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A public conversation with photographer Simbarashe Cha about street fashion photography as counter-archive
Slought, the Department of English and the Department of Francophone, Italian, & Germanic at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce a public conversation with photographer Simbarashe Cha on Thursday, March 30, 2023, from 12:00-1:30pm. This event is free and open to the public and will feature Cha in dialogue with Corine Labridy and Jean-Michel Rabaté.
Cha will discuss eurocentric vs ethnocentric directions in fashion, and the various epistemologies of the new (as luxury) emerging out of the United States, Europe and Africa. In addition, he will speak to his love for what goes on both on the runway and right outside, in the streets, and the intricacies of writing about fashion for The New York Times and a readership that encompasses both the casual Sartorialist and the fashion specialist.
Simbarashe Cha is an Emmy award winning filmmaker and photographer. He often combines commercial and documentary visual vocabularies to present impactful stories, always with an empathy for the human condition. He has photographed countless fashion collections, artists and musicians all over the world, and has worked with celebrated brands including Ralph Lauren, Gucci, GQ and Tommy Hilfiger. He currently both photographs and pens the "Fashion Week Diary" column for The New York Times.
Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, co-editor of the Journal of Modern Literature and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The author or editor of fifty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, philosophy and literary theory, he is also a founding curator at Slought.
Corine Labridy is a native Guadeloupean and an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in contemporary Caribbean and urban literatures and is particularly interested in works that deploy laughter strategies and dystopian tropes to signify the effects of mainstream culture on minoritized cultural production. She is a co-founder of kwazmanvwa.com, a digital humanities project dedicated to Caribbean literatures, as well as the assistant editor of Imaginaries.