otherwise lost to time and circumstance. We both believe that it’s still possible to embody the idiosyncratic glamour of Marlene Dietrich or Joan Crawford—so long as we are prepared to really commit to reapplying lipstick every hour or so4.

In the process of transforming my apartment into a makeshift 1930s-style boudoir—and my comically small Brooklyn closet into a miniature archive of screen-fashion eccentricity—I’ve begun to realize that fashionable glamour is just as much about moxie and intention as it is access5. As I see it, knowing the right keywords to type into the eBay search bar matters more than material wealth or the resources of a studio costume designer. My own glamour hinges on search terms and second-hand luck, but that old Hollywood’s glamour hinged on something even more precarious: supply chains.

With the onset of World War II, studio designers were suddenly robbed of the luxurious materials needed to create movie costumes. Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia cut off the supply of bugle beads, once indispensable to Gilbert Adrian’s dazzling on-screen evening gowns. The lamés, brocades, silks, and velvets that once adorned Claudette Colbert as the Egyptian queen in Cleopatra (1934) became scarce. The remaining stock of lace trim, beads, jewels, and sequins were hoarded—jealously guarded by designers who found themselves bartering among one another for these now-rare commodities. And just like that, the chiffon-and-sequin-lined portal to cinematic glamour dissolved. Never again would a movie budget tolerate a long, decadent sable border. The more austere costume designs of WWII signalled the fading out of Hollywood’s most glittering era.

Stars like Ginger Rogers, who had spent the 1930s doused in endless spools of tulle, chiffon, and feathers, pared down their on-screen wardrobe. Even madcap Carole Lombard appeared in off-the-rack clothes in the 1940 film They Knew What They Wanted.6 Marlene Dietrich traded her sultry, erotic veils and slithering black dresses for military-inspired tailored suits , as she entertained troops on hastily-erected plank stages in the jungles of the Pacific. The biggest on-screen-divas packed their bags, tied their hair in a scarf (Rosie-the-Riveter-style), and went off to sell war bonds across the country.

By 1942, all reserve stocks of beads, jewels, and sequins had been depleted, and studio workrooms were functioning under make-do-and-mend conditions. Tailored wool ensembles came to define the austere, pared-down look of 1940s film. Laura (1944), starring Gene Tierney and costumed by American fashion designer Bonnie Cashin, exemplified this new austerity: streamlined silhouettes stood in for the opulence that previously dazzled on-screen divas and their devotees.

Everyday women’s fashions in mid-century America faced a similar fate. Almost immediately after the United States entered WWII, shoe-making materials were diverted for military production, and civilian footwear was rationed. The U.S. government allowed citizens to purchase only three new pairs of shoes a year. The occasional exception was made only if you could prove that the new shoes were not being purchased to simply follow fashion or maintain personal appearance7.

Quickly, the footwear industry pioneered designs made from unrationed materials such as cloth, rope, and wood. These constraints resulted in fabulously dramatic platforms and bold architectural forms. In this way, shoes of the 40s feel more theatrical than those of other periods: they prove that even in moments of frugality, fashion finds a way to imagine new possibilities for beauty.

Rumors swirled that, similarly to shoes, clothing would soon be rationed as well. Just like the costume designers had, consumers rushed to local stores to buy up all the dresses and blouses they could, before the stock of clothing was depleted. These anxieties were well-founded: on April 10, 1942, the United States government initiated General Limitation Order L-85, which rationed “Feminine Apparel for Outer Wear and Certain Other Garments.”

L-85 restricted the use of wool, silk, rayon, cotton, and linen, and the order placed particular emphasis on garment measurements and lengths. Skirts couldn’t be too long or full, to conserve precious textile resources. French cuffs, double-layered fabric, leg-of-mutton sleeves, pleating, shirring, and inside pockets were all banned from women’s clothing. The resulting look was simplified, straight dresses and skirt suits, free of lapels or heavy ornamentation. But even in the era of L-85, fashion wasn’t so simple.

L-85 aimed to stall any radical changes in women’s styles. In effect, it sought to freeze fashion in 1942—putting the kibosh on new seasonal purchases. But, of course, stylish women persisted. Even amid these limitations, they sought creativity elsewhere, most notably in their hair: ladies lovingly curled their locks into “victory rolls,” topping their patriotic coifs with whimsical, decorative millinery—something, fortunately, untouched by rationing. Milliners like Lilly Daché pioneered turban styles, wide, flat brims, and towering architectural forms embellished with felt and straw flowers, bird feathers, and bejeweled brooches.

Claire McCardell, who had emerged as a major player in American design, pioneered wrap dresses, separates, and ballet flats among other items that complied with wartime restrictions. One of her most widely celebrated creations, the “Monastic dress” was an entirely pleated shift, paired with a simple string belt, that allowed the wearer to shape the garment to her own body. McCardell’s clothes were meant to adapt to you, rather than demanding your body conform to the dictates of a garment. Designers like McCardell began establishing a new modern design vocabulary of ease, flexibility and frugality in America. And then, almost as suddenly as it had emerged, this wartime practicality and simplicity was cast aside.

The year 1947 has an almost mythical status in the fashion history canon. The style stagnation that came from L-85 was abruptly interrupted by French designer Christian Dior’s “New Look,” or what he called the “Bar Suit.” This wasp-waisted hourglass shape was less about innovation than it was about the explosive reintroduction of glamorous excess and ostentatious abundance. The Bar Suit’s heavy circle skirt required approximately twenty yards of wool and its sharply sculpted, nipped-in bodice marked a dramatic return to pre-war fashions.

The New Look reintroduced clothing that acted as a conduit for aspiration, desire, and spectacle. It emphasized excess and sculptural artifice (and inevitably, discomfort and constraint) as peak femininity. However, many women, including designers like Claire McCardell, extended their simple, sporty, paired-down wartime looks into peacetime—believing that modernity could, and should, be expressed through democratic ease.

While it’s tempting to pit McCardell and Dior against one another (backward-looking, restrictive European fashion vs. forward-looking “American look”), their work is more productive when viewed as two different (and valid) responses to a moment in history. Both the otherworldly glamour and the practical simplicity can be viewed as emancipatory. Sequins and feathers and furs can be just as vital to everyday life as raw practicality.

Feeling glamorous allows me to live in a world of my own fantasies. A world that feels, if not perfect, at least okay. And, for myself, glamour currently provides a momentary escape from the specter of impending authoritarianism in the United States and the scourge of athleisure that has taken over every street corner of New York City.

At the tail end of last winter, a dear family friend named Briget mailed me a 1950s mink fur coat. Briget is a true estate-sale, church-basement-thrift-store warrior—she managed to find this coat for $30. Fortunately for me, it was not her size. Upon the first day below 50 degrees in New York this fall, I freed my mink from the confines of a dust bag.

Even though my mink jacket is fraying at the edges and doesn’t necessarily scream “untouchable leading lady,” it still makes me (momentarily) feel like Rita Hayworth. Add the right lipstick and a fresh haircut, and you’re armed. Bide’s grandmother knew this. The classic Hollywood screen sirens knew this. Glamour, in its most honest expression, is a performance that provides an escape, pieced together out of aspiration, desire, and whatever the materials and garments the moment affords. It can help us fashion our realities—to soften the rough edges and uncertainties of a particular moment in time and space.

