Faculty

Profile

Heike Jenss is Associate Professor of Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York. She was the founding director of Parsons’ MA Fashion Studies program, located in the School of Art and Design History and Theory. Jenss received her PhD in cultural anthropology of textiles from TU Dortmund University. Before joining Parsons, Jenss taught at Dortmund University in the Institute of Art and Material Culture and was a research fellow in the interdisciplinary project Uniformity in Motion, funded by The Volkswagen-Foundation. She is author of the books Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture (Bloomsbury) and Sixties Dress Only: Mode und Konsum in der Retro-Szene der Mods (Campus), and editor of Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices (Bloomsbury). Her research on themes such as fashion and secondhand consumption, identity and youth cultural style, authenticity, nostalgia, uniformity and mass/individualization are published in journals and edited volumes, including Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty, Fashion Theory, Design Studies: A Reader (Bloomsbury), Old Clothes, New Looks (Bloomsbury), Medialität der Mode (Transcript), Inter-Cool 3.0: Jugend, Bild, Medien (Wilhelm Fink), Uniformierungen in Bewegung (Waxmann), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Recent research interests include engagements with the temporal dynamics of fashion; connections between the materiality of fashion, mediation and cultural memory; workwear and uses of heritage in fashion.

Research Interests

fashion studies; fashion theory; material culture; cultural studies; fashion, body, identity; consumption; cultural memory

Portfolio

Fashion Studies: Research Methods, Sites and Practices (2016)

Fashioning Memory: Vintage Style and Youth Culture (2015)

Cross-temporal Explorations: Fashion and Nostalgia (2013)

Sixties Dress Only: Mode und Konsum in der Retro-Szene der Mods

Dressed in History: Retro Styles and the Construction of Authenticity in Youth Culture