On My Mind

Tag: history

  • My Story

    The Great Depression, with its pitiless lessons of economic ruin, cast a shadow over my family, as it did for so many others who managed to scrape their way through the 1930s. It was always there, hovering over the shoulders of my mother and father as they set out to make a life for themselves.…

  • The Museum at FIT 50th Anniversary

    The 50th anniversary party for the Museum at FIT offered a welcome opportunity, in the middle of a dreary February, for celebration. To acknowledge this milestone moment in the museum’s history, its director and chief curator, Valerie Steele, and curator of costume and accessories, Colleen Hill, selected from 33 of the museum’s most influential—and often…

  • Happy Lunar New Year!

    The other day, Professor Kam Mak’s latest U.S. Postal Service Lunar New Year stamp arrived on my desk. This is the 10th stamp he has designed for the USPS in its Lunar New Year series—and it is, as usual, brilliant. Kam was selected by the USPS in 2008 to design a 12-year series of stamps…

  • Claudia Rankine Visits FIT

    Poet, playwright, and social commentator Claudia Rankine shared a little inside information with the audience of students and faculty when she appeared in a packed Katie Murphy Amphitheater at FIT to give a talk entitled “The Creative Imagination and Race.” As a high-school student, Ms. Rankine told the rapt audience, she had travelled from her…

  • Remembering Oscar de la Renta

    What can one possibly add to the abundance of tributes to Oscar de la Renta following his death last month? He was, as WWD declared on its front page, “an American master” and there was not a person who knew him—personally or professionally—who did not laud the elegance, sophistication and romantic beauty of his designs,…