And I’m not alone. This is, sadly, an often-overlooked part of American fashion history, which archivist and historian Mia Elliott brought to my attention.

Her senior thesis, “‘Dressing Up the Movement’: The Uniforms of the Black Panthers, Brown Berets, and Young Lords” was presented at Princeton University Library’s “Fashion, Fear, and Feminism: A Symposium on Clothing and Power.” And she’s made a little condensed version for us here.

Take it away Mia

“It was like a theater, a good theater.”1 This is how David Sanchez, the co-founder of the Brown Berets, describes the impact of their uniforms. The Brown Berets were an LA-based Chicano Nationalist organization active in the late 1960s through the early 1970s. Dressed in all-brown military berets and field jackets, the Brown Berets projected the ideal of the new man of the Chicano Movement, one that was militant, empowered, and proud of his heritage.

Much like the former GIs, anti-war protesters, and pop culture icons (described in chapter 4 of Gear), Young Chicanos in L.A. harnessed the symbolic power of the field jacket to reflect their militant demands for dignity and criticism of the Vietnam War. But the Brown Berets’ use of M65 military jackets reflects another, often neglected, side of the Anti-War movement, rooted in oppression that treated Chicano lives as expendable.

The Chicano Movement of the 1960s-70s emerged from a shared sense of Mestizo identity and belonging, based on collective experiences of oppression, double colonization, and pride surrounding their indigenous roots in the American Southwest. They developed the ideology of Aztlan, the mythical homeland that united Chicanos across areas of the American Southwest that once had been taken from their indigenous ancestors by Mexico and then the US. Aztlan was a rallying cry for a shared ethno-racial identity and rejection of Anglo-American assimilation.2

Following a Chicano Student organizing conference, a group of seven students founded the organization Young Citizens/Chicanos for Community Action (YCCA) in 1966. The following year, they opened La Piranya Coffee House in East Los Angeles as a place to host revolutionary speakers like Stokely Carmichael and facilitate organizing. As the cafe grew in popularity, police began targeting the young people who hung out there. This pushed the YCCA to adopt militant politics and posture, inspired by the Black Panther Party (BPP), that would be embodied in their new military-inspired look. 3

These young Chicanos knew that they needed an image that would reflect their pride in their Chicano heritage, yet also signify solidarity with their brothers in the BPP and other revolutionaries across borders and history. Above all though, the uniform needed to stand out– dramatize their movement– and attract the attention of their community and the media, even if that meant risking police and FBI attention too.

“The way to do it would be with the brown beret and with the bush jackets,” said founding Brown Beret member Cruz Olmeda Becerra. “Because the beret was like a symbol of urban guerrilla warfare from World War II and France… There was a history to that, and we would be tying in with that history, apart from the fact that the Panthers were wearing it as well… They were our brothers.”4

The Berets knew that their uniforms also needed to adapt to the varying climates of Southern California and the American Southwest to comfortably take action in L.A. and beyond. So, they turned to the fruits of the local Army Surplus stores. “Somebody would go to the army surplus and buy a bunch [of] khaki bush jackets,” recalled Carlos Montes, a leading member of the Berets. These brown military jackets made them feel like General Bernard Law Montgomery, the famous general who led British troops in World War II through the Egyptian desert. “We used to joke about it, and we used to see old pictures of World War II, that general… General Montgomery. So we would joke about, ‘Yeah, General Montgomery. But this is the Chicano look now.’”5

David Sanchez remembered that his first beret was blue, given to him by a local church member, but he “just didn’t feel right wearing a blue beret,” thinking, “This doesn’t make any sense to me. I need a brown beret!” So, Sanchez bought one, put it on, and everything clicked.6 To Carlos Montes, the brown color was key in representing their pride and power as Chicano people: “the brown beret, a symbol of pride in being Chicano, Mexicano, and it being brown, being brown and proud, a symbolism of pride, cultural pride.”7 Or at least, that’s what he hoped the beret would project.

To give the uniform a sort of test-drive, David Sanchez wore his new brown beret to a playground where he worked supervising neighborhood children. The kids in the program ran around teasing him, calling out, “Hey, brown beret!” Confused, David insisted his name was “David,” but they would retort, “No, brown beret. You’re wearing a brown beret.” But then David thought, “Hey, that sounds like a good name for an organization, you know.” So, he bought a bunch more brown berets and brought them to La Piranya Coffee House. The YCCA decided to officially adopt this look, and to debut it at a protest against police brutality at the East L.A. Sheriff’s Station.8

As soon as the Brown Berets arrived, armed with their military uniforms, the police caught onto their new name and ideology without the Berets even having to utter a word. Across police radios, Chicanos could hear the police chatter about the appearance of these new “Brown Berets,” comparing them to the Panthers, striking a formidable fear in the hearts of police (and FBI agents) across L.A.9 After the endorsement of neighborhood kids and the instant reaction from the police, their name and uniform became official and iconic. And thus, the Brown Berets were born and became the army of the Chicano movement.

The Brown Berets helped create dramatic, powerful, and shocking demonstrations that were pivotal to the Anti-Vietnam War movement. Thousands march the streets of L.A. to memorialize their loved ones and call attention to the disproportionate death rates of Chicano soldiers - who were only 10% of the US population, but 20% of all U.S. troops killed in Vietnam.10 At these marches and demonstrations, Brown Berets were posted every few blocks to protect protesters and preserve peace. In the event of police violence, the Brown Berets quickly assembled in formation and formed a wall between the police and protesters.

On August 29th, 1970, police attacked over 20,000 protestors, who were marching in the third Chicano Moratorium. Countless were injured, 200 jailed, and 3 killed, including renowned Chicano journalist, Reuben Salazar and a 15-year-old Brown Beret named Lynn Ward. After this tragedy, the Brown Berets decided to shift strategy. They would join forces with other Chicano activist organizations, and expand their focus from just East L.A. to the whole state of California.11

In 1971, the Berets organized multiple cross-state marches, called “La Marcha de la Reconquista,” to re-conquer their land and reclaim their indigenous heritage. Protestors marched down dirt roads, along highways, and through the deserts of Southern California and the American Southwest, with Brown Berets in uniform leading the way. Much like official US military uniforms, the Brown Berets uniforms could be adapted for different environments, and during the hot portions of the marches, Brown Berets would wear a short-sleeve version of their bush jackets. Not only was this versatility convenient, it sent a second powerful message: we belong in the outdoors.

Parks and the outdoors have historically been an exclusionary place for Chicanos. Aside from histories of segregated park systems and the zoning and property taxes that impact park access, the predominantly white nature of many outdoors spaces can be alienating and uncomfortable.12 However, through their uniforms, outdoors-based occupations, and emphasis on cultural unity, the Berets made the outdoors accessible. And this was perfectly exemplified with the Berets’ takeover of Catalina Island.

From August 30th through September 22nd, 1972, the Brown Berets occupied Catalina, setting up camp and living there for nearly a month.13 On the island, they wore their uniforms, while they raised their “La Causa” flag alongside the Mexican flag and practiced their drills. But they also set up tents on the island and enjoyed themselves around the campsite, all while wearing their berets and field jackets.

