Woke Art Labeled "Aesthetically Terrifying"

 

[I don’t often post about politics on Rick On Theater, with the exception of my advocacy for freedom of speech and expression, my support for funding the arts, and my belief in the importance of including the arts in the curricula of our elementary and secondary schools and our colleges and universities.  But now and then, something comes to my attention that offends my commitment to those positions. 

[This occurred just this week, as reported in the articles I’m reposting below.  I’m pretty sure readers will see what’s exercised me in this case.

[There are two grounds on which these reports, both covering the same event, have raised my hackles.  The first, I think is obvious in the context of my introductory comments above.  This is related to the suppression of the freedom of expression in the context of art.  I’ll circle back to this in a bit.

[The second reason this particular incident has gotten to me is probably less obvious to those who haven’t read my posts on ROT that recount my teen years when my father was a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Information Agency in the Federal Republic of Germany (1962-67).

[USIA wasn’t very well known at home, so a little explanation is necessary.  Established in 1953 by President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969; 34th President of the United States: 1953-61), USIA was the agency responsible for what was called “public diplomacy” (read “cultural propaganda”). 

[The agency brought art and cultural events, lectures, and political and historical information about the United States to countries all over the globe through libraries and other facilities and tours by performers and speakers.  The mission was to show the U.S. in the best possible light and emphasize our founding principles and it was part of my dad’s job to display the breadth of America’s artistic achievements—visual art, music, theater, and dance in all their forms—to the Germans in his area of responsibility. 

[Though the new Art in Embassies wasn’t a program of USIA, it was nevertheless a project that engaged my dad (who had been active with a prominent art gallery in Washington, D.C., in the years just before he arrived in Germany).

[Now, that connection to my feelings about freedom of expression. 

[I’ve said numerous times on this blog that I’m pretty much a First Amendment absolutist.  There are a few exceptions to my belief in total adherence to the principle of free speech and free expression—incitement to violence, slander or libel, falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater, true national security—but not liking someone’s words, having one’s feelings hurt, or politically opposing what someone says is not among these exceptions.

[Now, I also have to acknowledge that the person or agency that owns the hall, so to speak, has some right to regulate what’s said in it.  It’s different for a public space, and that covers embassies and consulates.  But it’s obvious, I think, that the government has some legitimate entitlement to regulate what is said or displayed in its facilities.  Obscenity or vulgarity probably would fall into this category—but not political opposition, no matter what label one puts on it.

[And that’s what woke is. 

[What woke actually means in 2026 is probably irrelevant in this discussion.  The word has many connotations, depending on who’s using it, who’s hearing it, and what the topic under discussion is, but fundamentally it means being aware of and actively attentive to issues of racial, gender, and social justice.

[When used pejoratively by political conservatives, woke generally functions as a catch-all term criticizing progressive or left-wing policies, culture, and ideology.  And that’s where the problem dealt with here arises.

[Basically, it’s a label for anything the MAGA people don’t like.  That pretty much is the definition of “political opposition.”  And that’s exactly what our democratic government is not supposed to suppress.  Even if you label the ideas socialism—or, worse, communism—Americans are supposed to be allowed to speak them.

[Or draw them, sculpt them, or project them.  The First Amendment declares so.  It’s a founding principle of our Democracy.  Our powerful government isn’t supposed to erase, obliterate, cover up, suppress, censor, or delete what it doesn’t like or opposes.  The Constitution says not.  That’s the 237-year-old document whose semiquincentennial is coming up next.]

“BIG PICTURE ON POLITICS OF ‘WOKE’”
by Jason Farago 

[The report on the Trump State Department’s removal of a painting from the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, was published in the New York Times on 29 August 2026 in Section C (“Arts”).  It was posted as “When Kehinde Wiley’s Painting Was Removed, It Wasn’t About Art” on the paper’s website on 27 August 2026.]

During the Cold War [1947-91], the State Department maintained a robust program of American cultural diplomacy, sending the New York Philharmonic to the Soviet Union and Duke Ellington’s orchestra to the Middle East. There is not much left of this policy, but the program [launched officially by President John F. Kennedy (1917-63); 35th President of the United States: 1961-63) in 1963; still operational], established during the Kennedy administration, manages a collection of paintings, sculptures and photographs and helps organize art displays in 190-odd embassies and consulates abroad. It is led by Erin Scavino [b. 1978; attorney, former model, reality show contestant, and political activist; Director of Art in Embassies: 2025-present], a contestant fired in Week 9 of Season 3 [2005] of “The Apprentice.” [The Apprentice ran on NBC from 2004 to 2017; Donald Trump (b. 1946; politician, media personality, and businessman; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21 and 47th President of the United States: 2025-present) was co-producer and host from 2003 to 2015.]

This month, at the American embassy in the Dominican Republic, one painting from the program was taken down with the help of a cherry picker [see following article]. It was made by the artist Kehinde Wiley [b. 1977], who painted the official presidential portrait of Barack Obama [2018; National Portrait Gallery], but who shares with President Trump a taste for gilded ornament. Scavino explained in a podcast interview that her office intervened to remove the picture.

“It was very woke,” Scavino explained. “It was by the gentleman who did Obama’s portrait. And it was aesthetically terrifying.”

Strong words for a group portrait of four fully dressed, largely expressionless sitters in front of a background adorned with flowers. But aesthetic terror is a good place to start. Whether you find the work terrifying or otherwise, the meaning of this removal lies in psychology, rather than in painting.

[A section of this article that’s included in the online edition but not included in the print version is as follows:

The removed painting is called “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960” [2015], and the sitters are four Dominican artists that Mr. Wiley met in the Caribbean country, floating as usual against a highly decorative background.

Two women are standing; they look out from the picture with authority, and their skin has a waxen photorealism.

Two men are sitting; one wears a T-shirt with the logo of an evangelical children’s camp.

Against the teal background is a repeated pattern of sunflowers, peonies and tulips, which is as flat as wallpaper in most areas . . .

[I touch on “photorealism” in visual art in my post “Hyperreal Theater” (16 January 2021).]

For 25 years, Wiley has painted in this consistent format: young figures, mostly but not always Black, posed flatly in positions nodding to western European history painting (with large portions churned out by studio assistants in China and elsewhere). This was enough for a lot of people before November 2016. As the critic Rachel Hunter Himes persuasively argued last year, Wiley’s art became “a kind of court style for the Obama era,” and his one-by-one insertions of Black sitters in royal or imperial frames, not to mention his gift for business and taste for luxury, perfectly fulfilled that era’s individualist mandate.

Wiley’s rise from queer downtown New York to the State Department, Himes went on, “dovetailed with the emergence of a political culture that saw the presence of black faces in the halls of power as inherently progressive and black economic advancement under capitalism as anti-racist.”

Wiley’s formulaic glorifications were emblematic of the lapsed age now called “Woke 1,” though I do not think that Scavino — the wife of Dan Scavino [b. 1976], the president’s deputy chief of staff — is objecting on quite those grounds. But that is the bitter irony here: If she could look past the Black president whose administration commissioned the painting (and accept the Black models in the picture, too), Ms. Scavino might see that Wiley’s “aesthetically terrifying” painting could hang more naturally in the current Oval Office or the future White House ballroom.

