Skip to Main Content
You are now in the main content area
Kimberly Wahl

Dr. Kimberly Wahl

Associate Professor
EducationBA Psychology, York University; BFA Visual Arts, York University; MA Art History, University of Western Ontario; PhD Art History, Queen’s University

Dr. Kimberly Wahl is an Associate Professor in the School of Fashion, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada.  Her research examines the complex relations between visual, material, and embodied aspects of fashion.  She is particularly interested in historical expressions of artistic or alternative forms of dress, where individual or shared clothing preferences have challenged or eschewed normative patterns of fashion communication and consumption.  Past publications and funded research projects have explored the dress cultures of nineteenth-century Aestheticism, as well as fashion and feminism in the context of the Suffrage movement in the early Twentieth Century. Her current work addresses concepts of neurodiversity and difference across multiple fields relevant to fashion studies, including (but not limited to): affect theory and new materialism; critical/literary perspectives on Madness; and disabilities studies. 

  • Art History/Theory (including dress/textiles)
  • Fashion and Feminism
  • Critical Dress Practices (alternative and/or political forms of dress)
  • Neurodiversity/Affect theory/New Materialism

  • Wahl, Kimberly. “There is Madness in Fashion.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Fashion and the Body, edited by Tanveer Ahmed, Rimi Khan, Ilya Parkins and Jane Tynan. Palgrave Macmillan/ Springer Nature (In Press).
  • Wahl, Kimberly. “Bifurcated Garments and Divided Skirts: Redrawing the Borders of the Sartorial Feminine in Late Victorian Culture.” In Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend, edited by Andrew Reilly and Ben Barry, 22-34. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2020.  
  • Wahl, Kimberly. “Silencing Fashion in Early Twentieth-Century Feminism: The Sartorial Story of Suffrage.” In Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, Politics and the Body, 1775-1925, edited by Justine de Young, 207-232. London: I.B. Tauris, 2017.
  • Wahl, Kimberly. “Purity and Parity: The White Dress of the Suffrage Movement in early Twentieth-Century Britain.” In Colors in Fashion, edited by Jonathan Faiers and Mary Westerman Bulgarella, 21-33. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.
  • Wahl, Kimberly. “Picturing the Material/Manifesting the Visual: Aesthetic Dress in Late Nineteenth-Century British Culture.” In Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice, edited by Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen, 97-112.  London: Bloomsbury, 2015.  
  • Wahl, Kimberly. Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform. Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2013.