For the Brown Berets, the field jacket became a means to not only signal their anti-war ideology, but create the image of an army ready to “serve and protect” – the slogan of the Brown Berets– their communities from police, poverty, and racist political systems. They recontextualized the field jacket, and helped it stand for something more that ardent militarism. “We set a big, popular trend in that way,” recalls Carlos Montes. “About a few years later, everybody was buying them.”14

While the Black Panthers are frequent figures in pop culture depictions of the 1960s, the legacy of the Brown Berets is largely overlooked outside of the Chicano studies departments. However, in this moment, when the United States government is once again treating Chicané and Latiné people as expendable and trying to write them out of the history of America, it is crucial to remember their vital role in the life of this nation. The spirit of revolution that motivated the Brown Berets to organize, demand dignity, and fight fascism is more vital than ever. And it’s part of the story of the M65 field jacket.

This was a very small, intimate venue, and Jad asked such thoughtful questions… I was like you know what? I want to share this. So here is our conversation, which I think serves as a nice end to the series.

If you’d like to know the game I mentioned (the one where you can look at pictures and try to guess what year they were taken), here it is, it’s called Chronophoto (tell me your score!)

And if you’re curious about the piece about curvy swimming pools, it was an episode of 99% Invisible called The Pool And The Stream. And definitely check out Jad’s extraordinary show Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. It’s a revelation.

And yes, the night we talked I was still finishing up the last episode ( I was just finishing up some Quality Control listens). But before I went home to get back to work, I stopped by my sister’s place and met her new kittens. THEN it was time to finish the series :)

This year was the 30th anniversary of Clueless- and man that film still holds up! I was lucky enough to be in conversation with the director, Amy Heckerling, at Metrograph, where the film was shown in 35mm.

But what about the closet itself? In the year 2025, are we any closer to making Cher’s closet a reality? The intrepid Grace Tarducci (you might recognize her as the reporter from the episode about school uniforms), has taken it upon herself to test out the latest generation of closet apps. You can decide for yourself if we finally have found Cher’s closet.

Take it away, Grace!

The earliest punch card computers were used in looms. The sewing machine gave birth to the ready to wear. From synthetic fibers to zippers, technology has always been part of fashion. Yet nowadays, rather than incorporating new technologies into fashion design, new technologies are telling us how to design.

Like many fashion lovers before me, I have always been envious of the famous closet in Clueless - Cher’s 90s cyber assistant that identifies wardrobe malfunctions and puts the finishing touches on the looks she creates. I’m clearly not alone: over the last few years, app after app has popped up claiming to be the one to bring Cher’s closet to life. Until recently, these apps relied largely on randomized selections, more like shuffling pictures around on a table with your eyes closed than working with a stylist. But with the advent of ChatGPT, closet apps have started to make more and more informed style decisions.

I don’t use AI, or at least, I tell people that I don’t. I’m an artist and I don’t like the oversaturation of AI media that’s currently taking over the world. I don’t think AI has the depth required to provide thoughtful responses, to design, or to make art. But, unfortunately, I am only human, and when I learned about these new closet apps that could finally create cohesive outfits and present them to me on a me-shaped mannequin, I wanted to try one out.

There are a few different AI closet apps. I chose the app Alta, because, well, it’s free, and since its launch in June, it’s been something of the talk of the town. Alta has already been covered by Vogue, Elle, Business of Fashion, and Women’s Wear Daily - in no small part due to its famous donors like Karlie Kloss and Jasmine Tookes, and its notable partnerships with Poshmark and the CFDA.

The first step with all closet apps is to take pictures of every single item in your wardrobe. This was very time consuming (probably more time consuming than you may think), but I combined this task with a much needed closet clean up. I was surprised to find that taking pictures made it easier to get rid of clothes I knew I wasn’t going to wear.

Step two is to upload both a picture of your face and a full body picture. This was difficult for me, because essentially you’re allowing this app to make a deep fake version of yourself - yikes. After a short internal debate, I compromised my beliefs and uploaded my pictures, gently praying I would not spot myself in the background of an AI generated commercial any time soon. We’ll see.

Once you get past the fact that your AI mannequin looks like you mixed with Alita: Battle Angel™, you can look for your Outfit Of The Day in your feed. Today; Sunday, December 7th, 2025, in NYC. A high of 41° and low of 33°. My AI stylist gives me looks based on what it thinks I may be up to, “Art Studio,” “Brunch With Friends,” “Coffee Shop,” “Solo Exhibition,” “Photo Shoot.” AI Grace is much cooler than IRL Grace. But I don’t know if she dresses better.

For the suggested “Art Studio” look, My AI wears an oatmeal colored turtle neck, an oversized leather jacket that I thrifted with my best friend, baggy leopard print jeans, loafers, and a studded black baguette shaped purse. “Art Studio” is not offensive, but it’s perhaps just a bit too… basic? I’m not sure what makes this an “art studio” look as opposed to a “brunch with friends” or “coffee shop” look and it’s not something that I can really see myself wearing.

It feels like my AI stylist scanned the internet for elder Gen Z fashion trends, and then scanned my wardrobe and put all the trendy pieces together. Which may not be too far off, given that Alta founder Jenny Wang, when asked by Dale Arden Chong for Elle about her motivation for starting the app, explained, “I struggled to come up with new outfit ideas or apply inspiration I saw online to my own closet.” Wang certainly seems to have succeeded in the online inspiration arena.

AI mannequin images from my wardrobe

Another way to use Alta is to give it a “prompt” and it will make outfits out of your closet items… I’ve tried prompts such as:

Glamorous night at the circus

Dressing hot for my fianceé who I’ve never met in person

Alligator tour at a high fashion swamp

Etc., etc., but for the sake of this review, I’m going to use a more realistic example. The category is: “Date night in Brooklyn,” and my AI stylist has certainly gotten creative. I’m given the option “Cobble Hill Casual,” which combines a heathered gray graphic Tee that I stole from my sister, charcoal gray sweatpants paired with a matching sarong, my favorite beat up sneakers, and purple legwarmers, but the suggestion is that I wear the legwarmers on my wrists. Ok AI. This out of the box leisure-wear look is not what I would put together for a date night, but it’s at least a bit more interesting than the “art studio” look.

Using the same prompt, I switched to “shopping mode”- where the app will suggest clothes you can buy online. Here I was given the suggestion “Chic Evening,” a look that pairs the same sweatpants with platform Uggs and a black puffer coat, a teal micro purse, and two suggested items available for purchase. To complete my fit, I could buy a silk, ocean blue Dolce and Gabbana blouse, and a pair of silver Laura Lombardi hoop earrings. I don’t think there is a single person in the world who would wear this outfit.

To be fair to my AI stylist, it has in the past, proposed outfits that I did like and hadn’t thought of. For example, I thrifted a pastel-colored graphic mesh skirt by The Open Product this fall. It’s salmony pink and green and decorated with crude drawings of a dog, a seashell and a fluffy blue cat. It’s a cool piece, but not one that’s easy to style. When I tried asking Alta to put together a look around the skirt using my closet, I was surprised at what a good job it did. Alta put the skirt on my AI mannequin with a rose colored deep V jersey top I’ve had since high school, a pinstriped cropped blazer, Victorian inspired lace up heeled boots, and that studded baguette bag. I would’ve never thought to put these pieces together but for the first time, I felt that the app had begun to capture my personal style. The only caveat being that Alta hasn’t met these clothes in person. In real life my deep V top is more of a burnt orange color, and is way too tight to pair with a hip hugging skirt. The blazer’s pinstripes are an obviously clashing kelly green, and the Victorian heels are just a bit too high for a casual look. But if I was a few inches shorter, and my clothes looked and fit exactly as pictured, I would definitely rock this ensemble.

