Community matters because it allows us to learn from one another’s expertise, build meaningful professional relationships, and support each other’s work. Perhaps most importantly, it provides opportunities for inspiration. A casual conversation, a shared research challenge, or an unexpected encounter with a collection can spark entirely new ways of thinking.

Subscribe now

Re-Cycles of Dress

I was reminded of this recently while attending and presenting at the Costume Society of America’s 52nd Annual National Symposium, Re-Cycles of Dress, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Set against the backdrop of North Carolina’s rich textile heritage and growing textile recycling industry, the symposium brought together scholars, curators, conservators, designers, archivists, educators, and enthusiasts to explore the complex histories of dress and textiles. Through presentations, workshops, exhibitions, and discussions, participants examined the cultural influences, artistic practices, and communities that have shaped dress history and continue to inform contemporary design.

As a first-time attendee, I arrived excited to share my research. I left with something even more valuable: a renewed appreciation for the importance of scholarly community.

The symposium offered countless opportunities to connect with fellow researchers and practitioners who share a passion for material culture and dress history.

Learning Beyond the Conference

Beyond the conference sessions, I also visited several local institutions, including the Mint Museum, the NASCAR Hall of Fame, and Invisible Histories, an archival organization dedicated to preserving LGBTQ+ histories across the American South.

Each visit expanded my understanding of how cultural heritage institutions interpret, preserve, and share stories through objects. At the NASCAR Hall of Fame, I was particularly struck by displays that intentionally highlighted visible wear, allowing visitors to see evidence of use and lived experience rather than presenting objects as pristine artifacts.

While visiting both locations of the Mint Museum, I encountered exhibitions that emphasized the importance of craft traditions and cultural transmission. At the Randolph location, I learned about the Kuba people and the ways textile knowledge, artistic practices, and spiritual expressions are passed down through generations, often within families rather than through formal education.

In Designing Dynamism, an exhibition highlighting the intricate designs of Kuba prestige textiles, I was equally fascinated by the museum’s curatorial approach. Labels were intentionally minimized, encouraging visitors to engage more directly with the objects, while exhibition credits emphasized the specific contributions of each team member rather than simply listing professional titles.

My final stop was Invisible Histories, where I learned about the organization’s efforts to preserve and make accessible LGBTQ+ histories throughout the Deep South. Experiencing these community-driven archival initiatives reinforced the many ways material culture and archives connect us to the past while shaping how future generations will understand it.

The Angels Project and “Sacred Dirt”

One particularly meaningful experience came through my volunteer work with the Angels Project at Historic Rosedale site. While assisting with the care of historic garments, I had the opportunity to learn basic conservation techniques and engage in conversations with professionals whose expertise I deeply admire.

Among them was the Assistant Conservator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Our conversation led to a fascinating discussion about the concept of sacred dirt—the traces of wear, use, and lived experience that remain on objects and challenge traditional approaches to conservation and preservation.

What began as a simple conversation has stayed with me long after the symposium ended. In fact, the idea of sacred dirt has become a growing research interest, one that may eventually evolve into a future dissertation topic. It is also a theme explored in the epilogue of my book, The Archaeology of Fashion: Memories of Worn History, Secondhand Objects, and Material (Auto)Biographies of First-Generation Americans, which is officially published in two days!

Research questions can sometimes emerge over coffee between sessions, during volunteer projects, or through chance encounters with colleagues who encourage us to see familiar questions in new ways.

Share Real People, Real Clothes

The Value of Being in the Room

For now, I am simply grateful for the opportunity to have been in a room filled with supportive, like-minded individuals who are passionate about preserving and interpreting the histories embedded within clothing and material culture.

Attending the symposium served as a reminder that the work we do matters. Whether we are documenting collections, teaching students, preserving garments, conducting research, or writing books, we are contributing to a larger conversation about memory, identity, culture, and history.

This reminder felt especially meaningful at this moment in my own career. As I continue my work across fashion history, archives, and material culture—and celebrate the publication of my first book—I am reminded that none of these accomplishments happen alone. They are made possible through communities of people who share knowledge, offer encouragement, challenge our ideas, and celebrate our successes.

In a field dedicated to preserving human stories through material things, community remains one of our most valuable resources.

And for that, I am incredibly grateful.

My recent work with the Levi’s Vintage Clothing (LVC) materials has been one of those unfolding processes.

Subscribe now

Initially, I approached the LVC lookbooks as a case study for a potential chapter in a larger volume on fashion printed matter. I began with what was available: digital copies and fragments that allowed me to start building a preliminary framework. From these, I began to outline arguments around printed ephemera as brand storytelling, archival construction, and the visual language of “vintage” as a mediated form of history.

But the more I worked digitally, the more I realized that the object I was trying to understand was not fully accessible at a remove. The lookbooks were not only visual documents; they were tactile, editorial, and material constructions. They demanded proximity.

This shift led me to arrange a research trip to the Levi’s Archives, following a virtual research appointment with the Levi’s archivist and an informal interview with the creative director behind the LVC lookbooks. Both conversations expanded the contours of what I thought I was studying. What I had initially understood as printed branding materials revealed themselves instead as layered editorial worlds—constructed through location scouting, sometimes staged authenticity, and carefully orchestrated narrative sequences.

