Docile Bodies

Prison Uniforms and the Dress of Subservience

By Anja Aronowsky Cronberg

A Chain Gang in South Carolina, c. 1929 - 1931. Doris Umann. Courtesy of the International Center of Photography.

Prison literature and theory often focuses on the oppressiveness of the system, the callous discipline enforced on the prisoner, the strict rules which often seem arbitrary in their focus and the often patronising attitude of the authorities. We often assume that prison is an environment so infused with control and discipline that the inmates have no choice but to bow...

Keywords: Michel Foucault, On Shame, Self Care, Uniforms, Upturned Collars and Resentful Squints

Layer After Layer of Loving Devotion

By Amber Winick

Harold Feinstein, Child's Back in Mother's Arms / Putney Vermont, 1974. Courtesy ICP.

My mother tells a story about wheeling me around in a supermarket shopping cart as a toddler, wearing so many...

Get Distressed: An Introduction to the Market for Thrashed Clothes

By Sonya Abrego

Judith Scott, Figure 9 Untitled, 2002. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum.

Vintage has never been more visible, but that doesn’t make it any easier to define. There were never hard-set rules...

DRESSING WITH MOTHERS

By Giuliana Mazzetta and Hamutal Hayun

Tsila Hayun by Haim Hayun, sometime in the late 1990s. Courtesy the author.

As daughters, we are privy to a deeply intimate space: a space where our mothers could be themselves, where they...

Magic Carpet Ride

‘There is almost like a desire to distract you,’ said the Turner prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price about the carpets in...

Mending at the Margins

Repair in My London Neighbourhood

By Diamond Abdulrahim

Gene Badger, Man Assembling Leather Football Shoes, 1941. Courtesy ICP.

What Adil was saying is that everyone wants an office-based job. His comment made me think about the contemporary office...

Little Doubts Everywhere

By Aurelie Van de Peer and Merel Lefevere

In the 21st century ‘little doubts’ have entered the field of fashion at its core: from doubts about the necessity...