Search
Jennifer Ayres
Jennifer Ayres is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at NYU who focuses on creative work, fashion, the secondhand clothing trade, and cultural economy. With a BA from UC-Davis in Women & Gender Studies in 2008, an Masters from Cornell in Apparel Design in 2011, and as a vintage shop owner, Jen approaches the material culture of style through the lens of a scholarpractitioner. Jen’s dissertation project, Enterprising Fashion: The Political Economy of Secondhand Clothes, Secondary Markets, and Vintage, uses economic geography and multi-sited ethnography to examine how value is created across a loose network of corporate non-profits and small businesses for a category of objects traditionally classified as ‘Post-Consumer Waste’. Jen’s project illuminates how the secondhand trade is a vital part of the aesthetic economy that the creative city increasingly relies upon as an untapped market, infinite resource, and lucrative export. What it shows is how the intersections of race, gender, class, immigration, and sexuality complicate simplistic notions about how fashion and the economy works.