Assembly Speaker Vanessa Friedman

By: Anvi Bhate, Ashley Jiang, Clark Wu

36 years ago, Vanessa Friedman ’85 donned slouchy corduroy pants and printed t-shirts when she traversed the Academy campus. “I don’t think the term ‘fashion sense’ is one that could be used,” she joked. “If anyone told me I would one day step into fashion, I would’ve told them in very rude terms that they were wrong.”

Friedman spoke at a student-moderated assembly with lower Claire McConnell and senior Violet Goldstone last Tuesday. Assembly Committee Chair and English Instructor Alex Myers shared that the Committee invited Friedman as part of the 50th co-ed anniversary programming and for her experience with visual arts and politics. “I hear students talking about brands and clothing every now and then, but I think a lot of people would deem fashion as trivial and irrelevant. Yet it’s an interesting subject that lends to meaningful analysis. It’s important for us to realize that one can talk about and process politics in a variety of ways.”

Friedman recalled that “fashion was superficial” when she was attending Exeter. “We generally think that anyone who wanted to think of themselves as smart wouldn’t spend much time caring about clothes,” she said. “Back in the day, fashion wasn’t a subject to be studied.”

After leaving Exeter and graduating from Princeton University, Friedman freelanced for Vogue, The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly, before stumbling upon the field of fashion in London as a newlywed. Friedman received a call from someone at the Financial Times (FT) who assumed that she “wrote about boots.”

“At that point, you know, if she had said ‘write about tire treads and we’ll pay you,’ I would have done it,” Friedman said.

Friedman did not feel entirely convinced by the gravity of fashion until reading about the public debates surrounding Al Gore’s feminist campaign consultant Naomi Wolf, and the campaign’s appeal to more female voters. “That was the first time I really started thinking about it as a political tool, even though obviously this goes way back to Cleopatra. None of this is new.”

“I finally figured out that fashion would let me write about politics, identity, culture and philosophy – issues that no one had figured out fashion was the best lens to use,” Friedman said. Recognizing the ties fashion had to many matters that interested her, Friedman opted to stay in the industry as the first fashion editor of FT.

Years later in 2014, Friedman was appointed as New York Times Fashion Director and Chief Fashion Editor. Taking on the weight of bringing fashion into the limelight, she hoped that more will value fashion criticism and take it seriously.

“I mean, honestly, you've got Obama rolling up his shirt sleeves to try and convince you that he is just like you. You’ve got Trump wearing a trucker hat to convince you that he is not sitting by himself in his gilded palace on Fifth Avenue.” Friedman explained. “And if you don't understand that he is infiltrating your subconscious mind, then you are the one that's missing something.”

Lily Hagge, Sophie Raskova and Veruka Salmone are lowers and co-founders of Exeter’s fashion club “PEA at the MET.” They also noticed the bridge between fashion, politics and self-expression. “Anything is political. Kamala Harris wears clothes almost all made by Black designers; that was important to show a message. Joe Biden is really for America, so he wore Ralph Lauren, the most American designer,” Salmone said.

To Friedman, the events of 2020 spurred the fashion industry to finally “grapple with its own history of racism, cultural appropriation, and what it all means.”

“Action is incredibly slow. We can see changes in imagery, like the covers of a magazine or the models you book for your runway. But those aren’t huge financial commitments or require a lot of work to change,” Friedman said. “The executives, the designers, the fashion education, however, stay the same. There’s an enormously long way to go.”

“Every industry is in a period of flux. Fashion as an industry is one [which is] geared towards acknowledging and giving shape to identity” Friedman continued. “You like a piece of clothing because you recognize some of who you are or who you want to be in that garment. Fashion is always attuned to how society and the world are shifting. The pandemic made us question a lot of the things we practice.”

Friedman also believes that the age of sweatpants will fade with the pandemic. “We’ve been through a really hard, complicated, and tragic period,” she said. “I don’t think people want to come out of this and wear clothes reminding them of this time. You’ll want to wear clothes that celebrate life in a new era. There’s no reason you can’t be comfortable in clothes that are right and happy and creative and sparkly.”

Friedman hopes that “last year has taught us to express ourselves in different ways.” She especially acknowledged Jonathan Anderson, a fashion designer who photographed models for his pandemic shows, then shrunk their images to produce physical paper dolls, “artifacts of the lost year.”

“If I was a cultural anthropologist, this would be something I would look at in 50 years to think about how people dealt with the pandemic,” Friedman added. “It’s a fashion statement and a cultural statement. I don’t save most fashion things. I recycle them because I find it irritating and wasteful. But these have some kind of archaeological meaning, and I probably want to see them again.”

Hagge agreed. “Having to wear masks is a great example of inhibiting the mark you make on people, since you're not able to express yourself through your face,” she said. “You have to find other sources like clothing to make connections to people.”

Friedman finds her role in the New York Times crucial in the increasingly noisy fashion world. “Everyone should have access to style; that’s a good democratic impulse,” she said. “But it somehow then evolved into everyone should have access to new stuff at all times, which is a bad impulse and encourages bad, unsustainable behavior. We now produce way too much stuff, none of which we value enough at all.”

In the end, Friedman hopes that more of the younger generation will see fashion as a sophisticated subject. “I think what’s changed is that I have understood fashion as a lens through which you can talk about everything you know. It’s one of the three universal subjects. Everyone has to think about what they put in their bodies, which is food, where they put their bodies, which is shelter, and what they put on their body, which are clothes,” Friedman said. “Even nudists think about clothes, they just reject them. So it’s an incredible and universal tool.”

“We all should acknowledge to ourselves what we're trying to say with our clothes when we choose them,” Friedman said. “And if anyone ever says to you that they don't think about what they wear, they're lying.”