The Museum at FIT Fashion Culture Podcast

Norma Kamali studied fashion illustration at FIT before taking a job at Northwest Orient Airlines. From 1964 to 1968, she traveled to Britain every weekend, where she immersed herself in the culture of 1960s London. In 1967, she and her husband opened a boutique in NYC and filled it with items purchased in London. She supplemented her stock with her own designs and eventually began to focus primarily on her original creations. Among her most celebrated creations is the “sleeping bag coat" and a swimsuit worn by Farah Fawcett in one of the most memorable photographs of the 1970s. However, she also designed high heel sneakers, adjustable dress from parachute silk, created a suit from sweatshirt fabric, and is renown as a pioneer in athleisure. In this conversation, Norma Kamali and MFIT's Patricia Mears speak at the museum's fashion symposium, Fashion, Science, and Exploration, held on October 10, 2017.

Watch the full video with captions on YouTube.

The Museum at FIT (MFIT) is the only museum dedicated exclusively to the art of fashion in New York City. https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum

Piet Mondrian's abstract paintings were appropriated by various aspects of popular culture throughout the 1960s, notably by Yves Saint Laurent in his 1965 dress series. Co-authors Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis join MFIT's senior curator of costume Dr. Colleen Hill to discuss the wildly popular dress series and how art, commerce, and fashion became intertwined in the postwar period. 

This talk was recorded March 6, 2024.

Watch the full video with captions on YouTube.

The Museum at FIT (MFIT) is the only museum dedicated exclusively to the art of fashion in New York City. https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum

Robin Givhan, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, presents her new book, Make It Ours: Crashing the Gates of Culture with Virgil Abloh. Appointed as head of menswear for Louis Vuitton in 2018, Abloh was the first Black designer to serve as artistic director in the brand's 164-year history and his rise was amid a cultural moment that would upend a century's worth of ideas about luxury and taste. In this conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Way, The Museum at FIT's associate curator of costume and accessories, Givhan discusses Abloh’s disruptive impact on the fashion industry, his controversial design methods, and his legacy as a figure of optimism. She notes that in the current cultural climate, choosing optimism is a "radical" act, and Abloh did so not out of naivety, but as the only way to move forward.

Robin Givhan spent more than 25 years writing about politics, race, and the arts at The Washington Post as a fashion critic and most recently, senior critic-at-large. 

This talk was recorded August 26, 2025.

Transcript (pdf)

The Museum at FIT (MFIT) is the only museum dedicated exclusively to the art of fashion in New York City. https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum

Colombian designer Lia Samantha Lozano, a pioneer of Afro-Colombian fashion and speaks with Professor Dr. Tamara J. Walker about Lozano's eponymous brand, Lia Samantha, which translates the power of Black and Indigenous peoples’ cosmovisions, traditions, wisdom, spirituality, and beauty into contemporary design.

Walker, an associate professor of Africana studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, centers her research on slavery, gender, and racial formation in Latin America. Walker’s first book, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (2017), won the 2018 Harriet Tubman Prize.

This talk occurred on October 25, 2024 at The Museum at the FIT's Africa’s Fashion Diaspora Symposium at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The symposium explored key histories, networks, and industries led by Black designers who are actively shaping fashion culture. Scholars and designers illustrated the breadth and depth of diasporic fashion networks, from the African continent to South America and the United States. #FashionCulture

Transcript (pdf)

The Museum at FIT (MFIT) is the only museum dedicated exclusively to the art of fashion in New York City. https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum

How can fashion schools institutionally cultivate support and accelerate the many changes already happening in the classroom around inclusion and equity? Ben Barry, Dean of Fashion at Parsons School of Design, explores the decolonization work at Parsons and the successes, challenges, and discussions that arose from that process.

Ben Barry was named to the Vogue Business inaugural “100 Innovators” list in 2022. Barry is leading the Parsons fashion community to embed equity, inclusion, and justice in its curriculum and culture. His current research, funded by the Ford Foundation, explores how to redesign fashion education and the fashion industry to enable disabled designers to thrive.

This talk, "Transforming Fashion Education: Possibilities and Limits of Equity, Inclusion, and Decolonization," was originally given in 2024 at MFIT’s New Direction in Fashion Research Symposium. 

The Museum at FIT’s 31st symposium, New Directions in Fashion Research, focused on new avenues of study in the interdisciplinary field of fashion. Scholars, curators, and collectors explored topics such as practice-based research, collecting practices, theories and methodologies, and the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in fashion education.

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The Museum at FIT (MFIT) is the only museum dedicated exclusively to the art of fashion in New York City. https://www.fitnyc.edu/museum