| Abstract: | New York Vogue published a photographic feature just over two months after Hurricane Sandy hit the Eastern seaboard of the USA, to commemorate the work of New York City emergency responders in the wake of the disaster. Juxtaposing fashionably clad models with responders, the feature invoked a gendered and classed rhetoric of fashion, crisis, and temporality to create both a memory of the disaster, and a vision of the metropolis and its future. This article draws on fashion theory, critical disaster studies, and urban geography to show that the feature is emblematic of an emergent approach to disaster recovery and urban development under neoliberalism. In particular, disaster management and recovery protocols benefit from the complex temporality of fashion, with its simultaneous deployment of past, present, and future, to sketch a possible rebuilding of New York City that benefits the transnational capitalist class for whom urban development is increasingly tailored. A close reading of the logics of class, race, and gender in the photographs shows that the imagined future towards which New York's recovery from Sandy might proceed is characterized by a contingent ‘whitening’ of people of colour as they ascend to a transnational elite, and a conception of the city as a site for gendered leisure rather than a zone of social inequalities. |