The artist and the commander in chief have quite a bit in common, after all. Both love ostentation, glitter and flamboyance, and Wiley’s use of ornate, even vulgar, gold frames jibes rather well with Trump’s Mar-a-Lagofication of the West Wing. Both employ a populist rhetoric that in fact serves their own celebrity, access to elite institutions and personal enrichment.

Wiley and the president have also both faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct; both have denied wrongdoing and claimed their accusers are motivated by money and fame. (Trump was found liable in federal court for sexual abuse in 2023; Wiley has not been found liable for any sexual assault, but at least three museums, in Florida, Minnesota, and Nebraska, decided not to go ahead with exhibitions of the artist after the accusations emerged.)

Look: There’s nothing inherently sinister about swapping the art in an official building. Administrations come and go, their ambassadors arrive in Canberra or Copenhagen, and they redecorate. No doubt when Obama and Joe Biden were in office, their foreign plenipotentiaries unhooked a few pictures by their Bush- or Trump-appointed predecessors and shipped them back to Foggy Bottom.

What is different with this administration, in art as in life, is the vengeance. Before, a difference in cultural politics would play out with some Bubble Wrap and spackling paste. Under this administration, culture war is waged publicly, optimized for the short-form vertical video. Our ambassador in the Dominican Republic decided to showcase the removal of Wiley’s picture with Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” playing in the background and punctuated the caption with an American flag emoji.

It is not enough to dislike Wiley’s painting; one must shame Wiley the painter. He is the second of the Obama portraitists to come under direct fire from the Trump administration; Amy Sherald [b. 1973], who painted Michelle Obama [2018; National Portrait Gallery], canceled her own exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington [Amy Sherald: American Sublime was scheduled from 19 September 2025-22 February 2026; Sherald canceled it on 24 July 2025] rather than accede to demands to censor (or “contextualize”) a supposedly objectionable work [Trans Forming Liberty (2024); depiction of a Black transgender woman as the Statue of Liberty]. In both cases, the matter at hand is not the painters’ quality or even their political stances, but the need — the pleasure — of functionaries as low down on the organization chart as the Santo Domingo political division to demonstrate loyalty to the president through carnivalesque acts of censorship and humiliation.

But what if your enemy resembles you in ways you cannot admit? That is the real aesthetic terror that this Obamaist kitsch triggers in the halls of the administration: that what you say you want to eradicate (if you ever looked at it at all) is the equal and opposite thing that defines you.

[Jason Farago, a critic at large for the New York Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.  He began writing for the Times in 2015, reviewing exhibitions and reporting features across the United States and in more than a dozen foreign countries.

[Previously, Farago wrote for The Guardian, and was a regular contributor to The New Yorker, the BBC, NPR, the New York Review of Books and Artforum.  He edited a global culture magazine called Even, whose four-year run is collected in the anthology “Out of Practice.”

[In 2017, Farago was named one of the inaugural laureates of the Rabkin Prize for arts writing.  In 2022, he was awarded one of the inaugural Silvers-Dudley Prizes for criticism and journalism, and in 2023 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.]

*  *  *  *
“OFFICIALS CALL PAINTING ‘WOKE’ AND WANT TO GET RID OF IT”
by Zachary Small 

[Just before the publication of the above article, the report below ran in the New York Times of 26 August 2026 (Section C: “Arts”).  It was also posted on the website as “Trump Officials Propose Sale of ‘Woke’ Painting by Kehinde Wiley” on 24 August 2026.]

The State Department wants to sell a painting by the celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley that the director of its Art in Embassies program called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” It was removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic last week.

The painting by Wiley, who rose to fame after being selected to create President Barack Obama’s official portrait, features four Dominican models against a floral backdrop. It was commissioned by the federal government in 2013 and paid for with taxpayer dollars.

State Department officials removed the painting from the embassy last week, after first hiding it behind a tarp designed with an image of the American flag.

Erin Scavino, the director of Art in Embassies, criticized Wiley’s painting in a recent podcast interview and pointed out the artist’s connection to Obama. Leah Campos [b. 1977; former intelligence officer serving in the Central Intelligence Agency, 2001-12], the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic [2025-present], celebrated its removal on social media with a video playing the rock anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” writing that the painting was an example of “globalist and woke ideologies.”

Neither elaborated on what she found objectionable.

In a statement on Monday about the removal of the painting, a State Department spokeswoman did not directly address the artwork. The statement instead criticized comments Wiley had made in 2023 about his “Judith and Holofernes” painting, which he described as “a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.” It also cited accusations of sexual assault that Wiley has denied.

[Judith and Holofernes (2012) is Wiley’s modern take on a 17th-century painting (Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1608) by Giovanni Baglione (Italian; 1566-1643). The biblical story of the beheading of Holofernes by Judith (Book of Judith, Chapter 13, verses 1-10) has been depicted in paintings and sculptures throughout history.]

“The work of an individual with such violent and racist words and depictions has no place in the America First State Department,” the spokeswoman said.

The statement said the State Department is determining whether it can legally sell the painting of Dominicans, which is titled “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960.”

“If that is feasible,” the spokeswoman said, “it would be the goal of Art in Embassies to proudly do so.”

A smaller painting by the artist sold at a Phillips auction in 2024 for nearly $845,000. Wiley and his gallerist, Sean Kelly, did not respond to requests for comment.

Virginia Shore, who commissioned the Wiley painting, established many of the embassy art collections as director of acquisitions and chief curator for the Art in Embassies program between 2000 and 2017. She described the work as nonpartisan and said there was no precedent for selling embassy artworks.

“Calling this woke is difficult for me to understand,” she said. “This is a program validated and financially backed under Bush. There is a science of building trust and empathy across borders.”

Wiley received an award from the State Department in 2015 [Department of State Medal of Arts by Secretary of State John Kerry (b. 1943; 68th U. S. Secretary of State: 2013-17)] because of his contributions to cultural diplomacy. He often takes inspiration from historic paintings, asking contemporary Black models to pose inside his version of the compositions. For “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960,” he spent two years studying paintings by the Dominican artists Celeste Woss y Gil [1890-1985] and Gilberto Hernández Ortega [1923-79; renowned Dominican modern artist on whose poses and composition in the 1960 painting Siamesas Wiley based this work], working with art students in the country to finish the scene.

The artwork’s removal was the latest attempt to politicize the State Department’s art program, which became part of the government during the Kennedy administration in 1963 to foster cultural diplomacy. The program was strengthened in 1999 under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act, which led to embassies developing their own permanent art collections.

This year, Scavino claimed to have gotten an ambassador in Bucharest, Romania, fired over “satanic baby art,” though the diplomat’s departure was reported as a planned retirement. She also selected a friend with no curatorial experience [Jenni Parido, a woman whose most recent job was owning a luxury pet food store in Tampa, Florida] to serve as the commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, bypassing normal procedures. In July, Scavino organized an exhibition in Washington that aimed to “Make Art Great Again” with nearly 70 versions of the American flag on display.

In a statement about the removed Wiley painting, Campos, the U.S. ambassador, said, “It is my intention that everything we project from U.S. Embassy Santo Domingo, including the art and décor, reflect the beauty, strength and commitment to liberty of the United States of America and its people.”

