The voice of Ella Fitzgerald’s “How High the Moon” filled the room Monday as students and faculty filed into Kirkwood Hall for a talk by Dyese Matthews.
Matthews is a Chicago native and currently teaches as an assistant professor at Parsons' School of Fashion. She graduated with a doctorate in apparel design from Cornell University in 2024.
The event began with director and curator of the Elizabeth Sage Historic Costume Collection Kelly Richardson introducing the talk as part of the Bill Blass Speaker Series. The Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design and the College of Arts and Sciences have hosted and presented speakers since the series was established in 2002.
The series is funded by a legacy from the fashion designer Bill Blass, which also funds the Sage Collection, student projects and fashion design scholarships. Past speakers have included fashion designers, authors, scholars and entrepreneurs. Speakers are usually nominated by faculty.
Matthews’ research in unconventional fashion archives, which was the topic of her talk, began when she took a course at Cornell University. The course was titled “Black Memory Workers and their Spatial Practices: Explorations on African American Heritage Spaces in New York City” in 2021. Matthews took what she learned about preservation to look specifically at the role of fashion in archiving the lives of Black women in Harlem.
Matthews discussed where Harlem actually is on a map of New York City to outline the space in which her research took place. Next, Matthews discussed three Black women who helped make Harlem a prominent neighborhood, one of whom was American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a trailblazer in the Harlem Rennaissance and jazz movement, known for her scat singing style.
Matthews then talked about how she spent time with each of her seven research participants in their closets discussing their upbringing while looking at their garments and old photographs. One of her participants was Lana Turner, a fashion icon from Harlem. Matthews shared a short clip of Turner reading an excerpt that she wrote herself for a publication.
“She speaks to her relationship with fashion, specifically, in relation to Sunday mornings for church, and how the Harlem streets become fashion runways on Sunday morning, a ritual that she often takes part in,” Matthews said. “In these memories captured in photographs, we witness Miss Turner using her relationship with fashion as a tool and inspiration, and that is being archived and preserved.”
The archives Matthews researched are unconventional because they exist outside commercialized institutions and are inside the homes of the women she interviewed. Matthews said that Turner having a fashion archive in her own home is an active refusal of the gentrification taking place in Harlem.
“Why I’m asking us to deconstruct this idea of a more conventional archive is because it often leads to erasure, mostly of marginalized communities, histories,” Matthews said. “It's really accredited to this more conventional ‘right way’ of archiving. Really, wherever and whenever people exist, there are markings of time and memory.”
Megan Romans, a guest lecturer for the fashion design program at the Eskenazi School, nominated Matthews for the series last fall. Romans attended graduate school with Matthews from 2016-2018 at Iowa State University.
“I have had the opportunity to watch her grow as a researcher and scholar and she has truly accomplished so much in her professional career thus far,” Romans said. “I suggested her as a speaker because her research focuses on elevating underrepresented populations and centering their lived experiences in new and novel ways within the fashion industry.”
Romans said she immediately thought of Matthews despite knowing other great researchers, because Matthews offers a fresh perspective on the topic of fashion as a means of liberation. She said it is a way to get her research and name out to a larger audience.
“She's done so much in that space in such a short amount of time, and she has a young, fresh perspective on things,” Romans said. “I think that like that's what that speaker series fund is for; it's just bringing people in to hear different perspectives and new ideas for students to get inspired by.”
IU junior Disha Bukkasagaram came to the talk because she heard it was extra credit for one of her fashion design classes. While she didn’t know much about the topic beforehand, she said she ended up loving it. The most memorable part to her was how Matthews defined how a home can be a fashion archive.
Matthews asked those in attendance to talk to those around them for 60 seconds about what came to mind when they heard the term “archive.” She then asked attendees to think to themselves about what they think when they hear the term “fashion archive,” and how that may be different. Bukkasagaram said the exercise led her to develop a new understanding of archiving as well as thinking differently about defining other terms.
“To kind of look deeper into definitions, because for me the archive thing, I always thought like it has its own definition,” Bukkasagaram said. “But she had so many different definitions and she talked to so many different people, and what it meant to everyone else and also kind of just viewing it in different perspectives.”
Matthews concluded the talk in the same way she started it — with the music of Fitzgerald. This time, it was a 1966 archival recording of a live performance of the song.
The next event in the speaker series will be April 9. More information on past and upcoming speakers can be found on the Bill Blass Speaker Series website.
