5 Minutes with Threadbared bloggers Minh-Ha and Mimi
MINH-HA T.PHAM and MIMI THI NGUYEN are two academics who write, teach and speak about the politics of fashion and beauty. Their love of writing urged them to begin their blog threadbared. Here they talk to our writer NATALIE MILLER about how they began their blog, how they became such a good team and the goal of co-authoring a book on fashion and politics.
Where did the idea of Thread bared come about?
Minh-Ha: Mimi and I are both academics who write and teach on the politics of fashion, beauty, style, and consumerism, so Threadbared began in 2007 as a research blog. It was like our virtual notebook, a place we could work out ideas; catalog events, images, and performances that we were intrigued by — all with the goal of co-authoring a book on fashion and politics.
Where do you get the ideas for your blog? What are your inspirations?
Mimi: For us, fashion is a fascinating object of study because it is about art and creativity but also commercialism and property claims; because it is so often regarded as trivial and “fun” (by both detractors and champions of fashion), but also commands a tremendous amount of authority and power, economically, socially, and politically. So we get our ideas from the everyday encounter with these transactions of style, body, and the self with history and power.
Who is your partner within the blog? Have you always worked together? How did you come together?
Mimi: Minh-Ha and I met as I was finishing my dissertation at Berkeley; she was in a cohort a few years behind mine. We became really close friends over long distances, and at some point we were discussing my second book project on non-profits and NGOs that hope to “empower” women through dress or beauty reform. Minh-Ha had some wonderful insights, I encouraged her to pursue them, and we presented separate papers on a panel on fashion (with our friend and colleague Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, whose book Beautiful Generation examines the rise of Asian chic and Asian American designers) at an academic conference. The panel went so well that Minh-Ha and I started to talk about further collaborations, and the blog became the jumping point a few months later. It made sense for us, since we are still located at considerable distance from one another, and it would allow us to pursue some of our concerns in a format that lent itself to works-in-progress, or one-off topics.
Minh-Ha, I understand you do a lot of travelling, where abouts are you based?
Minh-Ha: Right now, I’m in San Francisco trying to finish another book project on the everyday sound worlds of Vietnamese Americans in California. But last July I was staying with Mimi just outside of Chicago working on companion journal articles about fashion and beauty after the September 11th attacks — both those articles will be published in a feminist journal called Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and available sometime in Spring 2010. In a few days, I’m going back to New York City (where I was teaching for the past 3 years at New York University) to visit a few art exhibits on fashion and dress as well as to meet with another collaborator - a photographer named Spencer Lum - who I’ve been working with for about 6 months on a photography project examining the emotional labors that drive the wedding industrial complex.
How do you find all the travelling?
Minh-Ha: The traveling is mostly all blog-related - or I make it blog-related. I love New York and so I’m going there because I miss it but while I’m there, there’s a lot of work I can do too. And it’s all a pleasure for me! Even shopping with friends is blog-related, if we go to the right places - which we usually do!
How often do you update your blog?
Minh-Ha: Unfortunately, because this isn’t our full-time job and because we have other writing and teaching commitments, we can’t update as much as we would like. I’m not teaching this year but Mimi has students, faculty meetings, teaching, grading and writing to juggle. Although, since she’s also teaching a course on the politics of fashion, I think she’s managed to parlay the teaching into the blog which has been amazing. Anyway, there’s no real rhyme or reason to our posting habits. Sometimes something comes up and we both drop whatever we’re doing to comment on it because it’s THAT urgent. Other times, one of us is more active than the other. But our goal is to post at least a couple of times per week.
There are an enormous number of blogs at the moment; do you feel it’s hard to keep up with the constant ‘competition’ of updating your blog continuously?
Mimi: We don’t feel that much competition since we don’t offer the same sort of commentary as most fashion or style blogs. We’re not trend-focused, we don’t post daily outfits, et cetera, so we aren’t operating on the same sort of time frame that most other blogs are. For the most part, we do political and social commentary with the hope of making sense of how and why clothing matters. It’s an everyday concern, of course, that bears upon how we as individuals understand ourselves, but it’s also a matter of control and anxiety for society, even the government, which can have real effects on how we as individuals get to live in the world. These are usually matters of deep and complicated histories, so it’s not nearly as pressing to update! And so, while we are part of a small, but growing, cohort of intellectually-minded fashion blogs (e.g., Fashion Projects, LipstickEater), we’re just happy to have some company, frankly.
Where do you see yourself and your blog going?
Mimi: Threadbared is an extension of our intellectual pursuits. We are both writing separately and together on fashion and beauty in our “other” world, but because fashion and beauty are so everyday and yet so little remarked upon as serious business, serious politics, in an everyday forum, we want to be able to talk about this to a broader audience, more effectively. I think we’d love to be able to write for more publications, on-line or off, on the topics we cover.
