Stitching & Glitching with Dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell

Stitching & Glitching with Dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell is a weekly (Tuesday morning) show exploring fashion theory, visual culture, sociocultural histories of dress, and the political economies that shape what we wear. Hosted by Dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell, professor of fashion studies at Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto, the show moves between current research, cultural critique, archival discoveries, and conversations with occasional guests from the worlds of fashion, art, design, and scholarship.

O’Connell’s research focuses on visual culture and political economy within the history of fashion. He is the author of Canadian Fashion Economies: A Select History of Fashion Culture, Commerce, and Colonization, published by Bloomsbury UK in 2025, as well as Lilac Time at the Rodeo: Stories of Identity, AIDS & Fashion and Lilac Time at the Rodeo 2: Marie Debris, David Wojnarowicz, Martin Wong. His academic writing has appeared in Fashion Theory, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Fashion, Style & Popular Culture, and Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture.

Bringing together scholarship, storytelling, creative practice, and industry experience, Stitching & Glitching examines fashion as culture, commerce, identity, memory, politics, and art. Before entering academia, O’Connell worked as a designer both in-house at M.A.C Cosmetics and through his own clothing line, Modular Menswear. He is also an artist and fiction writer, with current work available at markoconnellstudio.com.

New Episode Every Tuesday Morning!

Episode: No One Has to Die for This Kinda Love: Why Heated Rivalry Going Global Changes Everything

No One Has to Die for This Kinda Love: Why Heated Rivalry Going Global Changes Everything

In this episode of Stitching & Glitching, Dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell turns to Heated Rivalry as more than a romance: a cultural moment in contemporary Queer storytelling. Set within the hypermasculine world of professional hockey, Heated Rivalry follows two elite athletes whose fierce competition becomes something intimate, erotic, and emotionally undeniable. What begins in secrecy and rivalry develops into a love that refuses to be erased.

This episode examines why Heated Rivalry matters now, particularly as it reaches a global audience. Rather than relying on subtext, euphemism, or tragic resolution, the series places Queer desire at the centre of the narrative. Its power lies in its refusal of the familiar “Queer tragic paradigm,” where same-sex love is too often made meaningful through suffering, punishment, or death. In contrast to earlier cultural texts such as Brokeback Mountain, where visibility is devastatingly linked to danger and loss, Heated Rivalry imagines Queer love as survivable, durable, and real.

Through a cultural studies lens, Dr. O’Connell explores how the series reworks masculinity, athleticism, intimacy, and public visibility. Queerness does not weaken or undo masculinity here; it transforms it through longing, competition, vulnerability, and commitment. The story also engages with the material realities of labour, family, institutional power, and celebrity, showing how love is negotiated over time rather than resolved through tragedy.

At its heart, this episode asks why it still feels radical to see Queer desire represented without narrative punishment. Heated Rivalry offers a vision of Queer joy, erotic truth, and emotional continuity within mainstream prestige television storytelling. No one has to die for this love to matter. No one has to be destroyed for the story to be profound.

Episode: Pride Talk 2025

Dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell, Pride Month 2025 Keynote Talk: Lilac Time at the Rodeo

Seneca Polytechnic, King Campus — Tuesday, June 3, 2025

In this episode of Stitching & Glitching with Dr. Mark Joseph O’Connell, we feature Dr. O’Connell’s Pride Month 2025 keynote talk, Lilac Time at the Rodeo, delivered at Seneca Polytechnic’s King Campus on Tuesday, June 3, 2025.

This keynote explores the lives, work, and cultural significance of Way Bandy, Halston, and Scott Barrie, three figures whose contributions to fashion, beauty, and visual culture shaped the glamour, intimacy, and complexity of late twentieth-century style. Through their stories, Dr. O’Connell considers how fashion becomes a site of Queer identity, artistic self-invention, desire, labour, and cultural memory.

Rather than treating fashion as surface or spectacle, Lilac Time at the Rodeo examines how style can carry histories of visibility, vulnerability, ambition, and loss. The talk situates Bandy, Halston, and Barrie within broader conversations about Queer creativity, the politics of image-making, the fashion industry, and the ongoing legacies of AIDS, remembrance, and cultural erasure. Presented during Pride Month, this episode reflects on the importance of recovering and honouring Queer fashion histories that have too often been marginalized or forgotten. It asks how beauty, design, and self-presentation can become acts of survival, testimony, and world-making.

