Deirdre Clemente, Ph.D., 2010
May 14, 2018
Deirdre Clemente is a scholar of the American clothing industry and studies dress as social and cultural change. She is the author of Dress Casual: How College Kids Redefined American Style (UNC Press, 2014), which looks at collegians as the driving force behind the “casualization” of the American wardrobe. Her current project, East Coast/West Coast: A History of the American Fashion Industry plots the development of New York and Los Angeles as global fashion capitals. Sources include: designer’s production notes; radio scripts for textile promotion in the 1940s; women’s diaries; and the Chamber of Commerce papers for the city of Beverly Hills. Clemente’s work aims tohelp us better understand how clothing shapes the human experience.
Deirdre Clemente is the director of public history and an associate professor of history at UNLV. She has published in journals including the Journal of Social History, The New England Quarterly; and Journal of American Ethnic History (which featured her article on Italian-American material culture that was born in a research seminar at Carnegie Mellon). Dr. Clemente’s work has been profiled in The New York Times, USAToday,The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Bazaar.
Dr. Clemente has a degree in Writing Seminars from The Johns Hopkins University and an MA in Museum Studies: Costumes and Textiles from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT).
For more information, see Deirdre Clemente.com or UNLV Public History.