Jessamyn Hatcher

Jessamyn Hatcher has taught at New York University since 2002 and is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and newyorker.com. Her academic work focuses on fashion labor and fashion use. She has written about the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire; the current revival of the cottage industry in the United States; and the diverse meanings and uses of fast fashion as practiced by consumers. For The New Yorker, she has reported on stories including the accidental discovery in a Florentine villa of a dozen Louis Vuitton trunks that contained a lost chapter of fashion history; a treasure trove of rare 17th century textiles unearthed from the seabed by a Dutch amateur scuba diving club; and the family that has served as the tailors to the Pope for the last 220 years. Jessamyn runs the Textile Revival Workshop, a mobile lab in which she enlists individuals, communities, and organizations as co-researchers, and where together they design and experiment with creative methods to extend, support, and imagine strategies to positively impact the social and environmental costs of fashion production, distribution, consumption, use, and disposal. She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University.