Online, she had a stronger perspective: “Under the Trump administration and my leadership, we are leaving behind globalist, ‘woke’ ideologies to embrace, instead, American patriotism and the beauty of our great country.”

She ended the sentence with an emoji of the American flag.

[Zachary Small is a New York Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics, and technology.  He started contributing to the Times in 2019 and was hired in 2023.

[Small has worked as a journalist for nearly a decade, after previously working in museums and theaters.  He spent years writing criticism for art publications until becoming an investigative reporter on stories about sexual misconduct, fraud, forgeries, and violence in cultural institutions.

[His first book, Token Supremacy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2024), details the frenzied collision of art and cryptocurrency.]

2026 Edinburgh International Festival Fringe

 

[The Edinburgh Festival began in 1947 as a single official, classical arts event to heal the wounds of war, which accidentally sparked the world's largest open-access performing arts movement.  It was founded by Rudolf Bing (1902-97; Austrian-born British opera impresario who worked in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including as General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City from 1950 to 1972) to unite Europe through culture after World War II. 

[The main, official event, the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF), focuses exclusively on high-profile, curated classical music, opera, theater, and dance.  It established itself as a top-tier destination for new work and hosted the world premières of T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party (1949) and Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker (1954).

[Unlike its open-access counterpart—the Edinburgh Festival Fringe—the main festival deliberately limits its programming.  This carefully handpicked lineup allows the EIF to focus entirely on elite, world-class artistic quality.

[In 2026, marking its modern evolution, the EIF entered a high-profile, three-year co-production partnership with the Holland Festival and France’s Festival d’Avignon, two other international festivals founded in 1947.  The EIF now features 147 individual performances across its month-long run (7-30 August 2026; through 31 August for the Fringe).

[Back in 1947, eight theater groups arrived without an invitation because they were left off the official program.  Refusing to leave, these groups performed on the edges (the “fringe”) of the main event using independent venues. 

[Because the main festival booked the city’s premier theaters, these groups took over whatever small spaces they could find—church halls, a cinema, and even a restaurant.  It was this specific layout in 1947 that prompted a journalist to write that these plays were performing “round the fringe of official Festival drama,” accidentally naming the global movement. 

[Today, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest arts festival, built entirely on an un-curated, open-access model where anyone with a script and a space can perform.

[The size of the Fringe dwarfs the main official festival, operating as a massive, city-wide takeover.  Currently, the Festival Fringe hosts over 4,100 un-curated shows; over the 25-day run, artists stage 53,884 individual performances.  The lineup features talent arriving from 71 different countries.

[Because the Fringe Society, founded by artists to nurture and uphold the Fringe’s values of inclusivity, experimentation, and imagination, maintains a strict non-vetting policy, the festival’s lineup is highly varied.  Stand-up and sketch comedy make up 38.4% of the entire program (1,401 shows).  It serves as the primary global scouting ground for networks like the BBC and Netflix.

[The festival functions as an incubator for raw creativity, boasting 1,748 world premières.  Beyond comedy and theater, the program heavily features contemporary dance, circus acts, cabaret, spoken word, and musicals.]

“SURVIVING EDINBURGH’S MASS CHAOS”
by Helen Shaw

[This review of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe ran in the New York Times on 22 August 2026 (Sec. C: “Arts”).  (It was also posted as “How to Make Sense of 4,000 Edinburgh Shows: Just Soak It All Up” to the Times’ webpage on 20 August 2026.  Helen Shaw reviewed the performances from Edinburgh, Scotland.]

Amid 4,000 fringe shows, discernible trends emerge.

There’s something ridiculous about the name of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

“Fringe” implies decoration happening out on a margin, threads on the hem of a larger garment. But if you have ever elbowed your way down a crammed Edinburgh sidewalk in August, past hundreds of posters for stand-up shows and circus spectaculars, accepting promotional fliers from, say, a woman wearing a disco ball on her head — you might wonder what garment could possibly be larger than this.

This year, the Fringe includes over 4,000 productions. I went to a critics’ symposium where I heard writers talk about how impossible it is to discern trends in such a huge population. And yet, somehow, they do. Certainly in the 23 pieces I managed to see, themes emerged. For example, I accidentally saw three shows in one day that featured Margaret Thatcher [1925-2013; British stateswoman; Leader of the Conservative Party: 1975-90; Prime Minister of the United Kingdom: 1979-90; known as the “Iron Lady”]. (I could have just as easily gone to three “Heated Rivalry” spoofs.)

Ostensibly, the Fringe operates on the periphery of the Edinburgh International Festival, an event founded in 1947 to bring the world to the city’s stately sandstone theaters. Despite the Fringe’s exponential (and eclipsing) expansion, that international fest continues. This year, I saw two rather lengthy shows: “Seagull” and “A Trial — after ‘An Enemy of the People,’” both of which ran a full two and a half hours without intermission.

“Seagull” — rendered as “[seagull],” as if for closed captioning — was often wildly thrilling. This Belgian adaptation of [Anton] Chekhov’s [1860-1904] unrequited-passion drama [written in 1895; first produced in 1896] features a superb cast of both hearing and deaf actors, all communicating in Flemish Sign Language. The production, directed by Stijn Van Opstel [sic: Stijn Van Opstal; Flemish actor and theater director, b. 1976; co-founder of the theater company Olympique Dramatique, presenter of [seagull]], is easily the angriest “Seagull” I’ve ever seen, placing at its center the depressive Masja (“Masha”; the explosive Lobke Leirens) and her self-loathing love-object, the neglected writer Konstantin (Yana Wuytjens). In one of Van Opst[a]l’s cleverest gestures, the supertitles sometimes stop translating, and we experience the stinging frustration of incomprehension for ourselves.

[Wuytjens is a female actor, but this was a gender-swapping production, and Konstantin remained a male character.]

In “A Trial,” the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura [b. 1976] plays Thomas Stockmann, the hero of Henrik Ibsen’s [Norwegian; 1828-1906] 1882 “An Enemy of the People,” in which a scientist is reviled for discovering a contaminated water supply. This modern-day agitprop epilogue to Ibsen’s play, devised by the director Christiane Jatahy [b. 1968; the production was from her Paris-based company, Cia. Vértice de Teatro], consists of Stockmann arguing his case to a jury drawn from each night’s audience.

He wants them to declare that his whistle-blowing doesn’t make him an “enemy of the people,” and at first I was impatient with how the verdict seemed to be a foregone conclusion. After an hour, though, I remembered how many real scientists are being vilified, just like Stockmann. “Why don’t we stop this farce?” I kept thinking, right up until that question — and its political ramifications — finally penetrated.

I thought a lot about theatrical duration during my breakneck trip to Scotland. The International Festival’s generous running times give plays time to pivot: to refashion our understanding of a Chekhov classic, or to move from obviousness into persuasion. But almost every show I saw in the Fringe’s protozoic ooze lasted about an hour. Although stand-ups excel in that format, as can song cycles, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that many Fringe plays relied on bathos, since dramatists can draw a character in that time but have little space to develop more complicated emotions than that’s sad.

