Twitter fashion teacher Cora Harrington is going back to school

“I really think it’s time for a rebrand, as they say,” Cora Harrington tells me over Zoom.

If you utilize X, the social media platform formerly generally known as Twitter, and tweet about fashion, you’ve got probably seen it. Maybe it was a thread extolling the advantages of wool dryer balls over dryer sheets. Or it was a tweet expressing opposition to counting on firms like Shein. Whatever it was, there’s an excellent likelihood you encountered content related to a username @Lingerie_Addict as Harrington consistently achieves virality. However, he is increasingly wondering when to change direction.

The handle is from her second profession. After graduating from college and starting her nonprofit profession, she launched a statewide crisis hotline for victims of violent crimes. Harrington then struck out on her own, devoting herself to her small but growing blog, initially called Stockings Addict. She later modified the name of the location to Addicted to underwear and ran it for 14 years, becoming the principal source of knowledge about intimate clothing on the Internet. Thanks to this brand, she has built most of her fans on the Internet. She has also published a book, an underwear guide that celebrates each size and gender inclusivity. Harrington’s status as a black queer woman often implies that her own perspectives include those which can be often forgotten. Two years ago she decided to leave.

“As I was preparing to close, I was worried that I would miss it and that I might regret it,” Harrington now says of the move, which was covered by, amongst others, the media. The site archive stays online and folks proceed to use it as a resource. “It became part of my identity, both personally and professionally, in a way that I didn’t realize until I stopped doing it. For the first six months I felt a bit lost, not really sure what I was doing or what would happen next. I didn’t even know what I wanted to do.”

So she went back to school.

Now Harrington, who initially focused on online education related to intimate apparel, is already a yr into her master’s degree in fashion and textiles on the Fashion Institute of Technology. Earlier this month, she presented her research on the Unraveling Fashion Narratives symposium at Parsons School of Design. While it is going to ceaselessly retain its knowledge of the intimates area of interest, it has effectively exited the market and might now not sustain with what brands are doing. Instead, he is considering a brand new direction, specializing in fashion in a broader sense. Since she’s now not addicted to lingerie, she might have to change her online image.

“Now, being inside [school], “really combines a lot of the things I liked about ‘The Clothesing Addict’: the cultural commentary, the social commentary, the history of things, how they’re made, and the deeper dive into the show,” she says, explaining that she hopes her next step will be on some level of educating the public. “It’s very important to me that people learn about this space and I truly believe that despite the cliche and rude people on the internet, it really helps change their perspective for many people and that excites me.”

Online, the researcher joined a bunch of accounts including Rian Phin, Lakyn Carltonand others that provide recipients with fashion-related knowledge. They expose the secrets of fabrication, cutbacks and costs in a world that may often seem inexplicable. He often speaks on various viral topics in a market overflowing with voices.

“I think it’s increasingly important to distinguish between influencers and fashion experts because I think the gap between those things has become even wider,” he says. “It’s obvious to me that there are a lot of people who don’t know [what they’re talking about] or who clearly copy other people’s notes and I think that’s really sad and unfortunate.” To counteract this, he often adds nuance and depth to the discourse, typically reframing conversations from trendy endpoints to less-discussed sources.

“One of the things I always come back to is the fact that all our clothes are made by people,” he emphasizes. “As Temu gains momentum and absolutely the love that folks have for Shein, I believe it’s increasingly more essential to emphasize that there are real individuals who put these items together. So if you go to considered one of these sites and discover a shirt for a dollar and a few rags, how much does the one that made it make? In a world of overconsumption and the need to give every post a brand new look, this may occasionally prove to be a dangerously touchy and, frankly, unsexy prompt, but ultimately it is mandatory.

Harrington’s tendency to critique the industry by highlighting those on the margins is still present today. She noted that there is a certain disdain in academia for historians who’re self-taught. Collections, donations, and artifacts are kept outside the canon just because the collecting researchers didn’t graduate from college. He cites Lois K. Alexander-Lane, who founded the Black Fashion Museum in 1978, for example. After closing in 2007, the museum’s exhibits were eventually donated to the Smithsonian Museum’s Conservation Institute.

“Then [Lois] “she did that job because she wasn’t an educational, and since academics didn’t think the work she was doing was essential, her work wasn’t treated with the identical respect that it is today,” Harrington notes. He notes similarities to the lack of knowledge about fetish, clothing and subcultures. “This is an ideal example of what I’m talking about.”

He’s going to help this type of gating to not less than start to change. “The space is more homogeneous than I think it should be and we should do better.”