The closer my AI stylist gets to dressing me the way I dress myself, the more it scares me. I actually prefer when AI gets something ridiculously wrong, it’s like proof that the robots won’t take over, or that maybe there is something inherently magic and superior about humans. But when AI gets something right, something as deep and personal as my style, I start to question whether my style was really mine to begin with. I mean, what is my personal style, really, if not a collection of influences from people, movies, artists, and designers I admire? I suppose a robot can learn to mimic that.

But here is the part that a robot could never touch: experience. I know what looks good on me, because of trial and error. I’ve tried things on my physical body, I know my shapes, I know my colors. And the best part is, I’m still learning and trying out new things. I don’t want a rigid set of algorithmic rules - I’m not afraid to make mistakes because that’s what makes fashion fun. Despite having my entire wardrobe at its disposal, my AI stylist rarely seems to come up with something I’d actually want to wear. It’s all a little safe. It fits AI Grace nicely, but not the human me. For now, I can hold onto my personal style as something sacred; even if only for a little longer.

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Veterans die by suicide at a higher rate than non-Veterans. In 2020, the age- and sexadjusted suicide rate among Veterans was 57.3% higher than the age- and sex-adjusted rate among non-Veteran U.S. adults.

Soldiers feel alienated from civilian life, and civilians feel alienated from the wars that are being fought in their name and with their money. In face, soldiers and civilians functionally live in two different Americas: one has healthcare and subsidized housing, the other doesn’t.

(Even though I don’t want to romanticize it too much- the VA is riddled with problems)

So what do we do? How do we mend this rift? And how can clothing play into it? This is the last episode of the season.

At the very end of this series we learn that, the army has switched from their “dress blues” to a new service uniform.

(The service uniform is the fancier suits that soldiers wear for weddings, funerals, and formal events.)

This new jacket is actually an old one. It’s a reboot of the ETO jacket- the field jacket that General Littlejohn, opposer of the M43 and nemesis of Joshua Kerner, designed. The jacket that used to opposed the M65. Literally, this service uniform is a reboot of an old design.

These days, army soldiers walk around looking like officers from World War II.

How did we come full circle back to the 1940s? Not just in soldiers’ clothing, it turns out, but in the way that war is fought. We are sort of going back in time in a strange way.

I won’t say any more. The rest is in the podcast. Which, I am honored to say, was just named one of the best podcasts of the year by the New Yorker (in excellent company- you must listen to Jad Abumrad’s podcast about Fela Kuti). Thank you so much, Sarah Larson.

But let me leave you with this. In lieu of a holiday gift list. These are just a few companies that I’ve encountered that make and sell outdoor gear that I really like. I’m not an outdoorsy person, and I don’t usually like the look of the clothes. But there are so many interesting designers who are taking outdoor wear in fascinating new places.

1. Wabi Wear fishes old gear out of the trash and gives it new life

2. Korogi sells beautiful Japanese camping accessories and tents that look like works of art

2. Gnuhr make brilliant, simple stylish clothing and accessories, concieved by a designer who has worked with Margiela, Louis Vuitton, Nike, and Yeezy. I especially dig these sandals that pack flat

   

3. Hikerkind- you’ve heard from them in the show! But their clothes are androgynous, chic, and classic. Their inspiration was the journalist and writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and you can tell.

   

4. Snowpeak- I won’t pretend that this is some new discovery. This luxe stylish Japanese outdoor brand is pretty well-known by now. But I’m still not over how well they have married form and function. All their garments are simple beautiful and they just happen to be practical and all-weather

5. Windthrow- ok while they do make some in-house products and do plenty of collaborations, Windthrown is not just a clothing company. It is an amazing store full of exciting tiny brands to discover. Their curation is impeccable and everyone in Seattle is obsessed with it. I swear, I saw these cute Bedrock Sandals here months before I saw New Yorkers wearing them on the street in Manhattan (New York is losing the crown)!

And it’s ok if you don’t want to go on a hike. You can wear these clothes wherever you are. It’s not tool-ish or poser-y. You have my permission

<3

I’ll start with this picture I took at Functional Fabric Fair: the market place where both outdoor brands and the department of defense go shopping for the newest, latest, most cutting-edge textiles.

This is where it all begins. These mills come up with new chemical treatment, new twists of yarn, new ways to make cloth perform.

The outdoor brand’s job is to buy that performance cloth and add style and marketing. So…. what makes an outdoor company so different from a fashion company anymore?

Ok. This is when. Finally, at long last, we talk about GORPCORE.

What is Gorpcore? It is outdoorsy fashion. It is crunchy made cool. Most perfectly exemplified by the collaboration that Gucci did with The North Face:

Or the collaboration that Dior did with Birkenstock

Or Proenza Schouler with with Sorel.

The list goes on and on and on and on. There are so many upscale fashion brands that decided to collaborate with granola-y outdoorsy brands. But what happened in 2017 that lead writer Jason Chen to coin this new term “Gorpcore?”

I mean, streetwear had already taken a liking to outdoorsy clothes and Biggie Smalls was wearing North Face Nuptse jackets in the 1990s. What was so new and different in 2017?

I have two little theories. I don’t want to get into them too deeply here (please listen to my podcast).

But I think they have to do with

1. A continuing revolution in modern sizing and fit. In both the outdoor industry and the military.

2. A trend for tactical outdoor clothing that was made for special operators. Most famously exemplified by Drake and Virgil Abloh’s matching Arc’teryx multicam jackets at New York Fashion Week.

It wasn’t just a few celebrities here and there. Tactical clothes truly became grails, right around the time gorpcore was coined. And since then, the trend for special forces fashion has only grown.

Fashion and military also continue to be interconnected. Like our military layperson expert Joshua Kerner stopped in his tracks when he saw this American Eagle bomber jacket. He texted me “It’s not just an homage to a bomber jacket (extremely standard) but to a rare unique variant only produced in San Francisco in the late 1930s.”

But hey hey ok I’ve already said too much here!!! That’s it that’s it!

This is a short substack this time because I am very tired… but thank you all so much for reading and for listening and all your support. I feel like I’m running the final stretch of a marathon. I’ve been so completely chuffed by the attention the show has gotten from the likes of GQ, Elle, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, Glamour, The Observer, Atmos, and Harper’s Bazaar, as well as anyone and everyone who has helped spread the word. It means a lot.

I loved it. But mostly because I didn’t kill anything. I was mostly tagging along as my friend Rebecca got a hunting lesson from Fisher Neal. I have to admit, I see why Americans like to shoot stuff.

But I wasn’t there to talk about guns. I was there to talk about camo. That’s the clothing I associate with gun culture, right? And even though hunting camo and army camo are very very different, they both serve similar purposes: they are both about hiding from stuff. But in both cases, the camo is also subject to trends. It’s not purely practical.

Take, for example, the military’s trend for digital camouflage.

This fashion movement was kicked off in the 1990s by the Canadian army, when they released their CADPAT (Canadian Camouflage pattern) in a pixelated form.