Perhaps as a result, among the new plays there’s a vogue for characters talking about fashioning a story. That works in rare cases, as in the Emma Howlett’s [British-Irish writer and director, b. 1997] intellectually generous “The Plot” [presented by theatregoose] or in the eerie nightmare story-hour, “As Far as We Know,” by Sam Ward [British theater-maker, writer, and performer; founder of the contemporary theater company YESYESNONO; b. 1994]. It can, though, slide into tweeness.

For instance, in the much-acclaimed but, to my ear, thinly sentimental “Badgers” by Malaika Kegode [British writer, performer, theater-maker, and producer; b. 1993], a podcaster falls into a supernatural mystery. Instead of watching actual scenes, we hear about them from a narrator (Kegode herself) who swoops a magical pen around as if flying a spoon into a toddler’s mouth. She concludes by telling us, cloyingly, that we all have our own stories, and that these are made up of “moments.” Yech.

Clowning, on the other hand, can cut straight to the metaphorical pie-in-the-face. The world doesn’t make linear sense, so why should a show? Simply by painting their noses red, the athletic clowns Xhloe and Natasha [New York City-based absurdist physical theater, clowning, and playwriting duo consisting of Xhloe Rice (b. 1999) and Natasha Roland (b. 1999 or 2000)] can somersault into the middle of the plot of their “Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It” and start acting out an entire small town plagued by a (fake) sasquatch. Their satire becomes a strangely sympathetic portrait of conspiratorial thinking: People would rather believe in cryptids than in their neighbors’ brutality.

Another [British] clown duo, Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole of the docu-absurdist Sh!t Theater, made the trenchant “Evita Too,” exploring the true story of Isabel Perón — Juan Perón’s third wife, who became the world’s first female president when he died — as well as the performers’ own fraught relationship with legacy.

[The reference, for those who don’t catch it, is to the 1978 Andrew Lloyd Webber (b. 1948; English composer and impresario of musical theater) musical Evita, about the life of Eva Perón, (1919-52, Argentine politician, activist, and actress) who served as First Lady of Argentina from June 1946 until her death in 1952. She was the second wife (1945-52) of Juan Perón (1895-1974; Argentine military officer and politician; 29th and 40th President of Argentina: 1946 to his overthrow in 1955, and 1973 until his death in 1974).

[Evita, as she was known, was followed (1961-74) by Isabel Perón (b. 1931; Argentine politician, known as Isabelita) who served as President of Argentina from 1974 to 1976.]

Sixteen years into their collaboration, Mothersole and Biscuit (who spend parts of the show naked and on roller skates) crack jokes about misogyny, often connecting Isabel Perón’s historical erasure — if not her corporate neo-fascism — to aspects of their own experience. For instance, much like Isabelita, the clowns get a lot of unsolicited advice from men. They cheerfully display a cautionary letter from an Andrew Lloyd Webber representative, who seems worried that the show could reflect poorly on his client’s musical “Evita.” (Adorably, the lawyer notes that he assumes that his letter will end up in the show.)

Lloyd Webber’s legal team must have had a busy summer. I also saw the company Flo & Joan’s [British sisters Nicola and Rosie Dempsey] charmingly bonkers “One Man Musical,” which imagines a certain mega-composer of “musicools” [i.e., Lloyd Webber] trying to win over the youth with a preening solo bio-play.

The wonderfully desultory Ed Easton [British actor, writer, and comedian] ambles around, refusing to do an impression of anyone in particular, probably so he can’t be told to cease and desist. He does, though, issue droll commands while demonstrating maneuvers in “Starlight Express”-style roller skates. He indicates Flo & Joan’s critique of Lloyd Webber’s overweening influence while also warning the front row. “You’re going to need to stop my mass,” he says, rolling toward us.

[Starlight Express is a 1984 musical with music by Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Richard Stilgoe (b. 1943; British songwriter, lyricist, musician, and broadcaster). It’s about railway trains and the actors perform on roller skates.]

Many Fringe pieces seem to see success itself as villainous, not to say demonic. In the explicit solo show “Roleplay,” Hannah Reilly [Australian comedian and podcaster] blames the lure of podcast superstardom for shaping her hypersexualized persona; in “Ay Am!,” the clown Maya Ricote’s [Mexican/Venezuelan-American telenovela actress turned contemporary clown artist; b. 2000] hilariously exaggerated curves (balloons, basically) have been bestowed on her by a Mephistophelean talent agent, who otherwise keeps her in a cryogenic freezer.

Fame is a shared obsession because, while you’re at the Fringe, you can’t help but wonder what will escape the Fringe. The festival’s crossover hits of the last decades, like “Six: The Musical” [2017; West End, 2019; Broadway, 2021], “Fleabag” [2013; British TV series, 2016-19] and “Baby Reindeer” [2019; British television miniseries, 2024], are hard to recreate. And watching so much theater in such excited company makes your own opinions about what’s successful slalom crazily. Even as I sat laughing in a basement in Edinburgh, I wondered how I’d respond to the same show in a basement in New York.

But I did see two productions that seem ready to thrive outside the Fringe’s peculiar hothouse ecology. One of them, Alex Bechtel’s [New York-based multidisciplinary composer, actor, writer, and music director; b. 1986] “Penelope,” is already many years into its gestation, yet it could almost have been called into existence by this summer’s “The Odyssey” [2026 epic film] discourse. You think a Cyclops is bad? Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, is trapped, as she says, in a house “full of monsters.”

The stunning Grace McLean [American actress, playwright, composer, and singer; b. 1984] plays — and collaborated in writing — the long-suffering titular role, performing a cycle of songs about her fury at a husband who has left her in a two-decade lurch. McLean, whose voice ripples like bronze under the smith’s hammer, has both a wonderful siren’s shriek and a smoky, torchy growl. (Impressively, the show actually climaxes in a long, silent moment; like Odysseus’s nurse, you’ll know it when you see it.)

I was also utterly swept away by “The Real Kyle McCarren,” another long-developing musical, composed by Andy Roninson [American musical theater composer, lyricist, orchestrator, and music director; b. ca. 1989] and Sean McVerry [Brooklyn-based singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer; b. 1990], with a book by Roninson. It looks like a band gig, but it functions as a wake: Roninson is grappling with the early death of his childhood friend Kyle, the first guy he ever wrote music with. McVerry, on guitar, plays Kyle’s revenant, and between their excellent rock-inflected songs, there’s plentiful frontman banter.

The real story, though, is the interplay among the band. Playing assorted characters (Kyle’s friend, Kyle’s mother, etc.) are several staggering performers, including the astonishing Vincent Jamal Hooper [American stage and television actor; b. 1994 or 1995], sweet Sarah Coffey [Brooklyn-based actor, musician, vocalist, and comedian; b. 1994], and the powerhouse heartbreaker Jaygee Macapugay [Filipino-American Broadway performer; b. 1974]. They have voices like gods, while Roninson, as he frequently admits, does not. He’s a virtuoso on the keyboard, though, and as the group performs, we see each bandmate lost in laughing awe at the others’ gifts.

I was delighted because they were delighted, and this vicarious pleasure summed up my experience of the Fringe — its true power comes from so many artists watching other artists. The rest of us are welcome, but the makers are their own best audience, and we gather strength from their collected heat and light.

[Helen Shaw is the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times.  She trained as a dramaturg at the American Repertory Theater’s Institute for Advanced Theater Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the last few years that it was run by its founder, the playwright-critic Robert Brustein.

