Caroline Marie Bellios

Caroline Bellios is a professor of fashion design and history. Her current research ranges from 19th century hair jewelry, embodiment, and the transformative nature of touch, to the potential of fashion in the museum space, the memory space, and as a platform for inclusivity. With colleagues in the city, Caroline is a founder of the Chicago Fashion Lyceum, a collaborative body for fashion discourse. Lyceum provides a platform for research sharing and collegial camaraderie and continues expanding this work of community within our local spaces, nationally, and internationally. Caroline’s recent writing has explored the work of exhibition maker Judith Clark in Bloomsbury’s publication Fashion, Dress and Post-PostModernity, and how we dress and present our bodies in Fairchild Books’ The Meanings of Dress. She would also like to hear stories about your grandmother.

WE ARE ALL SPEAKING FASHION RIGHT NOW

Fashion is immediate and present; it is now. Every culture engages in some form of adornment of the body. Deep in our mitochondria is a human need to dress ourselves, to paint ourselves, to festoon our bodies with shiny things, to expand and contract the volume of space we inhabit. We are not able to choose our body’s shapes or colors, but we do choose our clothing—the second skin that we drape over the skin we were born in. It is a choice.  

We can dress ourselves to highlight our individuality or to identify ourselves with a group and form a bond with others. We can wear garments that tell the truth about who we are or we can choose to dress in a way that hides our identities. We can dress ourselves to appear as the person we want to become. However we dress, others will judge us based on both our inherited appearance and our chosen one. They will evaluate who we are based on what we're wearing, and we will do the same to them. Fashion touches everything else in the world because fashion touches us all of the time.

In spite of the fundamental role fashion plays in human communication and how important I believe it to be, I am not actually teaching fashion. I am teaching identity creation, critical thinking, empathy toward humanity and toward difference. I am teaching students to pay close attention to people, and teaching them to pay close attention to themselves, asking them to consider their values and how those values are reflected in their work and to pay attention to the impact of their choices. I focus on helping them learn how to say something personal through specificity and demonstrate how that specificity can bring universal connection. I listen to them intently to help them tell the stories that are important to them. I remind them that what makes their work engaging, even when it addresses ideas others have previously presented, is that it is filtered through their individual point of view and their unique life experience.