Profile
Christina H. Moon is an anthropologist and fashion studies scholar in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School. Her research looks at the social ties and cultural encounters between design worlds and manufacturing landscapes across Asia and the Americas, exploring the memory, migration, and labor of cultural workers. She writes on fashion, design and labor, material culture, social memory, the ephemeral and everyday, and ways of knowing and representing in ethnographic practice. She is a Social Science Research Council Transregional Research Junior Scholar Fellow, fellow of the Graduate Institute of Design Ethnography and Social Thought, and member of the India China Institute at The New School, and Fashion Praxis working group at Parsons.
Degrees Held
Ph.D. Anthropology, Yale University
B.A. Anthropology, Rutgers University
Professional Affiliation
Asian American Studies Association, Association for Asian Studies, American Anthropological Association, Society for Cultural Anthropology, American Studies Association, American Association of University Professors
Recent Publications
2023 Every Day is a Dress. Vestoj: The Journal of Sartorial Matters. On Everydaty Life. Issue 11.
2023 Foreword: I search for mothers in writing and clothing. Fashion and Motherhood: Image, Materiality, Identity. Edited by Laura Snelgrove. (Bloomsbury).
2023 Closet Feelings. Fashion and Feeling: The Affective Politics of Dress, Palgrave Studies in Fashion and the Body. Edited by Roberto Filippello and Ilya Parkins. (Palgrave Macmillan).
2022 Histoire d'armoires. Critique : revue générale des publications françaises et étrangères. Les Éditions de Minuit. Juin-Juillet, TOME LXXVIII - No. 901-902, pg 461-471.
2021 Four Decades of Doubt. Vestoj: The Journal of Sartorial Matters. Issue 10.
2020 Labor and Creativity in New York’s Global Fashion Industry (Routledge).
2020 The Maintenance and Preservation of Life. Vestoj: The Journal of Sartorial Matters. Issue 9.
2019 Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia, co-editers Heijin Lee, Christina Moon, and Thuy Linh Tu (New York University Press).
2019 Ethnographic Entanglements: memory and narrative in the New York fashion industry. In The Anthropology of Dress and Fashion. Edited by Brent Luvaas, Joanne B. Eicher. (Bloomsbury).
2019 Made in China: Material-Meanderings of Fast-Fashion Cities. In Fashion and Materiality. Edited by H. Jenß and Viola Hofman. (Berg).
2018 Fashion City: diasporic connections and garment industrial histories between the US and Asia. Edited by Jamie Doucette and Bae Gyun Park. Special Issue on Urban Developmentalism in East Asia: Geopolitical Economies, Spaces of Exception, and Networks of Expertise. Critical Sociology. Volume: 44 issue: 3, page(s): 519-532.
2018 To Dwell in Seams: Fashion as Buried Forms of Diasporic Memory. Special Issue: Fashion. Anthropology News. Volume 58, Issue 5. (September/October).
Performances and Appearances
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/christina-moon-on-cultivating-community-and/id1532769096?i=1000523138576
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/854108759
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/30/765834556/forever-21-files-for-bankruptcy-may-close-up-to-178-u-s-stores
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/downtown-la-the-center-of-the-vaping-black-market/forever-21-goes-bankrupt-what-does-that-mean-for-malls-and-fast-fashion
https://www.wnyc.org/story/inside-the-world-of-fast-fashion/
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/missing-plane-charter-schools-and-fast-fashion/the-secret-world-of-l-a-s-fast-fashion
Research Interests
Design, labor and work; fashion culture industries; migration race ethnicity; material culture and cultural studies; fashion and the body; cities and urban ethnography; social and cultural theory, US and Asia, reading and writing.
Awards And Honors
SSRC, GIDEST, India China Institute, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Kauffman Foundation, Fulbright Program, Korea Foundation
Portfolio
The Maintenance and Preservation of Life
Labor and Creativity in New York's Global Fashion Industry
Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia
Made in China: Material Meanderings of Fast-Fashion Cities
The Secret World of Fast Fashion