[Dramaturgy can often be a bridge to reviewing—the first dramaturg, Gotthold Lessing (1729-81; German philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic), was an embedded critic at the Hamburg National Theater—and it turns out Shaw was learning to be a critic without knowing it.

[Once she moved to New York, she started writing freelance reviews and features in 2003.  Most of her criticism over the next decade and a half appeared in Time Out New York.  Shaw joined New York magazine in 2019, The New Yorker in 2022, the Times in 2026.]

Subway Newsstand Art Project

 

A Special Installment of “A Helluva Town”   

[I’ve posted several reports on art in the New York City subways; see, for instance, “Tom Otterness & Life Underground” (27 April 2011), “A Helluva Town, Part 2” (18 August 2011), and “Can Art Be A Crime?” (9 July 2025).

[The article below is a little different.  The art installation here is sanctioned, but dynamic—it changes regularly—it’s multifarious, and it’s housed in a disused newsstand on a train platform.  The rest you’ll read for yourself.  Oh, and it’s called the W4 Newsstand Project (because it’s at the West 4th Street station on 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village for the Brooklyn-bound B, D, F and M trains).]

“A SUBWAY DIVERSION THAT AIMS TO DELIGHT”
by Winnie Hu 

[This article ran in the “Metropolitan” section of the New York Times on 2 August 2026; it’s on the paper’s website as “A Newsstand That Aims to Delight N.Y.C. Subway Riders,” dated 28 July 2026.]

Whimsy and freebies at a vacant newsstand in a West Village station.

Trading cards that highlight fun facts about retired subway conductors and operators. Key chains with a fake rat’s foot for “good train luck.” A bucket hat with a sliding veil that riders can borrow to cry in private.

These specialty items for straphangers, which they may not have even realized they need, or want, will be available for free starting this weekend [1-2 August] at a former newsstand inside the West 4th Street station in Manhattan.

The transit-themed newsstand will have no other purpose than to amuse and intrigue New Yorkers — or console them on a bad day — and make their commutes just a little better in the nation’s largest subway system.

It is the latest creation of Al Mullen, 37, a comedian and writer known for his humorous and upbeat takes on the transit world. The newsstand “snowballed” from his free zine, Public Transport Magazine, which he started in 2022 from his Brooklyn apartment and leaves on trains and in stations for riders to discover.

“Everyone’s on the subway,” Mr. Mullen said while fixing up the newsstand on a recent afternoon. “It’s a place where I can meet all kinds of people and see if they’ll be delighted.”

Mr. Mullen partnered with Art on the Ave NYC, a nonprofit that displays art in vacant storefronts, and the David Prize, a philanthropic initiative of the Walentas Foundation [aka: the Walentas Family Foundation; a New York-based private grantmaking organization founded in 2013 that supports civic institutions, the arts, public spaces, and education], to secure a one-year license for the shuttered newsstand from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Then, Mr. Mullen enlisted the help of his friends and fellow transit enthusiasts to transform it into a place where busy New Yorkers would actually want to stop. Edward Steed, a cartoonist whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, designed a whimsical mural of trains, buses and people to wrap around the newsstand. Comedians, writers and artists are creating travel guides to the city’s 472 subway stations, which will be handed out at the newsstand.

Mr. Mullen also plans to offer live entertainment, including puppet shows that will run between train arrivals and departures. He is installing a photo booth with a subway pole that commuters can grab to find out “their inner train line.” The picture will show a colored circle around them, which corresponds to a particular subway line and reveals their “train aura.”

Even in its unfinished state, the newsstand on the downtown platform for the B, D, F and M trains has buzzed with activity. Riders have come over to ask directions to their trains. A group of teenagers on scooters zipped behind the counter and made themselves at home, pretending to hawk Newport cigarettes.

The other day, five big round clocks were behind the counter, all displaying the same exact time. Below each clock was a yellow sticky note with the name of one of the city’s five boroughs scrawled in red.

Markus Kusano, 35, a software engineer, stopped to tell Mr. Mullen how much he liked the clocks.

“I thought it was funny,” Mr. Kusano said afterward. “It’s kind of a New York or nowhere kind of thing — that’s all the time you need.”

Mr. Mullen grew up in the coastal town of Scituate, Mass., and later studied film at Occidental College in [Los Angeles,] California. He arrived in New York City in 2011 and worked as a film and video editor. In his free time, he wrote and performed stand-up comedy.

But by 2019, Mr. Mullen was ready for a change. While reporting for jury duty one day, he looked around at all the different people in a Brooklyn courthouse and realized how small his own world was. “I wanted to reach out to people in some way,” he said. “I realized the closest thing to jury duty was the subway.”

So Mr. Mullen made the subway his stage. He created Public Transport Magazine on a home printer and distributed it with guerrilla-style drops on trains. It looked like a school project but was packed with a slew of talented comedians, writers, cartoonists and illustrators, including Jack Handey, an author and former writer for “Saturday Night Live,” and David Cross, an actor and comedian.

As it gained a following, he met Erika Augustine, the executive director of the David Prize, in 2024. He applied for the prize, which awards a total of $1 million annually to five New Yorkers who are working to make the city a better place. Though Mr. Mullen did not win, he made an impression.

“His love for the transit system, I think, is so uniquely New York,” Ms. Augustine said, adding that Mr. Mullen has inspired other straphangers to look past the usual gripes about train delays and rats.

Last year, Mr. Mullen reached out to Ms. Augustine with his idea for a transit-focused newsstand. She connected him with Barbara Anderson, the executive director of Art on the Ave NYC and a 2025 finalist for the David Prize.

Ms. Anderson’s group has organized art exhibits in 106 vacant retail spaces around the city since 2020. Last year, the group converted a newsstand in the West 81st Street station in Manhattan into a sound booth [named Sound Booth] where riders can drop by to sing, play the piano, D.J. and catch live performances.

On a Saturday in June, Mr. Mullen held up the keys to the newsstand for the first time outside the West 4th Street station. “It feels like I’m holding the smallest trophy,” he said, before heading down the stairs to see what he had gotten himself into.

A few minutes later, he unlocked the newsstand to find Us Weekly and Cosmopolitan magazines from 2016 still sitting on the shelves and an unplugged Coca-Cola refrigerator in a corner. There was graffiti on several display cases and a thick coating of grime over everything.

“I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity here, a lot of dirt and no rats that I can see,” he said.

Mr. Mullen returned with cleaning supplies and friends to scrub the newsstand. They found a quarter and placed it on the counter. A man ran up, grabbed the quarter and jumped onto a train. “It was a heist,” Mr. Mullen said. “He hopped on a getaway train.”

The former newsstand was licensed rent-free through an M.T.A. program [Vacant Unit Activation Program] started in 2023 to activate former retail spaces in the subway with public art exhibits. Currently, there are 17 sites, including the newsstand-turned-sound-booth and another former retail unit that became a bodega for dinosaurs [Rex’s Dino Store] at the Grand Army Plaza station in Brooklyn.

Mr. Mullen received $10,000 in initial funding from the David Prize to develop and open his newsstand. He spent $4,200 on the mural, which included getting it made on vinyl. He plans to pay $100 each to other contributing artists and writers, including those creating the station guides.

