Letter from the Editors

Rachel Burns

As students, we are surrounded every day by structure: by rules, routines and restrictions. These structures, like the physical structures in which we live, define how we think about the world, how we form our identities and how we express ourselves. Our society is not unlike a garment itself—tightly woven with so many countless threads until it looks like one object, one uniform. But while fashion can represent a face of our rigid social expectations, it gives us an opportunity to subvert them.

Emily Ash

Staff writer Rachel Orbach interrogates the interplay between corporate norms and approaches to dressing oneself for work; STITCH photographers and stylists celebrate the parallels between garments and architectural forms; and senior editor Haley Glazer explores how her style evolution throughout college impacted her self-concept of femininity in dressing.

Style can break down the structures that limit our hearts and minds, and challenge us to reclaim our individuality and creativity from a society whose rules punish nonconformity. Our generation is one that breaks down walls, that dismantles systems of oppression, that refuses to let structures stand in the way of our humanity. We believe that style can be more than clothes: it’s about pulling the threads of the society around us and letting it come undone.

The Structure Issue is our small contribution to critically examining the structures around us— both physical and societal. We hope it will cause you to think more about the rules that govern our fashion, and seek out the moments when your style breaks through the constraints that bind us. Join us in breaking norms, removing boundaries and living an unstructured life.

Rachel Burns & Emily Ash