When I arrived at the Eureka Innovation Lab—their confidential, restricted innovation space—the work changed again.

I moved through the collections slowly, bit by bit, page by page, annotating visual patterns while also listening to the histories embedded in their production. These were not only my readings of the objects; they were also oral testimonies, offered by the creator as I handled the materials. The lookbooks became conversational archives: part object, part narrative, part remembered production process.

It was in this context that the project shifted.

Alongside the LVC lookbooks, I was introduced to two limited-run magazines produced by the brand around 2013, during the relaunch of their Orange Tab line. Though conceived as promotional material, they occupy a far more unstable cultural position. The first issue is often mistaken as a genuine 1970s countercultural publication, complete with a Rolling Stone-era aesthetic. The second issue, more kitsch-driven and released under a different title, complicates this further. Approximately 3,000 copies were printed, yet by the second issue, they were quickly withdrawn from circulation, rendering them difficult to access and even harder to classify.

They are, in many ways, archival objects that resist their own classification.

Later, as I returned home with several lookbooks temporarily loaned to me through the generosity of their owner, I found myself returning repeatedly to these magazines. The matte pages moved through my fingers as I read fictional narratives and encountered fabricated advertisements embedded throughout. The boundary between editorial content and constructed history blurred further the longer I spent with them.

At that point, something became clear: I was no longer working within the limits of a single chapter.

The density of the LVC lookbooks—their layered authorship, their embedded storytelling, their relationship to place, labor, and image-making—exceeded the scope of a 3,200-word essay. What I had initially framed as a contained research project began to resemble something closer to a book-length study, or even a dissertation, where the full complexity of these objects could be properly accounted for.

This is not a conclusion, but a redirection.

For now, I have shifted my focus from the LVC lookbooks to these two limited-run magazines as the central site of inquiry. I am currently awaiting feedback from my editors on whether to proceed in this direction, as this shift carries implications for scope, structure, and publication format.

A key consideration moving forward is also material: whether reproduction rights and copyright permissions for these images can be secured, as this will directly determine the feasibility and shape of the final publication.

In the meantime, I am staying with the process as it continues to unfold. I continue to trace the relationships between printed matter, brand narrative, and material culture as they shift in my hands and in conversation with those who made them. Whether this becomes a chapter, a manuscript, or something else entirely is still undecided.

What I can say is this: the work has already exceeded its original frame.

More to come as editorial direction, permissions, and archival access continue to take shape.

Stay tuned.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on June 14, 2026 as part of The Materialist’s Notebook. It has been republished here following the consolidation of that publication into Real People, Real Clothes. For more information about this article, please see my Substack note from June 17, 2026:

I’ve been thinking lately about all the work that happens before the work.

Not the publication, presentation, article, or lecture.

The notes.

The questions.

The half-filled notebooks and marked-up photocopies. The folders that begin with one research question and end somewhere entirely unexpected. The archive visits that produce more uncertainty than answers. The objects that linger in the back of my mind long after I’ve returned them to a box, a drawer, a shelf, or a garment rack.

Subscribe now

For years, much of my work has centered on understanding how people use objects—particularly clothing—to remember, communicate, inherit, preserve, and reinvent aspects of themselves. Through Real People, Real Clothes, I’ve developed a platform to prospectively share many of those stories: garments as family archives, inherited objects as vessels of memory, and the ways ordinary things acquire extraordinary meaning over time.

But what often remains unseen is the process.

The reality is that my days are rarely devoted to a single project. Instead, I move between archives, classrooms, collections, manuscripts, conference papers, research appointments, freelance projects, and writing deadlines. One day I might be tracing the biography of a garment through family photographs; the next, revising a lecture I’ve taught for years because a new group of students has prompted me to see the material differently.

Research rarely unfolds in a straight line.

It is accumulative. Recursive. Sometimes frustrating. Often surprising.

A chance conversation at a conference becomes a future collaboration. An overlooked footnote becomes a chapter. A student question reshapes a lecture. A garment, photograph, or document reveals a story I wasn’t looking for but suddenly can’t stop thinking about.

I’ve come to realize that some of the most meaningful parts of this work happen in those in-between spaces—the moments before conclusions are reached and before ideas are polished into finished forms.

So I’m considering creating a new space here: a living record of research in progress.

Not polished essays, but field notes.

Not conclusions, but investigations.

A place to share discoveries, challenges, methods, teaching reflections, archival encounters, and the often invisible labor behind historical research and material culture scholarship.

Real People, Real Clothes

Research, Field Notes, and Everything Between Projects

There’s a particular kind of work that happens in-between projects. Not quite visible yet, not fully formed, often scattered across notebooks, scanned documents, archived images, travel planning, conversations, and unfinished paragraphs…

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · Nicole K. Rivas

In many ways, this feels like opening the notebook itself.

If Real People, Real Clothes is where I share stories once they’ve taken shape, The Materialist’s Notebook would be where readers can follow the process of shaping them.

I’d love to know whether that’s something you’d be interested in reading.

Share Real People, Real Clothes

What parts of the work would you like to see more of? Cast your vote below and let me know.

• Archival research and methods

• Behind-the-scenes of freelance archival projects

• How lectures and courses are built and updated

• Conference and publication preparation

• Research challenges and problem-solving

• Material culture analysis in practice

• The realities of balancing scholarship, teaching, and contract work