Faculty

Profile

Christina H. Moon is an Associate Professor of Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design The New School. Her work moves between the vast global fashion industry and the intimate archive of a diasporic wardrobe. Her current writing explores how garments archive the buried histories of diaspora and interior life, where clothing becomes witness to what history and language leave unspoken. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University. She is the author of Labor and Creativity in New York's Global Fashion Industry and co-editor of Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia, and her writing has appeared in Vestoj, Critique, and Tank, among others. She is a fellow of the Graduate Institute of Design Ethnography and Social Thought and member of the Fashion Praxis working group at Parsons. She is the former Director of the MA in Fashion Studies program at Parsons and sits on the Advisory and Editorial Boards of State of Fashion, Digital Multilogue on Fashion Education, and Fashion Studies Journal.

Degrees Held

PhD, MPhil, Anthropology, Yale University, 2011

BA Anthropology, Rutgers University, 1999

Professional Affiliation

American Anthropological Association, Society for Cultural Anthropology, Asian American Studies Association, Association for Asian Studies, American Studies Association, Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles

Recent Publications

SAMPLE

2025 In the Backseat of a Car. Marlè Magazine. On Escape. Issue 6.

2024 An Intimate Dream. Tank Magazine. Issue 98, February.

2023  Every Day is a Dress. Vestoj: The Journal of Sartorial Matters. On Everyday Life. Issue 11.

2023  Foreword: I search for mothers in writing and clothing. Fashion and Motherhood: Image, Materiality, Identity. Edited by Laura Snelgrove. (Bloomsbury).

2023  Closet Feelings. Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress, Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Edited by Roberto Filippello and Ilya Parkins. (Palgrave Macmillan).

2022  Histoire d'armoires. Critique : revue générale des publications françaises et étrangères. Les Éditions de Minuit. Juin-Juillet, TOME LXXVIII - No. 901-902, pg 461-471.

2021   Four Decades of Doubt. Vestoj: The Journal of Sartorial Matters. Issue 10.

2020   Labor and Creativity in New York’s Global Fashion Industry (Routledge).

2020  The Maintenance and Preservation of Life. Vestoj: The Journal of Sartorial Matters. Issue 9.

2019  Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia, co-editers Heijin Lee, Christina Moon, and Thuy Linh Tu (New York University Press).

2019 Ethnographic Entanglements: memory and narrative in the New York fashion industry. In The Anthropology of Dress and Fashion. Edited by Brent Luvaas, Joanne B. Eicher. (Bloomsbury).

2019  Made in China: Material-Meanderings of Fast-Fashion Cities. In Fashion and Materiality. Edited by H. Jenß and Viola Hofman. (Berg).

2018  Fashion City: diasporic connections and garment industrial histories between the US and Asia. Edited by Jamie Doucette and Bae Gyun Park. Special Issue on Urban Developmentalism in East Asia: Geopolitical Economies, Spaces of Exception, and Networks of Expertise. Critical Sociology. Volume: 44 issue: 3, page(s): 519-532.

2018  To Dwell in Seams: Fashion as Buried Forms of Diasporic Memory. Special Issue: Fashion. Anthropology News. Volume 58, Issue 5. (September/October).

Performances and Appearances

Available to Promise; Hidden Systems, Shared Futures - State of Fashion Biennale 2026

Christina Moon On Common Threads, podcast episode, The Recovering Elitist, 2026

Tactile Memory and Technology: Practices of Forgetting and Remembering, a collaborative workshop with Mary Ping

Christina Moon on cultivating community and collective wisdom, podcast episode Fashion Is A Great Teacher

University of the Arts Berlin Defashioning Education with Otto Von Busch 2023

American University of Paris + University of the Arts Berlin Digital Multilogue Fashion Education 2021, Provocation

Research Interests

Fashion, memory, and diaspora; material culture and the archive; labor and the global fashion industry; history of New York fashion; art, design, and craft; visual culture and museums; social and cultural theory; ethnography and literary writing

Awards And Honors

Graduate Institute of Design Ethnography Social Theory, Social Science Research Council, India China Institute, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, Fulbright Program, Korea Foundation

Portfolio

Closet Feelings

The Maintenance and Preservation of Life

Labor and Creativity in New York's Global Fashion Industry

Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia

The Secret World of Fast Fashion