Joan Crawford’s Mouth

September 12, 2025

By Philippa Snow

Joan Crawford, Weegee, ca 1953, Courtesy ICP. Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993.

To age in public for a woman is, despite all woke societal efforts to the contrary, still hell; to age in public as a star is worse. A roll-call of the sex symbols of my youth in the noughties – Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox, Christina Aguilera – is notable for the fact that many of them...

Keywords: Beyond beauty, Britney Jean of Kentwood, Bulimia, Fan mail, Glamazons

Golden Girls: How South Asian Women Preserve Legacy Through Gold

August 29, 2025

Sebastião Salgado, India, 1990

Solid gold bangles, intricate tikkas encrusted in jewels, magnificent chokers covering the entirety of a woman’s neck — all of...

The America They Want To See

By Tiffany Olgun

Currier & Ives, The Capture of an Unprotected Female, or the Close of the Rebellion, 1865. Courtesy ICP.

Fashion is political propaganda. What one hesitates to say aloud - or what may be unspeakable - can still be...

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...

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...