Kind of badass looking, right? And so the US Marines followed their lead, and released MARPAT (Marines Pattern)

By the way, the Marines still use this pattern! You just don’t often see Marines in their combat fatigues because that is so not a part of their culture. But my friend Alex obliged me by changing into his fatigues:

So after the Marines took on MARPAT, then this digi camo thing really took off, every branch wanted their own digital camo, no matter if it was actually practical or not. The most offensive example of this was that the Navy created their own digital camo… that was blue. And immediately sailors were like “….what the hell we don’t want to blend in with the ocean!??”

But the biggest branch to take this on was, of course, the Army. They created a new digital camo pattern called UCP, or the Universal Camouflage Pattern. It was called “Universal” because it was supposed to blend in with many different environments.

But as season consultant Charles McFarlane will tell you, UCP was “a camo that stuck out like a sore thumb.” The only thing that was universal about it was that it universally blended in with nothing.

And so this pattern was soon replaced by another trend. OCP. Operational Camouflage Pattern. Which I saw for sale on the military base that Alex took me to:

And you’ll note that this camo is very very very similar to another pattern called Multicam. Very similar:

And multicam is worn in a lot of places. Including by police and militias.

The military and local police are already looking very similar, in terms of what gear they have access to, and the camouflage is only making it more visually confusing. So much so that the New York Times had to release a guide for how to tell who is who.

Polygraph

How the Iraq War turbocharged police militarization

IN THIS NEWSLETTER: A look at how combat gear deployed in Iraq made its way back to local police departments through the 1033 program, and how to shut it down…

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a year ago · 37 likes · Stephen Semler

This episode is about the drama that got us to this point. There’s a whole story behind it.

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Secretly- not-so secretly, while I’ve been diving into the military-industrial complex for the current season of Articles of Interest, over the last two years, I have also been periodically going to Belgium for a book that I have been writing about The Antwerp Six, which will be published by Simon & Schuster.

Little did I know that while I was spending many many hours smoking cigarettes and drinking tea with the designer Marina Yee, I was recording her in what turned out to be the last year of her life.

Spending time with Marina was my absolute favorite part of researching the book. Not only because she was a tremendous creative force- but as you will read, she also had a fair bit of juicy fashion gossip to spill.

Above all, I was truly inspired by Marina, both personally and professionally. Many people were. I’ve been so sad that the world lost her too early, and I couldn’t wait for the book release to talk about her. I wrote this tribute for Marina in i-D magazine, and I thought I’d share it here as well.

A model stepped out on the runway, completely topless. Her long blonde hair was swept up in a tousled bun. Her eyes were rimmed in black kohl, her lips painted red. Although she wore no shirt, her chest was decorated with a fake suntan in the outline of a v-neck shirt, and she covered her breasts with her hands. The one garment she wore were white pants with a raw, unfinished hem. Below that hem were boots with a split toe, like she had hooves for feet. This was the world’s very first impression of Martin Margiela, at his premiere fashion show on October 23rd, 1988.

But this is not about Martin Margiela. This is about a woman who was there in the crowd, watching that show. Someone who looked eerily similar to that topless model. Her long blond hair was swept up in a tousled bun, and her eyes were rimmed with black kohl. A friend leaned over and whispered exactly what she was thinking: “she looks completely like you. It’s like, it’s you.”

A second model came out, also wearing tabi shoes, with another stack of tousled blond hair and kohl-rimmed eyes. It was impossible to ignore. More and more models emerged, looking nonchalant and bohemian, wearing backwards skirts, oversized men’s shirts. The garments looked like they had been picked up in thrift shops or sewn together at the last minute. The women all looked, and dressed like this woman in the audience. Her name was Marina Yee.

Marina Yee was an upcoming fashion designer in her own right, and member of the Antwerp Six. She was also a long time friend and occasional lover of Martin Margiela. Long before “upcycling” was trendy, Marina was digging clothing out of the trash, finding strange pieces at flea markets, and wearing fabric scraps to the club. “By the age of thirty I hope to be at the top with my own collection,” Marina had once said. And there she was at 30 years old, watching Martin Margiela, her childhood friend rise to the top, with a collection that could have very well been her own. It’s just that Margiela had the savvy and skill to get there first, especially because he worked with a business partner, Jenny Meirens.

Marina, a consummate artist, had adamantly refused to work with a business partner. “People were constantly talking about my talent,” Marina said. “But I was insecure and wanted to do everything on my own.” Growth had never been Marina’s goal. But now, Marina knew, if she tried to continue in fashion design, it would look like she was knocking off Margiela. Even Meirens’ daughter, Sophie Pay, admits Marina’s influence: “When you just looked at her, how she looked and how she dressed, and you looked at Martin’s collections, it was quite obvious.” Once Margiela laid claim to this look, Marina had been reduced to a muse.

As she watched the versions of herself parade around the catwalk at Margiela’s premiere, Marina couldn’t stop crying. She collapsed in a friend’s arms. “I think it was the worst moment of my life.” The day that Martin Margiela entered the global stage, Marina Yee left it.

Over the next forty years, Martin Margiela, as well as Marina’s schoolmates Dries Van Noten and Ann Demeulemeester, would become titans of the fashion world, and would retire to much fanfare after selling their successful businesses. As of last year, Marina Yee was still renting a one bedroom apartment in downtown Antwerp, where she lived with her adult son.

But at last, in 2021, just after she turned 60, Marina Yee finally planned her comeback. Marina finally found a trusted business partner in Rafael Adriaensens, and had been working on a line of clothing that she was starting to sell on SSENSE and Dover Street Market. “Wow,” I thought, as I admired her beautifully remade secondhand coats, “it’s never too late to start again.”

Until it suddenly was too late. Marina Yee passed away on November 1st at the age of 67, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. We lost a brilliant and singular soul, and all the remembrances of her are entirely too short.

Marina Yee was born in Antwerp, but her family moved to the Belgian Congo when she was one year old. Just before the Congo was declared independent, her family came back to Belgium, where they moved from city to city. Marina’s father, who was mixed race Chinese- Belgian, worked as the director of a successful Belgian chain of department stores called Inno, and as he was promoted within the company, the family moved from location to location throughout Belgium. Throughout her childhood Marina moved at least eleven times.

By nature of all these moves, and because of her father’s tendency to lash out abusively towards her mother, Marina’s panic attacks began when she was nine years old. Friends were not allowed to come into the Yee household, for fear of her father’s outbursts, and Marina, by necessity, became a lone wolf. She never related to other children, and Marina became an odd, dreamy, self-sufficient child, who entertained herself by gathering bouquets of wild flowers, baking cakes, and, eventually, sewing clothes.

Marina’s chic and stylish mother taught her daughter that sewing wasn’t difficult, and Marina made high waisted velvet, skirts that were “a bit gothic.” She’d wear these skirts to school, along with her mother’s vintage boots from Paris, wear circles of dark kohl around her eyes, and carry a wicker basket in lieu of a school bag. Marina’s eclectic style stood out during the hippy dippy 70s, when everyone else was wearing clogs and Indian prints: Marina wasn’t quite in-vogue, but she wasn’t passé either. Her style was just different and entirely unique. And so perhaps it was natural that, when Marina was fifteen years old and her family moved again, this time to the town of Hasselt, Marina gravitated to the only other student who also dressed in his own unique way. A neat, dapper, shy boy named Martin Margiela.

