Decorative Arts, Design, and Material Culture: 
Elizabeth Koehn and Emma McClendon Discuss Their PhD Dissertations for Bard Graduate Center

Elizabeth Koehn is a Ph.D. candidate in Design History at Bard Graduate Center, where she works on material relating to architecture, design, and consumer culture across the 20th century and through to the present. Her dissertation, Utopian Shores: Visionary Design and its Limits in the 1960s, interrogates and complicates the relationship between Utopia and design by focusing on a selection of case studies from the 1960s in order to map the spatial and temporal boundaries of utopian thought, and examine how these limits inform our understanding of design and its objects. Prior to joining the BGC, Elizabeth held positions working with artists at the New York-based galleries Gavin Brown’s Enterprise and David Zwirner after earning her BA in History and Art History from Oberlin College in 2009. She is currently teaching a course titled Design and Culture at Purchase College (part of the State University of New York). 

Emma McClendon is a Ph.D. candidate in Design History at Bard Graduate Center and Associate Curator of Costume at The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), where she has curated several exhibitions including Denim: Fashion’s Frontier (2015), The Body: Fashion and Physique (2017), and Power Mode: The Force of Fashion (2019). Her research focuses on the social and political implications of fashion with a particular interest in body politics and the history of standardized sizing. Emma received a BA in Art History from the University of St. Andrews and an MA in the History of Dress from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She recently co-edited a special issue of the academic journal Fashion Theory with Dr. Joanne Entwistle around the theme of her 2017 exhibition The Body: Fashion and Physique. Other recent publications include, Yves Saint Laurent + Halston: Fashioning the 70s (2015, Yale University Press), Denim: Fashion’s Frontier (2016, Yale University Press), and Power Mode: The Force of Fashion (2019, Skira). Dissertation topic:
The History of Standardized Sizing Technology in the New York Fashion Industry.