About

Denise Green is the Lau Family Professor in Fiber Science and Apparel Design at Cornell University and serves as the Director of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection. Her research employs ethnography, video production, archival methods, and curatorial practice to explore the production of fashion, textiles, identities, and visual design. She is actively involved in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Archaeology and Material Studies, and American Studies, as well as being a graduate field member in the Department of Anthropology. Green's work includes documentary filmmaking, with a focus on textiles, identity, and Aboriginal title, notably through projects with Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations communities. Her recent film, Mapping Regalia in Hupacasath Territory, exemplifies her ethnographic film practice. Her academic background includes a PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of British Columbia, an MS in Textiles from UC Davis, and an undergraduate degree in Apparel Design from Cornell University. Green's curatorial work uses fashion to engage with social, cultural, and political issues, and she has curated several exhibitions, including award-winning shows like The Biggest Little Fashion City and Union-Made. She is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, running a media production lab, and her films have been recognized at various festivals. Her creative practice extends into textile and garment design, especially around natural dyes, and she has collaborated with fashion companies to develop naturally-dyed collections. Green's research interests include fashion anthropology, history of dress and textiles, ethnographic practice, Native American textiles and regalia, museum studies, and the history of textile manufacturing in the U.S. Her work consistently integrates exhibition design, documentary film, and public scholarship to make her research accessible and impactful.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Visual arts
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Threads of Transition: The Archaeology of Dress, Girlhood, and Menstruation

  2025-12-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Harlem Noire: Fashion Movement, Moment & Memory

  2025-12-14

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Style Narrative Geographies: Black Women Making Harlem Through Fashion and Memory Work

  Fashion Theory · 2025-08-04

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Materials Sourcing for Commercial Upcycled Fashion Production: An Exploration of Approaches

  2025-01-20

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Commercial upcycling has experienced significant growth as an essential component in expanding the sustainable circular economy. Despite the increase of fashion brands integrating upcycling into their production strategies, reliable access to the pre-and post-consumer materials used to create these lines remains an obstacle for some businesses, which can impede their ability to scale. This research examines where and how upcycled fashion businesses source their materials. The findings of this study reveal that the landscape for sourcing upcycled materials is highly varied and often occurs in spaces not typically associated with traditional fashion manufacturing. This complex web of social, material, financial, and creative assets overlap and intersect with one another with varying intensity. These relationships shape what is possible for upcyclers in terms of design, product development, the quantities they can produce, customer satisfaction, and the markup on goods that will ensure a sustainable future for their businesses.

  PublisherDOI

• Sustainable Studio Visit: 3 Women

  Fashion Studies · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Material memories and Black womanhood: Asserting presence in conventional university archives through collective-declaration

  Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty · 2025-12-01

  articleSenior author

  Black women in Harlem, New York City, challenge and disrupt conventional archival practices by collecting, wearing and documenting dress through their own voices, bodies and materials. This research uses a case study of Harlem-based multimedia artist Dianne Smith and her archival repository at Barnard College to introduce a new theoretical concept: collective-declaration. This concept captures how Black women assert individual agency while simultaneously forming a collective resistance to oppressive structures, claiming their rightful place in the past, present and future as place-makers through fashion archiving. We focus on Smith’s archive as a central example, particularly in its connection to the life and legacy of Zora Neale Hurston – Harlem Renaissance writer, thinker and anthropologist – whose influence shaped the archive’s development. By defining and curating her own archive, Smith both affirms her historical legacy and contests the erasure and exclusion of Black womanhood from conventional university archives. Through the practice of collective-declaration, Smith reimagines and transforms the traditional archive into a new place, rooted in spatial presence and the dressed Black body, offering a powerful intervention into dominant archival frameworks.

  PublisherDOI

• A History of 4-H Clothing Clubs in New York State: A Preamble to Sustainable Fashion Education? 

  2025-12-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Fashioning the Bounds of Free Speech

  2025-01-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Fashioning the Bounds of Free Speech was a curated, multi-sited fashion and art exhibition that explored how symbolic speech and expressive conduct have shaped the limits and possibilities of freedom of expression in the United States (US). The exhibit was displayed in the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection (CF+TC) and Johnson Museum of Art from Sept. 2023 to Jan. 2024. The exhibit contributes new knowledge to the field by exploring free speech through fashion, and how it may be suppressed, and in other instances, celebrated and protected. We used the taglines “Fashion Speaks!” and “Express Yourself!” in exhibit promotional materials to continually remind audiences that the fashioned body is communicative, dynamic, and meaningful. At the same time, we wanted visitors to understand that the freedom to dress to express has been hard fought and remains at the crux of socio-cultural battlegrounds that shape people’s lives personally, professionally, and politically.

  PublisherDOI

• Sounding Fashion

  2025-12-16

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Face masks in context: Ambiguities, anxieties, and asymmetries in COVID times

  Elsevier eBooks · 2024-11-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Kelsie Doty

  Kansas State University

  12 shared

• Susan Kaiser

  University of California, Davis

  8 shared

• Lynda May Xepoleas

  5 shared

• Rachel Rose Getman

  5 shared

• Kyra Streck

  4 shared

• Kelly L. Reddy-Best

  Iowa State University

  3 shared

• Kelly L. Reddy Best

  Iowa State University

  3 shared

• Utkarsh Mall

  Columbia University

  2 shared

Labs

• American Studies ProgramPI

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  University of British Columbia

  2014

• M.S., Textiles

  University of California Davis

  2009

• B.S. (honors), Fiber Science and Apparel Design

  Cornell University

  2007

Awards & honors

• The Biggest Little Fashion City: Ithaca and Silent Film Styl…
• Union-Made: Fashioning America in the 20th Century (2017, re…
• Jean Rouch Award for Ethnographic Filmmaking
• Best Documentary at the Cowichan Aboriginal Film Festival
• Best Documentary award at the UC Davis Student Film Festival