Martin and Marina got along like a house on fire. Marina loved to talk, and Martin loved to listen, so he became her audience and she became his entertainment. They became all but glued at the hip. They rode the bus together, they took all their classes together, and spent all their time outside of school together. Marina told Martin about the music that her older boyfriend turned her on to, like Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Doors: music that seemed eons away from the Top 20 hits everyone else was listening to. Their tastes started to merge, especially in the realms of design and in fashion. “He loved my weird combinations. He thought they were fantastic,” Marina remembered. “And so we had something in common, a shared passion for fashion and clothes.” Martin and Marina would be magnetically drawn to the exact same shirt at a flea market, or both of them would bend down at the same time to pick up an abandoned toy on the street. They became magpies- collectors of inspiration and detritus, which they might hoard and incorporate into their art projects.“Our styles were so close: Martin and I were sister cities,” Marina said. “If he thought something, I would say it and vice versa.”

Marina followed Martin to the famous Fine Arts Academy in Antwerp, where a department of Fashion was still being developed. At the entrance exam, Marina met a tall affable lanky boy named Dirk Bikkembergs, who readily admitted that he was entirely unqualified for the fashion school entrance exam, but still really wanted to go to fashion school. As Dirk Bikkembergs recalled, it was just by chance that he “saw a very beautiful girl with long blond hair down to her hips, dressed in a white parka that was billowing with the wind,” Dirk recalled. “I thought: she’s definitely also here for fashion. I followed her and sat next to her. Turns out I couldn’t draw. But she could. She helped me out, literally dictating how and what marks I should make. She dragged me through it.” Marina Yee, a beautiful blond girl in the white parka, helped Dirk Bikkembergs into the fashion program, they would meet fellow students Ann Demeulemeester, Walter Van Beirendonck, Dries Van Noten, and Dirk Van Saene, and together they would work hard and party harder.

When she was getting ready to go out, Marina would smoke a joint and throw together an experimental outfit by “creating in the moment” with a single pin or a cinch of a belt, or by quickly sewing a piece of elastic into a swath of fabric. Marina could turn old second hand clothes or a simple scrap of fabric into a show stopping ensemble. “I made my own style.” This also worked because Marina was show-stoppingly gorgeous even though she was the last to realize it. “I was not aware what my influence was,” she sighed. “Walter always told me, ‘Oh, you’re amazing’ because I did things an hour before I went out.”

Whenever Marina went to the club, her last-minute, freeform outfits would always get compliments, and she would always offer to show how she made it. “It’s very easy. Just give me a beer and a pen.” She’d grab a napkin and draw out a pattern: stitch there, stitch there, make a tunnel, feed in the elastic. The next time she came back to the club, someone would be wearing a version of her clothes. She loved it. She was living in the world that punk had created. It was style anarchy. “Everyone could feel the spirit of the moment,” Marina said. “Strong individuals with outspoken personalities came to the forefront. We too could feel that. We broke out of the school; we broke away from the laws of the Academy.” Quite literally, Marina almost got kicked out of the Academy because she would disappear for months on end. Marina couldn’t help but feel like she was “wasting time” in this protective academic bubble, keeping up with strict assignments. Especially when she knew she could already create beautiful clothes in her own way.

The legend goes that this group of friends: Marina, Dries, Ann, Dirk, Dirk and Walter, would go on to become “The Antwerp Six” when they would travel to London together in 1986. When they were placed inconveniently on an upper floor, it was Marina Yee’s idea to create a poster: she saw the convention center had a copy machine, she grabbed some scotch tape, she grabbed the others (shouting “we’re all going to be famous!”) and they started making flyers that read COME SEE THE SIX BELGIAN DESIGNERS. They were stronger together when they marketed as a group.

Until Martin Margiela’s premiere show. Although they had dated on and off in the past, it wasn’t until after Martin’s stunning debut that Marina and Martin became a couple. This puzzled everyone I talked to, including Marina herself. But Marina followed Martin to Paris, where they lived together for two years.

Although Marina tried to work for a Spanish clothing brand, it proved unsatisfying, and the collection ultimately ended. It was becoming clear that Marina and Martin were living in opposite worlds. “I regularly had bouts of jealousy,” Marina told De Standaard. “I was sometimes furious about what I saw. Things that I had done, or could have done but never did.” Marina was getting weak and losing weight. “What I went through then I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” Marina said. “I was actually at the end of my career, while things were just starting to go so well for him. We were two incredibly kindred spirits, but at the same time there was also competition between us. I sometimes wished I had become a sculptor or a photographer, or at least something else, so that I could have cheered wholeheartedly for Martin’s success.”

Marina left Paris and opened a successful cafe in Brussels. And then she had a career restoring furniture. For a while she taught classes, she designed maternity clothes, stage costumes, and lines for other designers, including Dirk Bikkembergs’ womens line.

When I went to Marina’s small apartment in Antwerp, Marina had finally come back to her calling: to impeccable reconstructions of second hand clothing, ever so subtly rumpled in exquisite ways. Her apartment was full of garments she rescued from the street and thrift bins. She would lovingly breathe new life into these garments with elegant little stitches, the way a sculptor chips at marble. She would sew phrases and poetry inside her jackets and give them names. Her collections of found objects were organized in little bins- one for belts, one for buttons. She rolled me cigarette after cigarette and her cat dodged between our legs.

I continued to walk by Marina’s apartment most nights. Not in a creepy way, it just so happened to be on my way to everywhere else in Antwerp. This secret titan of Belgian design was hiding in plain sight. And always, even coming home from a late night drink, I couldn’t help but notice that Marina’s living room light was on. An eternal flame, curtained by houseplants. I imagined Marina up there in her late night laboratory, hauling out boxes of buttons and sifting through piles of thrifted skirts. Taking this refuse, this junk, and ripping it apart. Breaking it down further into the end of its life. Hastening its decay until it is fully reincarnated.

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Here’s one fascinating legacy, unearthed by Eilidh Duffy, a fashion writer and researcher based in London who edits the magazine-turned-substack Bog.

The following is a small part of her research that was presented as a paper at Objects in Distress in June 2024, and will be published in a forthcoming collection by Bloomsbury in 2026. Enjoy!

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I am not an American. And I am not a soldier. Yet I have come to identify with a classic piece of U.S. militaria: the M-65 field jacket. If you’re not so nerdy about models and shapes and army codification, it’s essentially the classic American army jacket with a zip away hood that’s been referenced time and again since the 1980s by design teams all over the world.

Yet its timelessness, its classic silhouette and its *Americanness* is not what initially drew me to the M-65. In fact, it had always seemed to me to be a bit too on the hypermasculine side of militaria, adopted a little too widely in the contemporary moment by both bankers and right-wing survivalists for me to really get behind in any meaningful way. Plus, I’ve always found the jacket itself to be surprisingly stiff, its nylon-cotton outer layer a little heavy for my personal taste. That was, until early last year when I went down the rabbit hole of the IrishRebelArchive subreddit.

Let me explain. I grew up in Glasgow, but my dad’s side of the family are from Derry, one of the epicentres of the conflict that is commonly known as ‘the Troubles’. When I was a kid, he wouldn’t talk particularly freely about growing up in what was, essentially, a low-level warzone, other than blurting out the occasional candid detail such as “your grandpa was in the IRA.”

