Dress for Success: Richmond History Alum publishes in Canada’s Globe and Mail on Fashion and Power

Alice Janssens graduated as a history major in 2012. For her brilliant Senior Thesis, she researched the historical relation of Fashion and Politics, a topic she has been developing since. She is now a fashion economist, a doctoral researcher in the business history of fashion, and lecturer at Erasmus University, Rotterdam.

Her article ‘Fashion as religion, and a higher moral fabric’, co-written with Katherine Wynne, was published in the Toronto Globe and Mail about the controversial Met Gala 2018, ‘Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination’ co-chaired by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. It argues that while fashion has ever been used as a mechanism for the visual expression of identity and power, the Met Gala reversed this relation: it showed fashion as dictating culture, reverence, idol worship and the rules of society. On the red carpet, Catholicism became the medium moulded to display the omnipotent power of fashion.