By: Aubrey Rogers

Anne Higonnet’s office is nestled in the corner of the Barnard College Art History and Architecture department, reflecting a beautiful view of Morningside Heights. Her office is quaint, filled with colorfully covered books, and two floor-to-ceiling glass walls that make up half of her office space. A copy of  “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” sits on the glass table beside her. A few weeks ago, she sent her students to visit the Superfine exhibit at the Met. Anne Higonnet is a Barbara Novak Professor of Art History at Barnard College. She received her B.A. from Harvard in 1980 and her Ph.D. from Yale in 1988. Before becoming a professor at Barnard in 2003, she was an assistant professor at Wellesley. Her work has been supported by Getty, Guggenheim, and others. She has published five books and a large number of essays. Her most recent project, a website, highlights some of the rarest and most radical fashion plates. She also teaches one of Barnard’s most popular courses, a course titled Clothing. In the class, students learn about the historical adornment of human bodies, alongside interdisciplinary subjects.  When asked to describe Clothing to outsiders, she calls it “an almost anti-fashion course.”

For Higonnet, the art of clothing is found in the act of getting dressed each day. This is precisely the idea that fueled her initiative to build the course. She came up with the idea of the class while taking a leave of absence from teaching at Barnard. “It started as an experiment,” says Higonnet. It was “a totally new kind of course about something that definitely makes us human.”  Having long studied the history of dress, she began asking how to bridge that scholarship with the humanities. The answer, she realized, was disarmingly simple:“Well, we all get dressed.” 

The class launched in 2020 and has only continued to grow. Next year, the class will be available online to high school students across the country. Higonnet managed to incorporate material from over ten humanities disciplines, including art history, anthropology, psychology, economics, sociology, design, sustainability, and more.  Her course remains highly interdisciplinary and accessible to any student. 

Finding material to cover in the class is not difficult for Higonnet. With hundreds of years of clothing history to cover, the struggle for her is to decide what to cut. “There’s something about preparing class that just gives me so much joy. I’ll do it when I’m under pressure, I’ll do it when I’m exhausted. I’ll be fiddling with a lecture, and suddenly an hour and a half has gone by. It’s one of my favorite things to do.” Higonnet’s dedication to the course shines through in her teaching. She effortlessly weaves together materials ranging from royal Aztec headdresses of the fourteenth century to modern zoomorphic baby hats. Her presence is electric, humorous, and engaging. She melds the history of human civilization with that of dress. 

Anne Higonnet does not want the public to be confused with  the teachings of her course. “People who don’t know me well think that I’m teaching a course on fashion, and I have to keep saying, ‘Well, actually, it’s an anti-fashion course. It’s a course about clothing.’” Higonnet wants to make the distinction between the two words clear. “Fashion is just one kind of clothing. I have mixed feelings about fashion, but I absolutely adore clothing.”

Walking around college campuses and seeing what students are wearing inspires her, as well as being in New York, the epicenter of clothing adornment. “I don’t want people to feel obliged to be dreary either. Getting dressed can be so much fun. It’s one of the most creative things we do every day.” Anne Higonnet’s class does not reject beauty, but rather, it redefines it. Her class teaches students to weave together interdisciplinary facets to look at clothing from a completely different perspective, and to think of getting dressed each morning as a form of art. Thank you Professor Higonnet for what you bring to our university.