Punk subculture, which expands past the clothes to encompass various ideologies and forms of expression in the arts, has origins within a community of people who share a mutual passion for the genre of punk rock music and have anti-establishment and anti-capitalist attitudes. However, even this is a grossly simplified description of a far more complex culture.
For Monica Sklar, it’s a lifestyle that she’s been involved in since her teenage years, and she’s dedicated to educating others on what it really means.
Assistant professor of fashion history and merchandising at the University of Georgia is just one of the titles that Monica Sklar holds. Besides teaching several classes, Sklar is also the author of “Punk Style,” an exploration of punk fashion and the liaison to the 3,000-piece Historic Clothing and Textile Collection at the UGA Special Collections Libraries located on South Hull Street.
The job at UGA is what brought Sklar to Athens in fall of 2016 after she finished up her doctorate in design with an emphasis in fashion history and culture at the University of Minnesota. Before moving to Minnesota, she lived in metro Detroit, where she grew up.
“Fashion history or culture related academic or museum positions are few and far between, so this was a really good opportunity,” Sklar said.
More than meets the eye
Jean Dolls, which Monica Sklar has collected for nearly 20 years, are displayed in her office in Barrow Hall.
Although Sklar didn’t discover her love for fashion history in particular until later on into her adulthood, she always knew fashion was her calling. Fashion itself has been a part of her life since she was a child, Sklar said.
“It was inherent to who I was and what my interests were, so I latched onto it really early,” Sklar said.
As a child, Sklar owned “a million Barbie dolls” and constantly changed their outfits and cut their hair. Dressing up with friends, dance classes and MTV were also huge influences that helped solidify her love for fashion.
Because fashion stuck so early on, Sklar never felt the need to explore other options. However, she did have lots of hobbies.
The only thing Sklar ever had to think about was what path to go down within the industry itself.
“It’s a much wider industry than what is recognized outside of the industry, so it took me a while to find my footing,” Sklar said. “Did I want to be a journalist, a buyer, a historian or a wardrobe stylist? There’s so many paths.”
Discovering "why"
Before finding her place in design history and subculture, Sklar dabbled in everything from working in retail and exhibition design to wardrobe styling for bands. Her experience in all of these areas eventually led to her one true passion.
“All this time that I spent on the retail side — selling and marketing — or the physical side — how to design something — it kept boiling down to an interest in why we do all this [in the first place],” Sklar said.
Sklar was keen on learning how fashion impacts people in different ways during various time periods. She grew fascinated with a field that led to more scholarly research about how people feel about fashion and what they’re trying to achieve or communicate with it.
“It’s really not a subfield as much as it is foundational,” Sklar said. “One can’t have a supply chain from fiber to fabric to design to object to merchandising and marketing without understanding supply and demand, consumer wants and needs and all the social and cultural contexts.”
As she started working toward her doctorate degree, Sklar narrowed her focus on subculture and explored punk culture specifically.
Mary Kate Donahue, a senior fashion merchandising major from Bethesda, Maryland, has worked alongside Sklar since fall of 2017 and is the co-author of a few of Sklar’s research publications on punk culture. She was first given the opportunity as a student in one of Sklar’s classes. The journal articles relate to different aspects of punk, such as the clothes that people wear and the intentions behind certain punk-influenced clothing.
“She’s super knowledgeable in fashion specifically and she’s someone who really cares about her students and their wellbeing and success,” Donahue said.
Because Sklar is personally involved with the punk community, she feels a sense of responsibility to educate others on the community and the culture.
“I like the stylistic elements of it, and I’ve always understood that punk culture hasn’t been widely documented, particularly in the United States,” Sklar said. “It’s the kind of culture that is best documented from the inside in terms of understanding all its nuances, its codes, cues and details.”
As the liaison to the collection, Sklar is now actively going through a process of planning, funding and grant writing to grow the potential of the collection and focus the collection’s mission in a way that makes sense for both UGA and Georgia.
The collection holds 3,000 pieces, which is composed of mostly women’s, men’s and some children’s wear, as well as some accessories and textiles. The mission of the collection is to accurately document southeastern history, particularly Georgia, from the 1850s to the 1990s.
The collection is fully dependent on donations, and there’s no budget to purchase specialized items.
Fostering a conversation
Outside of teaching and being involved within the UGA community, Sklar is actively working on personal projects to promote her own personal mission: to include more people in a conversation about fashion.
She’s currently working on a large-scale qualitative research project on the history of punk merchandising in the U.S., as well as a secondary project on Motown Records, an American record label founded in 1959, and the Motown style and wardrobe of the 1960s.
“The unifying thing about all of this is that whether I have to write personal statements or digitize collections … or have one-on-one interactions in the classroom, I want to democratize the content,” Sklar said. “It’s always troubling to think of fashion as a luxury and elitist — fashion should be a daily conversation.”
