FIT Archives Salon: Collecting Sub Cultures—Goth and Japanese Lolitas

For this third FIT Archives Salon event, FIT Professor Summer Lee will be in conversation with Charlene Fossum to discuss the small collection of underground media, including magazines like Propaganda and Carpe Noctem, which she collected in her youth and recently donated to the archive. Charlene and Summer will discuss how underground media unified goth and dark subculture in the 1980s and 1990s, and explore its implications for contemporary scholars.

Summer Lee is a fashion historian who holds an MA in Fashion and Textile Studies from FIT, where her qualifying paper was an exhibition project titled Emo: Spectrum of Subcultural Style. She has been teaching at FIT as an adjunct instructor since Fall 2023 and currently teaches Youth Subculture, Identity, and Fashion: A Sociological Perspective in the Social Sciences Department.

Born and raised in suburban Philadelphia, Charlene Fossum became interested in goth subculture as a fan of British new wave and synthesizer-based music in the 1980s. Collecting magazines and catalogs was a way to keep abreast of alternative culture, and to share the styles, music, and interests with members of her local alternative community. She later became interested in Japanese culture and comics in the late 1980s, and began collecting manga, as well as culture and style magazines in the 1990s. Fossum attended the School of Visual Arts from 1990 to 1994, earning a BFA in illustration. She married in 1996 and came to reside in Brooklyn where she works on various personal projects of embroidered textile art and pointillism illustration. She donated her magazine collection to FIT’s Special Collections to ensure it would be accessible for subculture studies.

This event is free and open to the pubic.