My dress practice interview was with my close friend Richard Pankratov, who is a fashion design student at Parsons as well. My interview with him was very informative and I learned a lot about his dress practices and style. Many themes around the topic of organization and practicality, and where we draw inspiration from in designers we like, emerged as we were conversing. We talked a lot about organization, as I believe the way someone organizes their existence and wardrobe says a lot about them as a person. I never noticed exactly how monochromatic Richard’s wardrobe is. Almost everything is black, white, or red, with the exception of a few navy blue pieces. There are almost absolutely no other colors.

Me and Richard have extremely different styles of dress; I am not at all a minimalist and I enjoy experimenting with colors, etc., while Richard is extremely particular in his clothing and only wears designers he genuinely respects and admires, and doesn’t experiment much with colors. Our subject positions as a female and a male who both mostly conform to traditional gender norms attribute to this distinction. Our upbringings in modern and more populated areas of the world (he is from Stamford, Connecticut, I am from Brooklyn NY) contribute to our admiration of high fashion and our openness to breaking some gender norms in our clothing. Richard comes from a relatively affluent family, so he is able to afford the designers he likes, like Rick Owens and Boris Bidjan Saberi. My interview with Richard made me think a lot about the relationship between ones clothing and the presentation of the aspects of their personality that they want the world to see. This ties into the concept of the “social body,” as stated in Joanne Entwistle’s “The Dressed Body.” Entwistle states “Douglas (1973, 1984) has provided a most compelling account of what she calls the ‘two bodies,’ which constitute the totality of our experience of embodiment – the physical body (the biological, individual body)  and the social body (the body demanded by our culture). The latter gives meaning to the former, shaping our understandings of our embodiment…In other words, our experience of embodiment is thus always mediated by the culture we live in” (Entwistle, 138). Going off of this quote, I believe that there is more than just the social body in regards to our greater culture, but also in regards to the small groups someone lives in. Richard, who belongs to a culture of art students as well as appreciators of abstract fashion, engineers his social body around this concept, by wearing colors and styles popular with these groups.

Overall, my interview was an extremely informative experience and I had a wonderful time learning about Richard and his personal style and dress practices

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