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Avery Trufelman

Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear.

Produced and Hosted by Avery Trufelman

Articles of Interest

Clothes are records of the bodies we’ve lived in. Think of the old sweater that you used to have that’s just not your style anymore, or the jeans that just aren’t your size anymore. We are like snakes who shed our skins and grow new ones as we age. And it all starts in the kids’ department.

Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear, created by Avery Trufelman; a six-part series within 99% Invisible, looking at clothing. 

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1. Kids' Clothes

Lumberjacks wore plaid. Punks wore plaid mini skirts. The Beach Boys used to be called the Pendletones, and they wore plaid with their surfboards. Lots of different groups have adopted the pattern over the course of the 20th century, but if we want to explore how this pattern proliferated, we’ve got to go to Scotland.

Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear, created by Avery Trufelman; a six-part series from 99% Invisible, looking at clothing.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

2. Plaid

Womenswear is littered with fake pockets that don’t open, or shallow pockets that can hardly hold more than a paperclip. If women’s clothes have pockets at all, they are often smaller and just fit less than men’s pockets do. And when we talk about pockets, we are talking about who has access to the tools they need. Who can walk through the world comfortably and securely?

Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear, created by Avery Trufelman; a six-part series within* 99% Invisible*, looking at clothing.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

3. Pockets

There are a few ways to tell if you’re looking at an authentic, high-quality aloha shirt. If the pockets match the pattern, that’s a good sign, but it’s not everything. Much of understanding an aloha shirt is about paying attention to what is on the shirt itself. It’s about looking at the pattern to see the story it tells.

Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear, created by Avery Trufelman; a six-part series from 99% Invisible, looking at clothing.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

4. Hawaiian Shirts

For the most part, we tend to keep our clothes relatively clean and avoid spills and rips and tears. But denim is so hard-wearing and hard-working that it just kind of amasses more and more signs of wear. So you can learn a lot from observing an old pair of blue jeans.

Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear, created by Avery Trufelman; a six-part series within* 99% Invisible*, looking at clothing.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

5. Blue Jeans

There is this myth that it’s frivolous or unproductive to care about how you look. Clothing and fashion get trivialized a lot. But think about who get associated with clothing and fashion: young people, women, queers and people of color — groups of people who historically haven’t had a voice have expressed themselves on their bodies, through their style, their hair, their tattoos, their piercings and what they wear.

Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear, created by Avery Trufelman; a six-part series within* 99% Invisible*, looking at clothing.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

6. Punk Style

"Articles of Interest" theme song by Sasami Ashworth

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Theme Music by Sasami

In the wake of World War II, the government of France commissioned its most prominent designers to create a collection of miniature fashion dolls. It might seem like an odd thing to fund, but the fantasy of high fashion inspired hope in postwar Paris. These dolls also forever changed the curator who discovered them almost 40 years later, in a strange museum perched on a cliff in rural Washington state.

Articles of Interest is a limited-run podcast series about fashion, housed inside the design and architecture podcast 99% Invisible. Launched in 2018 by Avery Trufelman, the show encourages people to rethink the way we look at what we wear and what it says about us.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

7. A Fantasy of Fashion

Brands hold immense sway over both consumers and the American legal system. Few know this as well as Dapper Dan, who went from street hustler to fashion impresario and has spent time on both sides of American trademark law.

Articles of Interest is a limited-run podcast series about fashion, housed inside the design and architecture podcast 99% Invisible. Launched in 2018 by Avery Trufelman, the show encourages people to rethink the way we look at what we wear and what it says about us.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

8. Knockoffs

The world of high end perfume is surprisingly lucrative, considering that scent is often the most ignored of our senses. But one can't judge a scent solely by the brand and shape of the bottle. With the right amount of attention, perfume can be a key to a whole olfactory world.

Articles of Interest is a limited-run podcast series about fashion, housed inside the design and architecture podcast 99% Invisible. Launched in 2018 by Avery Trufelman, the show encourages people to rethink the way we look at what we wear and what it says about us.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

9. Perfume

The tricky thing about fashion is that, in order to preserve its history, you need to preserve physical garments. And, alas, closet space is finite, cloth gets sun-bleached and eaten by moths, and Americans notoriously do not care about their fashion heritage. So this is why one woman decided to put a call out across the country and make a scrappy archive all by herself. 

This story was reported by Enya Hennings. Pictures, details and more at articlesofinterest.substack.com

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