I’m an educator, researcher, writer, and curator working in the field of fashion studies.

I research the history of bodies & beauty ideals.

As an interdisciplinary scholar and curator working at the crossroads of fashion studies, history, critical theory, and American studies, I am guided by the mandate to recover forgotten and marginalized stories of dress and self-fashioning, and to contribute to larger conversations about decoloniality, inclusivity, and anti-racism in fashion research, education, collecting, and curating. 

My current research investigates the history of plus-size fashion and how it reverberates in contemporary fashion systems and practices. In recent years, I have presented and published on the history of plus-size fashion, the dress practices of self-identifying fat women, weight bias in the fashion industry, “curve washing,” the evolution of beauty ideals, online fat fashion communities, plus-size fashion photography, archival politics, commodity feminism, and the body positivity movement. 

I teach the designers of tomorrow.

In August 2018, I joined the faculty of Columbia College Chicago where I presently hold the titles of Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies and Director of the Fashion Study Collection. At Columbia, I oversee the fashion history and theory curriculum and am working with my interdisciplinary colleagues to develop forward-thinking and inclusive fashion design, merchandising, and product development curricula.

In addition to my appointment at Columbia College Chicago, I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Bard Gradate Center through 2025. Previously, I taught and guest lectured at The Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University (where I earned my doctorate), Parsons School of Design, Parsons Paris, Toronto Metropolitan University, The Fashion Institute of Technology, and Fordham University.

I freelance as a consultant and thought partner.

In addition to my teaching and research practice, I work with brands and designers to ideate and develop more inclusive and sustainable business and design practices. Recently, I worked with the London-based design and consulting firm IDEO to help a global fashion brand identify gaps in the plus-size market and develop a size- and gender-inclusive denim line.

I can work with your business to develop research insights, present case studies, facilitate recruitment for co-design and market research sessions, and serve as a sounding board for designers, merchandisers, and product developers.

And I am an author.

In 2022, it was reported that plus-sizes accounted for nearly twenty percent of all women's apparel sales in the United States and was one of the industry's few growth sectors. For many, this news seemed to herald a remarkably inclusive turn for an industry that long bartered in exclusivity. Yet the recent success of plus-size fashion obscures a rather complicated history—one that can be traced back over a century, and which illuminates the fraught relationship between fashion, fat, and weight bias in American culture.

Although many regard fat as a malady of the present, in the early twentieth century it was estimated that more than one-third of American women classified as “overweight.” While modern weight bias had yet to fully cement itself in the American imaginary, the limitations of mass garment manufacturing coupled with the ascendent slender beauty ideal had already relegated larger women to fashion's peripheries. By 1915, however, fashion forecasters predicted that so-called “stoutwear” was well positioned to become one of the most lucrative subsectors of the burgeoning ready-to-wear trade. In the years that followed, stoutwear manufacturers set out to create more space for the fat woman in fashion but, in doing so, revealed an ancillary motivation: that of how to design fat out of existence altogether.

Fashion Before Plus-Size considers what came “before” plus-size fashion while also shedding new light on the ways that the fashion industry not only perpetuates but produces weight bias. By situating stoutwear at the confluence of mass manufacturing, beauty ideals, standardized sizing, health discourse, and consumer culture, this book exposes the flawed foundations upon which the contemporary plus-size fashion industry has been built.

This title is now available. You can purchase it via Bloomsbury, or wherever books are sold. A paperback edition will be released in 2024.