Mr. Mullen, who works as a writer for a game show app, has not paid himself. He said he saw the newsstand as a space where he could collaborate with more people. “The New York thing is being in company with people, being in community,” he said. “And this is definitely an extension.”

Mr. Mullen and his friends will take turns staffing the newsstand from Friday to Sunday [Gothamist says 1-4 p.m., Saturday and Sunday]. He hopes to raise more money to keep the newsstand running for the next year.

Lily Crandall, 28, a textile artist, volunteered to make the trading cards of subway workers and even has a personal connection — her great-grandfather was a construction worker on the 8th Avenue line. “I love all of his ideas,” she said of Mr. Mullen. “They’re really fun to be a part of.”

The other day, Harris Alterman, 34, and Dave Ross, 43, both comedians, were taking measurements at the newsstand. In June, they had made a video of themselves putting up fake (and temporary) tech ads in Brooklyn subway stations to spoof the real ads that they said were annoying and ugly [see We put up fake tech ads and We put more fake tech ads].

After their video went viral, Mr. Ross posted on social media asking if anyone had access to a space in the subway. Mr. Mullen replied, “Weirdly I do.” Now, the newsstand will host a one-day installation of their fake tech ads on August 8.

“I love how much art and music is in the city — and how much isn’t in the zeitgeist but the city supports it anyway,” Mr. Ross said. “There’s a little scene for everything if you can find it.”

[You know from above that Al Mullen is originally from Scituate, Massachusetts, which is in the northwest corner of Plymouth County on Massachusetts Bay.  (Plymouth County is northwest of Barnstable County, which is Cape Cod.)  He went to college in Los Angeles and came to New York in 2011, when he was about 22.  Here, Mullen works as a freelance film and video editor and writes and performs stand-up comedy.

[Brooklyn-based, Mullen is heavily engaged in New York’s alternative comedy and live performance scenes.  He’s best known for his work with the sketch and performance group Channel 101 NY.

[His work explores the absurdities of daily life and corporate structures.  His satirical prose has been featured across prominent humor platforms, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency (a Patreon page), The New Yorker, and The Huffington Post.

[Beyond his solo writing, Mullen focuses heavily on collaborative and live performance formats.  With Max and Al, he performs alongside comedian Max Brand as half of this live musical-comedy duo.  Mullen manages the New York chapter of Channel 101, a monthly non-profit short film festival where creators submit short, episodic video pilots to be voted on by a live audience.  

[His comedic work and digital projects have earned him industry opportunities with the largest and most prestigious stand-up comedy festival in the world, Just For Laughs (Montreal, Canada), and the once wildly popular live, interactive game show app HQ Trivia.

[Winnie Hu is a New York Times reporter covering the people and neighborhoods of New York City.  She writes about demographics, immigration, public spaces, and socioeconomic trends that shape the urban landscape and help explain how people live, work, and move around the city. 

[She’s lived and worked in New York City for more than two decades and has written stories about nearly every aspect of urban life, including transportation, crowding, education, and city and state politics.  Hu joined the Times in 1999, having previously worked as a reporter for the Pensacola News Journal in Pensacola, Florida, and briefly for the Dallas Morning News.]

Dressing for the American Dream

 

[Clothes make the man (and woman, I warrant), some people believe.  Maybe so, but Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic of the New York Times, wonders what that looks like, especially with the changing fashion of the oft-invoked American Dream.

[That’s actually her job.  She chronicles what clothing says about American women and men over the past two-and-a-half centuries.  Of course, Friedman doesn’t look at li’l ol’ you and me.  She looks at the people who make fashion.]

“250 YEARS OF DRESSING FOR THE AMERICAN DREAM”
by Vanessa Friedman

[Vanessa Friedman’s article appeared in the New York Times of 5 July 2026, in the “Sunday Styles” section.  An undated (probably 6 July), cut-down version (with photos, but severely edited text), under the same headline, is posted on the Times website. 

[The only other online version of the article with the complete text that I could find is on the ProQuest New York Times database on the New York Public Library website; if you have access to this service through your library, it’s at 250 Years of Dressing for the American Dream: [Style Desk] - New York Times - ProQuest (text only).]

Over 250 Years, What We Wore To Break Free And Show Off.

For 250 years the American dream has been fodder for a potent national brand. Little wonder that since he began running for president, Donald J. Trump [b. 1946; 45th President of the United States: 2017-21; 47th President: 2025-2029], perhaps the most active executive brand manager in history, has repeatedly invoked the idea: declaring it dead, positioning himself as its champion, announcing it has been restored.

Often he seems to be talking about a purchase of some kind, like a home, a yacht, a freshened-up face, an ever more gilded fantasyland of success.

Yet when the American dream — or at least the idea that later became the American dream — was born along with the country, it looked very different.

Initially defined by the founders as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” that dream was reimagined by each generation and wave of immigrants. As a collection of values (like any brand) it often had less to do with material value than abstract values like liberty, revolution, aspiration, security and reinvention.

Perhaps the best way to think of it is as a “mythic construct,” said Jim Cullen [b. 1962], the author of “The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation” [Oxford University Press, 2004]. One in which, he said, “freedom is the currency of self-realization, which gets reflected in outward presentation that ratifies one’s hope, or one’s status in culture.”

In other words, one way to understand the way the American dream has evolved may be to consider the different styles Americans designed for the world they were inventing.

Freedom and Revolution

It began with the chance to define a new set of laws and governance, to reject the inherited trappings (or traps) of class.

“To escape from Old World fetters and start over again,” said Sean Wilentz [b. 1951], a professor of American history at Princeton University and author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln” [W. W. Norton & Company, 2005].

The founding fathers dressed the part, taking their cues from the fashions of Britain and France and simplifying them.

“In terms of silhouette, in terms of embellishments, there was always a sort of underlying sense of, not puritanism per se, but pulling back,” said Andrew Bolton [b. 1966], the curator in charge of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the man behind the show “American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity” [5 May-10 August 2010].

George Washington [1732-99; First President of the United States: 1789-97] may have powdered his hair, but he rejected the wig. Benjamin Franklin [1705-90; a Founding Father of the United States], who built a printing empire in Philadelphia, “was as attuned to self-presentation as anyone in American history,” Cullen said. It was not an accident that when he was ambassador to France [1779-85], Franklin represented his country with a beaverskin cap.

He understood the story that was being constructed had to do with the promise of new frontiers. A century later, the same promise was embodied by Buffalo Bill [aka: William Cody; 1846-1917; soldier, bison hunter, and showman] and his fellow pioneers, who helped build the myth of the West and created an enduring style of their own, albeit one that borrowed heavily, and without acknowledgment, from the Indigenous cultures that were being displaced. Throughout the 1800s, that myth helped turn functionality and practicality into a virtue in dressing symbolized by the jeans [aka: “Levi’s”] invented by Levi Strauss [1829-1902; German-born American businessman; founded Levi Strauss & Co. in 1853].