Episode: Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City

This episode examines the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City as one of the most significant architectural and cultural projects of early twenty-first-century Mexico. More than a public library, the building redefines the relationship between architecture, knowledge, and civic life through a design that merges monumentality with openness, infrastructure with landscape, and function with symbolism. Designed by Alberto Kalach, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos transforms the library into an immersive spatial experience rather than a conventional repository of books. The talk considers its suspended shelving systems, exposed structural hardware, integrated furniture, and vast interior volumes, showing how material and spatial decisions shape the visitor’s encounter with knowledge.

I also explore the conceptual dimensions of the project, including transparency, movement, circulation, and the experience of seemingly infinite information. The library’s dramatic interior recalls literary metaphors such as Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, inviting visitors to navigate knowledge physically while confronting both the exhilaration and the overwhelming scale of collective human thought. Particular attention is given to the role of art within the space, especially Gabriel Orozco’s Mobile Matrix, a suspended whale skeleton that reinforces the building’s dialogue between nature, science, architecture, and culture. The work amplifies the library’s sense of wonder, positioning it as a place where learning is embodied, visual, and atmospheric.

Finally, the episode situates the Biblioteca Vasconcelos within the urban and social context of Mexico City, examining how its architectural ambition has been matched by widespread public affection. By balancing technical innovation with accessibility and human experience, the library emerges as a landmark of contemporary design, a dynamic cultural ecosystem, and a vibrant civic space embraced by its many users.

#BibliotecaVasconcelos #MexicoCityArchitecture #ContemporaryArchitecture #UrbanDesign #AlbertoKalach #GabrielOrozco #CDMX #CulturalInfrastructure

Episode: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City

This episode examines the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City as a vital site for understanding contemporary art in Mexico and Latin America. Located on the campus of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and opened in 2008, MUAC was conceived as the first public museum in Mexico dedicated specifically to collecting, researching, and exhibiting contemporary art from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. More than a museum, MUAC functions as a research centre, pedagogical platform, and public cultural institution embedded within the intellectual life of UNAM and situated in Ciudad Universitaria, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The lecture explores how MUAC’s architecture, designed by Teodoro González de León, shapes the experience of contemporary art through monumental concrete forms, flexible gallery spaces, and an openness to large-scale installations, experimental formats, and immersive environments. Through a series of key exhibitions, the presentation considers how the museum bridges historical reflection and contemporary experimentation.

Central to the discussion is Ai Weiwei’s 2019 exhibition Restablecer Memorias, which addressed the construction of social memory across geopolitical contexts. From the presentation of a 400-year-old Ming dynasty ancestral hall to works commemorating the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, Ai’s exhibition foregrounded cultural destruction, collective trauma, and the ethical responsibilities of remembrance.

The lecture also examines Una modernidad hecha a mano (2022), curated by Ana Elena Mallet, which traced the development of Mexican design from 1952 to the present. Beginning with Clara Porset’s foundational exhibition El arte en la vida diaria, the project reframed artesanal design as a socially engaged and aesthetically innovative response to modern life.

A significant portion of the lecture focuses on Mis caminos son terrestres, an exhibition dedicated to Marta Palau, whose monumental fibre-based works explore migration, exile, territory, and embodied identity. Through weaving and organic materials, Palau challenges hierarchies between fine art and craft, articulating a feminist and decolonial understanding of materiality grounded in the earth.

Additional exhibitions discussed include Los grupos y otras revueltas artísticas, which revisits the role of artist collectives in reshaping Mexican contemporary art since the 1960s; Delcy Morelos’s immersive installation El espacio vientre, which transforms the gallery into a sensorial environment exploring earth, fertility, and myth; and the spatial interventions of Néstor Jiménez, whose subtle manipulations of architectural and everyday materials engage directly with MUAC’s modernist structure.

Taken together, these exhibitions reveal recurring concerns in contemporary art: collective action, memory and disappearance, the relationship between body and territory, ecological consciousness, and the critical revaluation of craft practices. Ultimately, the lecture argues that MUAC occupies a crucial position within Mexico’s cultural landscape, bridging academic research and public engagement while fostering rigorous, visually compelling dialogue around art’s capacity to respond to social, political, and ecological realities.