The Provisional Irish Republican Army (more commonly referred to as the IRA) were the most prominent paramilitary active during the near 30 year conflict, formed at the end of 1969 when they split with the Marxist-Leninist ‘Official IRA’ (of which my grandfather was allegedly a member before they split in two) after disagreements about the primacy of armed struggle in their campaign. So for a Catholic teenager growing up in Derry in the 1970s and 1980s, these people were often your friends or family or neighbours – the people you knew from down the street.

Other little facts from my dad (only, until recently, to be parted with after a whisky) might be a bit more shocking, like, “the IRA once used my primary school as a vantage point to shoot at the British Army.” His sense of humour is such that these morsels of detail would never come out of his mouth as a sombre, heavy delivery, but accompanied by peals of laughter. It was, he assures us, “just life”.

Something my dad would do openly and freely though was buy me pieces of army surplus clothing. It’s the only type of dress he ever gets excited about. In an effort to connect with an otherwise temperamental and fashion-obsessed teenage girl, he’d find me strange pieces of old army clothing: flight suit liners double my height, wraparound plastic goggles, misshapen satchels; garments I didn’t realise had a depth of history as objects designed for… well, warfare. To 14-year-old me, it was just fun.

A good decade and a bit later, I had a bit more worldliness to me, and I began researching types of dress used by the IRA. I’d been raking around the internet for photographs of liberation movements wearing ex-British and American military uniforms, having become increasingly interested in how military clothing is developed and, eventually, repurposed by militaries both official and unofficial throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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I then realized something pivotal. My dad had grown up at a time when army surplus clothing was worn by a pretty prominent paramilitary…. and yet he’d enjoyed playing with it – as much as I had – as a kind of fashion?! What would start as just a train of thought and a few clicks around the internet would grow into an obsessive year and half long research project and eventually become my Master’s thesis.

So– this is why I was spending a lot of time on the IrishRebelArchive subreddit. Scrolling through the page, I was stopped in my tracks by an image: a small, grainy, coloured photograph showing a Provisional IRA volunteer posing in front of an Irish Tricolour. He's brandishing an assault rifle, wearing the knitted balaclava quite typical of the IRA pulled over his head. But then, on his top half he’s wearing an M-65 jacket:

The balaclava’d man stands like a revolutionary, evoking the French revolutionary icon Marianne, the embodiment of liberty, leading the people to victory. Instead of a flagpole, however, he is holding a weapon, and rather than wearing a white muslin dress, he’s wearing an M-65. Suddenly, to me, the M-65 was an object that was incredibly charged.

By the time I came across this photo, I’d already been researching the use of army surplus clothing by the IRA in the 1970s for a few months (hence my scrolling on the subreddit). Military surplus clothing (often from the British military) was worn during IRA funerals and other commemoration events. Volunteers also wore surplus in their own promotional photographs, published in their own books and newspapers. Often these look and feel (and turn out to probably be) staged, even though they are sometimes credited as a submission from a reader and accompanied by editorializing captions usually describing the scene as some kind of training scenario.

But make no mistake, this photograph that I encountered on reddit is also deliberately posed. This photograph that I found after doing a bit of digging shows another angle on the scene, and makes his posing for the camera even more obvious:

The full context around the image, posed on the 12th of August 1979, is Casement Park, a large sportsground in West Belfast, in the midst of an IRA rally. What this behind the scenes shot reveals, however, is that this volunteer was not dressed up for the sympathetic lens of an IRA-affiliated photographer, but rather for a coterie of international press, who had descended on West Belfast to document an actual real demonstration.

Notably, it would have been near impossible to source an M-65 jacket (never mind the four or five that adorned the bodies of IRA volunteers over the course of the day on which this photo was taken) without a direct plug in the U.S. This use of this M-65, I think, can tell us something valuable about where the IRA were at themselves.

In 1979, they’d had a pretty good year. A large report by the British Government had been leaked which painted a picture of the IRA as a well-structured organization that “has the dedication and the sinews of war to raise violence intermittently…certainly for the foreseeable future.” Then in August, just a couple of weeks after the demonstration shown in the reddit picture, the IRA would assassinate Lord Mountbatten, a cousin of the Queen, as well as eighteen British soldiers, in a coordinated, one-day attack. This was the British Army’s largest loss of life in one incident during the entire period, and a great success for the IRA. As the historian Daniel Finn has written, the IRA were “in bullish form.”

On the 12th of August 1979, when the march arrived at Casement Park, one of the masked men read out a statement from the IRA, which contextualized their display of arms as “a show of our determination…to resist British imperialism.” Alongside this statement were messages of solidarity from other national liberation groups engaged in armed struggle: the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the South West Africa People's Organization, the Rhodesian Patriotic Front and the Basque ETA. All of whom, it must be noted, at one time or another adopted army surplus clothing as a form of revolutionary uniform.

From a contemporary perspective, though, this jacket does not look so radical. In fact, the M-65 is a type of garment we might think of as a ‘classic’ shape. Clothing so ubiquitous, so prevalent in the modern wardrobe that they feel as though it’s just been there, part of fashion design’s lexicon, since the dawn of time. These garments, however, are not so ancient and not so simple as the term ‘classic’ might suggest. In fact, scratch beneath the surface and you’ll reveal a deep, fascinating and sometimes troubled history.

After its deployment in the twentieth century’s most photographed conflict, the Vietnam War, the M-65 took on a life of its own. The design of U.S. Army clothing was somewhat considered for its aesthetic appeal, so these garments were attractive not just because of what they meant semiotically, but also how they made the body look. During the Vietnam War, when collecting their uniform, soldiers would enter a large warehouse-like quartermaster building whose entrance was framed with the line: “Through these doors pass the world's best-dressed soldiers”.

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Through the influence of G.I.s returning from Vietnam, many of whom joined the organisation Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), students involved in the antiwar movement bought fatigues at army surplus stores, thus turning political protests against military intervention overseas into, quite ironically, a sea of military uniforms. Contemporary army uniforms, then, took on a more nuanced meaning within youth culture.

In 1972, sociologists Nathan Joseph and Nicholas Alex termed the use of this kind of dress (wearing a uniform not for warfare, but as a stylistic or political statement) the “anti-uniform”, writing that it was “a mode of mocking the military services and…ultimately an expression of rebellion or rejection of society itself.” The M-65 was used to this effect in costumes for Martin Scorsese's 1976 film Taxi Driver, and Michael Cimino’s 1978 film The Deer Hunter. Through these Hollywood renditions of the jacket, the M-65 became synonymous with hyper-masculine representations of the troubled, postwar antihero, representative of a crisis of white, American masculinity.

If we start to think about why the IRA were wearing this jacket at this moment, it tells us something about culture, power and influence. Considering how hard it would have been to get an M-65, the IRA must have deliberately sourced it for this moment, knowing that a volunteer posing in this particular manner would be photographed. And one very important factor is that this garment was American, instantly recognizable to a contemporary audience both in Ireland and overseas as a garment associated with the radical antiwar movement and as an ultra-cool piece of clothing made desirable through Hollywood.

With this one simple-seeming jacket, the IRA was able to address two very different sections of their support base at the same time. The IRA was supported by both dedicated left wing Irish republicans who saw themselves as part of a global insurrection against capitalism and imperialism, as well as a more conservative Irish Catholic and Irish-American audience who made up a large chunk of their funding base (and may well have organized the shipment of jackets to them).

