Emma McClendon is a fashion historian, curator, and author based in Washington D.C. Her most recent publication (Re)Dressing American Fashion: Wear as Witness was released with Yale University Press and the Bard Graduate Center in May 2025. Co-authored with Dr. Lauren Downing Peters, (Re)Dressing American Fashion expands the history of fashion in the United States by highlighting garments that carry material traces of everyday wearers’ bodies, such as stains, rips, tears, mending, and signs of hand-craftsmanship.

While a curator at The Museum at FIT from 2011-2020, McClendon organized numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions, including Power Mode: The Force of Fashion (2019), The Body: Fashion and Physique (2017) and Denim: Fashion's Frontier (2015). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, CNN, The Washington Post, Vogue, WWD, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. She has taught in the Fashion Studies programs at Parsons School of Design, The Fashion Institute of Technology, and St. John’s University.

McClendon holds an MA Hons. in Art History from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and an MA in the History of Dress from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is currently completing her PhD at the Bard Graduate Center. Her research focuses on the power dynamics inherent in clothing with a particular interest in body politics, labor, technology, and standardized sizing.