More information:

[Insert full markoconnellstudio.com link]

#MUAC #MuseoUniversitarioArteContemporáneo #UNAM #ContemporaryArt #MexicanContemporaryArt #LatinAmericanArt #ArtAndMemory #CollectiveMemory #SocialPractice #ArtAndPolitics #ArtAndArchitecture #TeodoroGonzálezDeLeón #AiWeiwei #RestablecerMemorias #Ayotzinapa43 #UnaModernidadHechaAMano #MexicanDesign #ClaraPorset #MartaPalau #FiberArt #WeavingAsResistance #FeministArt #DecolonialArt #LosGrupos #ArtCollectives #DelcyMorelos #ElEspacioVientre #NéstorJiménez #Materiality #CraftAndModernity

Episode: “Simulacra in Silk: Haraway’s Cyborg, Performative ‘Femininity,’ and the Aesthetics of the Automaton on the Margiela Runway,”

“Simulacra in Silk: Haraway’s Cyborg, Performative ‘Femininity,’ and the Aesthetics of the Automaton on the Margiela Runway,”

In this video, I read my article “Simulacra in Silk: Haraway’s Cyborg, Performative ‘Femininity,’ and the Aesthetics of the Automaton on the Margiela Runway,” published in Fashion Theory in 2026.

The article examines Maison Margiela’s Artisanal 2024 runway show by John Galliano through feminist technoscience, philosophy of technology, media theory, and critical fashion studies. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s cyborg, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, and Hans Jonas’s ethics of technological power, the essay explores how fashion stages femininity as a technological performance: mechanical, over-coded, historically scripted, and deliberately malfunctioning.

By tracing the figure of the female automaton across fashion, cinema, costume, and visual culture, the article argues that Galliano’s Margiela runway constructs femininity not as essence or stable identity, but as a repeated system of signs, gestures, surfaces, and scripts. The models appear as cyborgs of aesthetic failure, revealing how gender, technology, embodiment, and spectacle are mutually produced through design, movement, staging, and visual excess.

This research uses a hybrid methodology that combines critical theoretical analysis with art-based visual exploration. Rather than treating theory and artistic practice as separate modes of inquiry, the project understands them as mutually constitutive. Theory shapes the reading of visual material, while fashion images, runway performances, cinematic stills, and design objects operate as sites of knowledge production in their own right.

Through close visual reading, comparative analysis, and speculative interpretation, the article considers how recurring figures such as the automaton, the cyborg, and the malfunctioning body help us understand contemporary technological subjectivity. Fashion and visual culture are approached not merely as illustrations of theory, but as epistemic objects that actively theorize gender, technology, and the body through aesthetic form.

Publication details:

O’Connell, M. J. (2026). “Simulacra in Silk: Haraway’s Cyborg, Performative ‘Femininity,’ and the Aesthetics of the Automaton on the Margiela Runway.” Fashion Theory, 1–36.

Access the article here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1362704X.2026.2614117

#FashionTheory #CriticalFashion #DonnaHaraway #CyborgTheory #GenderPerformativity #JudithButler #JeanBaudrillard #Simulacra #MaisonMargiela #Margiela #Gucci #IrisVanHerpen #AlexanderMcQueen #JohnGalliano #RunwayAnalysis #VisualCulture #FeministTheory #Posthumanism #PhilosophyOfTechnology #ArtAndTheory #FashionStudies #Fashion

Episode: Iris Simpson, Luxury Fashion Buyer & Stylist

In this episode of Stitching & Glitching, we explore the remarkable career of Iris Simpson, a trailblazing figure in Canadian fashion whose influence spans more than four decades. As one of the first Black women to hold a senior luxury fashion buying position in Canada, Simpson helped shape Toronto’s high-fashion retail scene through her work with iconic institutions including Holt Renfrew, Creeds, and the Yves Saint Laurent boutique at Hazelton Lanes.

From her early fascination with fashion, inspired by her mother’s craftsmanship, to her groundbreaking role as a buyer in the 1970s and 1980s, Simpson’s story reveals a powerful history of resilience, representation, and creative vision. At a time when Black women were rarely visible in elite fashion spaces, she built a career defined by expertise, style, and determination, bringing international designers to Canadian consumers while also championing Black designers such as Patrick Kelly and Willi Smith. This conversation situates Simpson’s legacy within the broader evolution of Canadian fashion, tracing the rise of Toronto as a luxury shopping destination and reflecting on the exclusions that have shaped mainstream fashion narratives. Her impact extends beyond retail buying into styling, mentorship, and advocacy, opening doors for future generations of Black professionals in fashion.

Iris Simpson’s story is one of innovation, perseverance, and lasting influence. This episode celebrates her extraordinary contributions while asking what it means to build a more inclusive and representative fashion industry.