That same spirit was adapted by the Gibson girls of the late 19th century, whose clothes reflected a newfound independence and love of action, captured for posterity by artist Charles Dana Gibson [1867-1944; illustrator for magazines and books], whose work gave them their name. And it was taken to an even further extreme by the flappers of the early 20th century, represented by Clara Bow [1905-65; film actress in silent films and early “talkies” (1921-33)] and Josephine Baker [1906-75; American-born French dancer, singer, actress (1921-75), and spy for the French Resistance (1940-44)], who rejected the corset with all its real and metaphorical limitations in exchange for unprecedented physical emancipation. Four decades later, the hippies would carry that torch, shrugging off fashion niceties the way they shrugged off antiquated ideas about sex and society.

[The Gibson Girl was the personification of the archetypal feminine ideal of physical attractiveness as portrayed by Gibson’s pen-and-ink illustrations that spanned the late Gilded Age [from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s] and Progressive Era in the U.S., from the 1890s to the 1920s. The character became iconic and came to embody the concept of the New Woman.

[Flappers were a subculture of young Western women prominent after the First World War (1914-18) and through the 1920s who wore knee-length skirts (then considered short), bobbed their hair, listened to jazz, and flaunted their disdain for prevailing codes of decent behavior. Icons of the Roaring Twenties, flappers have been seen as brash for wearing excessive makeup, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes in public, driving automobiles, treating sex in a casual manner, and otherwise flouting social and sexual norms.

[Hippies (for those too young to remember the ‘60s) were followers of a youth subculture associated with the counterculture of the mid-1960s to early 1970s that began in the United States. Hippies were the generation that followed on the beatniks (fl. 1950s). The hippies of the 1960s and 1970s inherited the Beat Generation’s rejection of materialism, embrace of Eastern religions, and interest in altered states of consciousness—though they carried the Beats’ style, scale, and substance several steps further. While the black-clad beatnik was dark, cynical, and emotionless, the tie-dyed hippie was sunny, joyful, and enthusiastic.]

At the same time, the Black liberation movement [mid-1960s through the end of the 1980s] created a modern version of the militant, challenging conventional notions of what rebellion looked like. Their disciplined fashion communicated a powerful message of revolutionary intentions and solidarity.

Affluence and Aspiration

Still, the term “American dream” wasn’t officially coined until 1931, when the popular historian James Truslow Adams [1878-1949; writer and historian] wrote the best-seller “The Epic of America” [Little, Brown, and Company, 1932]. It codified the idea of the dream as “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” Which later came to mean material attainment and conspicuous consumption.

“Making it was a big part of it,” said Valerie Steele [b. 1955; fashion historian, and curator], the director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology [a division of the State University of New York, in Manhattan, New York City]. Or rather, being “self-made.”

The foundation was originally laid by the second and third sons of the British aristocracy who emigrated to the new colonies [from the mid-17th through the 19th centuries] to build the estates that primogeniture denied them. In the south especially, they recreated the grand homes and the elaborate fashions of England (as well as its worst caste structures). Later the trappings of immense and visible wealth became the provenance of the self-made men of the gilded age, whose fortunes ushered in the era of generational wealth and created an archetype that was, Bolton said, “exported around the world.

“Henry James [1843-1916; American-British author] wrote about it, Edith Wharton [1862-1937; writer and designer] wrote about it,” Bolton said. All that opulence in environment and fashion was preserved in oils by John Singer Sargent [1856-1925; American expatriate artist; considered the leading portrait painter of his generation] and William Merritt Chase [1849-1916; painter; known as an exponent of Impressionism]. A more exuberant counterpoint was created during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, which challenged stereotypes and canonized Black style. Zoot suits, silk, satin and pearls dominated the dance floors.

[A zoot suit is a men’s fashion ensemble featuring a long, broad-shouldered jacket and high-waisted, wide-legged pants. Originating in African-American comedy shows of Black vaudeville in the 1920s, it became an iconic, rebellious cultural symbol for African-American men in the 1930s. it later became popular with Mexican, Filipino, Italian, and Japanese Americans in the 1940s, who used the dramatic, defiant style to assert their visibility and independence.]

The second gilded age arrived in the 1980s [through the 2010s], with a bigger-is-better ethos reflected in the grand talk and grander shoulders of the time, all of it memorialized in Tom Wolfe’s [1930-2018; author and journalist] “Bonfire of the Vanities” [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987] and embodied by the taffeta-clad gala-going wives of the new Wall Street robber barons.

By the late 1990s, the video maestro Hype Williams [b. 1970; music video and film director, film producer, and screenwriter] was ushering in the shiny suit era of hip-hop, followed by Jay-Z [b. 1969; rapper, businessman, and record executive] and Co., sailing into the sun on a mega-yacht in “Big Pimpin’” in 2000 [song by Jay-Z from his 1999 album Vol. 3... Life and Times of S. Carter; released as a single]. As the millennium turned, bling and brands were remixed into cultural currency by artists like 50 Cent [b. 1975; rapper, actor, television producer, record executive, and businessman], Missy Elliott [also known as Misdemeanor; b. 1971; rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer], Biggie Smalls [also known as the Notorious B.I.G.; 1972-97; rapper and songwriter] and Lil’ Kim [sic; b. 1974; rapper, singer, songwriter, and model; referred to as the “Queen of Rap”], who built images and empires out of the totems of the one percent.

Security and Reinvention

Along with financial success came another version of the American dream, one that had less to do with bling and more to do with security. It was a sense of belonging expressed through assimilation, as well as the acquisition of actual belongings.

It was after 1945, Wilentz said, when snagging the brass ring started to resemble “owning your own home, preferably in the suburbs, having stable year-round employment and making sure your children would do better than their parents’ generation.”

In the 1950s, that fantasy took the real-life form of the man in the gray flannel suit, picket fences and poodle skirts — at least until Doris Day [1922-2019; actress and singer; known for her girl-next-door image on screen] gave way to the dependably preppy style of the Ivy League. In the early and mid-1960s, the Kennedy clan dressed up their political ambitions in the crew necks, polos and chinos of the Boston Brahmins. And the self-respect conveyed through the dignity of Sunday best became a weapon wielded by Black Americans in the fight for basic freedoms during events such as the March on Washington in 1963.

[Preppy (or preppie) is a fashion style associated with the alumni of college-preparatory (“prep”) schools in the Northeastern United States. It has its roots in, and substantially overlaps with, the “Ivy League” style of dress (see below), in a more casual, youthful interpretation of Ivy style. Preppy menswear relies on quality tailoring and natural fabrics. Key staples include Oxford cloth button-down shirts, chinos, tailored polo shirts, unlined blazers, and leather loafers or boat shoes (often without socks).

[Preppy style for women centers on timeless staples like pleated skirts, cable-knit sweaters, tailored blazers, and collared shirts, often accessorized with loafers, Mary Jane shoes, headbands, and pearl jewelry. Just as the preppy male attire was a boy’s take on the clothes of the students at Ivy League colleges, the female version was the girl’s take on the dress of students at the Seven Sisters colleges, the women’s counterpart to the Ivies.

[Ivy League style—or “Ivy”—is a timeless menswear aesthetic blending British tailoring with relaxed, sporty American collegiate wear. The style evolved on the campuses of the eight elite Eastern universities dubbed the Ivy League from the 1920s through the 1940s, and became mainstream in the 1950s. Key elements include natural-shoulder blazers, Oxford cloth button-down shirts, flat-front chinos, and leather loafers. It prioritizes casual elegance, quality fabrics (wool, tweed), and a comfortable, lived-in feel.

