Ilya Parkins
Ilya Parkins is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She has long researched the intersections between fashion, femininities, and feminist theory. She has worked extensively on how femininity shaped Christian Dior’s self-representations. Some of this work can be found in her 2012 book Poiret, Schiaparelli, and Dior: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity, which examines how women and femininity figure in three early twentieth-century designers’ self-fashioning efforts. Dr. Parkins is also the co-editor of the 2011 volume of essays, Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion, which covers the period from 1860-1940. More recently, she co-edited a 2018 issue of the influential journal Australian Feminist Studies on the topic of Fashion. Her current research concerns questions of wedding dress and apparel in online feminist wedding media, and she is co-editing two exciting, linked special issues of different journals on fashion media, spanning the period from the late nineteenth century to the present.