The IRA, on the 12th of August 1979, was sending a message that expertly balanced a very thin line between two very different political ideologies. This man was putting on a show. One quite deliberately draped in the M-65.

The drill sergeant you’ve been hearing is none other than Ray Christian. He’s a legendary podcaster, but in his past life he actually was a drill sergeant.

Ray enlisted three years after the Vietnam War ended. But I love this picture from 1987, when Ray is wearing Vietnam-era fatigues. He’s in Panama! But for about ten years, the Army reissued old Vietnam stock

The funny thing is, Ray has been wearing field jackets for a long time. He remembers, back in the 1970s, even when he was off-duty, he could wear his field jacket home, just with jeans. And he would blend in with everyone else. Because everyone wore field jackets. Everyone. Whether they were soldiers or anti-war protestors, all rocked field jackets. Even John Lennon used to wear one:

Back when John Lennon wore his field jacket, this was the height of rebellion, because this was the “uniform” of a generation of drafted soldiers who did not want to fight.

I mean, what better proof than some of these amazing Vietnam-era ebay finds by reporter Jasper Craven

Back at home in the US, the field jackets were worn by the angry young veterans played by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and Al Pacino in Serpico. This was the uniform of the grizzled outsider

But then, over the course of the 1970s, the field jacket gets yuppified. To the point where its worn by the nebbishy upper class stars of Annie Hall and Kramer Vs. Kramer.

So what happened? Put simply. Military surplus went fashion. You can see what happened when you look at the catalogs from this one surplus store in Philly, called I. Goldberg.

In the 1950s, the I.Goldberg catalog is all Gear. It looks like a catalog for Holubar or Gerry:

And then cut to the 1970s, and I.Goldberg has become a fashion catalog:

The military look became a trend. Unlike the generation before, the generation that treated surplus like cheap basics, now it was cool to really play up the military-ness of surplus. What had started as a true political statement turned into a trend.

And a huge contributing factor in making surplus mainstream was… Banana Republic.

An artist named Patricia and a writer named Mel started Banana Republic in 1978. When it began, the store was as a cheeky take on a surplus, where the clothes were swashbuckling and the interiors made you feel like you were on safari:

You really have to just look at what the pictures of Banana Republic used to look like, it was amazing. And now, modern Banana Republic is starting to embrace this history.

And meanwhile, back in the 1970s, while many new outdoor brands were popping up, a beloved classic brand was on the way out. Abercrombie & Fitch began selling really weird stuff in the 1970s:

Abercrombie & Fitch went bankrupt in the 1970s- setting the stage for them to eventually be bought and re-made in time to terrorize me throughout my middle school years. But their demise was a clear sign to the outdoor companies: don’t get to wild here. Stay in your lane.

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Where did I get all these cool catalog images from? THE OUTDOOR RECREATION ARCHIVE! It’s the most amazing place. I got a fellowship to go there, and you can apply for the fellowship to go there too.

And as ever, if you’d like to know more about the military stuff, Charles’ substack is really the place to go

Combat Threads

Meditations on the Intersection of fashion and Military Uniforms

By Charles W McFarlane

I’ll get to the conference and what I was doing there later.

This is a chapter about how camping loses its masculine edge.

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Before the invention of the incredible multipurpose M43 field jacket- back when there were all those different field jackets for all those different needs- there was a particular field jacket that was given to the 10th Mountain Division.

The 10th Mountain Division was the US military’s troops on skis! Which was, actually sort of weird in the 1940s. Not that many Americans skied back then. Like, if you did ski in a place like Vermont or upstate New York, a lot of places wouldn’t have a ski lift or a tow. You’d have to walk back up the mountain in your skis.

To give you an idea of the kind of guy who would get put in the 10th Mountain Division, take Gerry Cunningham. Gerry was from Utica New York, and had been skiing since the time he was a teenager. He had also been an avid climber and backpacker and actually met his wife, Ann, in a tree. She was already sitting on a high limb that he had come to climb.

For their honeymoon, the young couple trekked off to the mouth of the Hudson River.

Their honeymoon was abruptly interrupted, however, when Gerry’s dad hiked through the woods to find the couple. Gerry’s draft card had arrived.

This is the kind of outdoorsy guy who was in the 10th Mountain Division. But Gerry hated being a solider and he haaaaated that parka he was given. He hated all the military gear. He hated the tents, he hated the backpacks. He just hated all the heavy, clunky, sturdy gear that the military saddled him with. It was all so inconvenient to carry. And so Gerry imagined what he would make when he got out.

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All through WII, Gerry daydreamed of the company he wanted to start. He even drew up a logo. And like divine providence, after the war, he and Ann would move out to Colorado, and they would buy a property with a view that just so happened to look like his logo:

Gerry and Ann set up a little house in Ward, outside of Colorado.

And very quickly, the Cunninghams got to know another couple who lived in the Boulder area: Roy and Alice Holubar.

Both couples would eventually start outdoor Gear businesses, and they would both help kickstart each other.

These two couples, Gerry and Ann Cunningham of Gerry and Roy and Alice Holubar of Holubar became the two outdoor businesses in the Boulder area. Holubar would eventually find its niche in down, and Alice Holubar would prove to be a wizard with quilting.

Gerry, on the other hand, got his hands on a drill press and started to experiment with metal.

And from this little house in Ward, Gerry would generate a number of completely game changing innovations. Seriously. You’ve been directly impacted by a number of things Gerry made.

Like the carabiner. They used to be perfectly oval shaped like this

It was Gerry’s idea to make one side tapered. It’s just what we all assume carabiners are.

Gerry also invented the cord lock, which tightens so many pants and jackets and clothes.

But my favorite example of Gerry invention was the baby backpack. Or, as he called it, the Kiddie Karrier. Here are Gerry Ann trying it out with their kids.

This was an entirely new vision of camping. It wasn’t anything macho or manly anymore. Literally a baby could do it. Gerry had a vision of making camping fun, easy, comfortable, and accessible to as many people as possible, through lightweight gear.

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Gerry became a pioneer of lightweight, packable, convenient gear. And a tenet of light gear was coming in lightly and leaving lightly.

Get this. Gerry invented the phrase “leave no trace.”

He published a pamphlet called “How To Camp and Leave No Trace” in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day. Gerry published a lot of pamphlets for how to keep warm, how to pack light, how to enjoy camping, and any number of useful guides.

This idea eventually spread to the military, directly from Gerry himself. He began to contract with the military, when he started making lightweight cold weather flight suits that could be crammed into a small pack.

The lightweight ethos is still there in the military. In fact, it’s more important than ever.

Because there, at that insane AUSA conference, amid displays like this:

And this:

…were displays like this:

Clothes were showed off like any other technology. Lightweight, packable, breathable performance clothes. Clothes Gerry would have dreamed of when he was in the 10th Mountain Division.

Which is not to be like tadaaaaaa happy ending! It’s not the half of it! You know my whole thing I am not going to tell you the whole story because please please consider listening to the podcast.

By the way, if you made it through last episode, congratulations, you will now be in the elite circle of people who (at least partially) understand Joshua Kerner’s meme page dedicated to lampooning General Littlejohn. It’s so good.