[Women’s Ivy League style blends tailored menswear elements with smart, collegiate basics. It relies on crisp Oxford shirts, cable-knit sweaters, and trench coats, balanced with pleated midi skirts, loafers, and a refined, earthy color palette. The women’s Ivy style developed on the campuses of the Seven Sisters about ten years after the men’s style began.

[John F. Kennedy [also known as JFK; 1917-63; 35th President of the United States: 1961-63], along with the extended Kennedy family (i.e., “the Kennedy clan”), epitomized everything preppy during its mid-20th-century heyday. JFK’s effortless blend of casual sophistication—polo shirts on the sailboat, chinos at family gatherings, and sharp suits in the Oval Office—set a benchmark for a style that feels as relevant today as it did in the 1960s.

[The Boston Brahmins are members of Boston's elite, wealthy, and educated historic upper class. Descendants of the earliest English colonists are typically considered to be the most representative of the Boston Brahmins. The term, derived from brahmin, the chief priestly caste in the Hindu caste system, refers to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) of old English and Puritan descent who built America’s closest equivalent to an aristocracy. They were known for a style of “quiet luxury” that favored conservative, high-quality attire (such as navy or charcoal suits combined with well-polished vintage leather shoes).]

Not quite two decades later, Martha Stewart [b. 1941; retail businesswoman, writer, and television personality] cooked up a new version of suburban life, repackaging her kitchen in Connecticut as a kind of apple pie paradise and herself as a domestic goddess.

The one thing all of these versions of the American dream have in common, however, is the belief in the power and right of every person to reinvention and optimization in any way available. It was the premise on which Hollywood was built, starting in the Golden Age with the soft focus, idealized and manufactured beauty of stars like as Jean Harlow [1911-37; film actress], Lena Horne [1917-2010; singer, actress, dancer, and civil rights activist] and Greta Garbo [1905-90; Swedish and American film actress], whose fame was its own kind of fortune.

Not to mention the promise inherent in the high-wattage sparkle of disco, where every song and sequin was electrified, as well as the physical perfection dangled by the aerobics age that followed, channeled most effectively by Jane Fonda [b. 1937; actress and activist] in her 1982 VHS workout tape [Jane Fonda’s Workout], which became one of the best-selling home videos of all time.

[In addition to the musical style, disco was a lifestyle and fashion movement. It was a radical, counter-cultural celebration of escapism, self-expression, and democratization that peaked in the mid-to-late 1970s. It was characterized by a sharp rejection of mid-century social conformity, the ruggedness of rock culture, and the anxieties of a turbulent economic era.

[Disco as a lifestyle was defined by a specific set of cultural shifts. It provided a deliberate sanctuary from the grueling economic recession, inflation, and political disillusionment of the 1970s. It originated as a safe haven for marginalized communities—specifically Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ individuals—before breaking into the mainstream. 

[As a cultural movement, it transformed nightlife into a theater of radical self-invention. It used fluid, high-glamour fashion and uninhibited physical movement to challenge traditional social barriers and offer a hedonistic escape from everyday reality.

[It shifted the cultural focus toward physical fitness, dance athleticism, uninhibited sexuality, and public display. It allowed working-class individuals to transform into glamorous, larger-than-life celebrities for a night just by stepping past a velvet rope.

[Disco fashion was built for performance, movement, and capturing the reflections of artificial light. It relied on lightweight, stretchy materials like Jersey knit, Lurex, and Qiana nylon that clung to the body and flowed during dance. It popularized shimmering sequins, metallic fabrics, satin, and bold jewel tones designed to gleam under flashing strobe lights. 

[It featured iconic structural elements like wide bell-bottoms, towering platform shoes, wrap dresses, and dramatically pointed collars unbuttoned to the chest. It blurred traditional style boundaries, encouraging men to wear cosmetics, silk shirts, and jewelry, while women embraced menswear-inspired tailored suits. 

Reinvention was the basis of the rejection of the old corporate uniform by the social media pioneers of Silicon Valley, who introduced the “zero dress code,” redefining office wear to suggest they were redefining industry, making it accessible to all. By the 2010s, it became the platform on which the Kardashians introduced themselves, becoming the ultimate avatars of the influencer economy in which celebrity through self-modification was an end in itself.

[“Zero dress code” serves as a general term describing workplace environments or events that enforce no restrictions on clothing. When used in a professional or event context, a "zero dress code" policy means there’s no formal mandate on what you must wear.

[In the early 1990s, employers institutionalized “Casual Fridays” on a wide scale. The actual concept of a true “zero dress code” emerged, however, in the 2000s and the 2010s alongside the dot-com boom and the rise of Silicon Valley. 

[Tech company CEO’s popularized the idea that success doesn’t require being buttoned up. Wearing t-shirts, hoodies, and flip-flops became a badge of innovation. Traditional institutions were eventually forced to match tech culture to retain talent.

[The ultimate transition into “zero dress code” policies solidified during the shift to remote and hybrid work in the 2020s. As professional meetings moved onto video screens, the standard for corporate clothing became highly contextual. 

[This move was reinforced and accelerated by the COVID pandemic practices, when many people worked from home and conferred over Zoom. Modern companies frequently replaced complex rules with a single, simplified mandate: “Dress for your day.” This relies on employee maturity to choose comfort for internal work and dress up only when facing clients.

[The Kardashian family, also referred to as the Kardashian-Jenner family, is prominent in the fields of entertainment, reality television, fashion design, and business. Through different ventures, several members of the family are reported to have assets of over $1 billion. From October 2007 through June 2021, they appeared together on the highly popular, albeit controversial, reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The show’s 14-year run gave and maintained media exposure to each member of the family, allowing them to start and build their individual careers in multiple businesses. (The family has been criticized as being “famous for being famous.”)]

In many ways, Trump’s version of the American dream is simply a throwback to the set dressing and costumes of the former gilded ages, viewed through the lens of televised materialism.

But even as it may seem increasingly stale and commodified, kitschy and tainted, the American Dream continues to endure — rewritten, revived, and reinterpreted by the figures shaping our lives and imaginations.

Because ultimately the look of the American dream is no more static than the dream itself. As Cullen said, it is “most authentically experienced as a struggle to achieve, not a destination.” And it is worn that way, too.

[Vanessa Friedman has been chronicling the relationship of clothing to identity, power, and politics for the New York Times since 2014.  She focuses on fashion as an expression of political, social, and cultural identity at a specific moment in time, especially how it is used by those in the public eye to communicate values and influence opinion.  

[She looks at how designers translate that into products for all of us on the runway, as well as the evolution of fashion into a part of pop culture.  She also examine the way all of that influences the larger business of fashion, one of the world’s biggest industries.

[Prior to joining the Times, Friedman spent 11 years at the Financial Times, five of them in London.  She was the FT’s first fashion editor, and the FT was my first all-fashion job.

[Before that, Friedman focused on culture coverage at magazines such as InStyle, The Economist, and The New Yorker.  She’s won the Fashion Group International’s Media Award, the Front Page award for fashion writing, and the Fashion/Beauty Monitor award for fashion journalist of the year.

[For “250 Years of Dressing for the American Dream,” she spoke with historians and museum curators about the patterns they saw in its seams.]