As Seen At Symposium: Reimagining the Yellow Brick Road: Costume, Black Identity, and Cultural Representation in The Wiz (1978)
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
7:00 pm Eastern/4:00 pm Pacific
Exclusively for CSA Members

Join us for an engaging installment of our As Seen at Symposium series, spotlighting the work of CSA member and scholar Lauryn Grubbs. A PhD student in the Apparel Design program at Cornell University, Grubbs’s research explores the ways Black women use style to challenge and subvert negative portrayals of Black womanhood in U.S. popular culture—revealing fashion as a powerful site of resistance, creativity, and cultural authorship.

A dedicated member of CSA since 2023 and currently serving as Mid-Atlantic Region Finance Chair, Grubbs brings both intellectual rigor and deep community commitment to her scholarship. This past summer at CSA’s 51st Annual National Meeting and Symposium, she presented two papers that invited attendees to reconsider the cultural and political dimensions of dress and representation. Among them, “Reimagining the Yellow Brick Road: Costume, Black Identity, and Cultural Representation in The Wiz (1978)” offered a compelling analysis of costume as a vehicle for reinterpreting Black identity within a beloved cultural text.

In this program, participants will revisit Grubbs’s Symposium presentation, followed by a live conversation with the scholar as she reflects on her research process, its broader implications, and the evolving intersections of costume, media, and Black expressive culture. Together, we will consider how style functions not merely as adornment, but as a deliberate and transformative response to cultural narratives.

Whether you joined us at the Symposium or are encountering this work for the first time, this event offers a meaningful opportunity to engage with emerging scholarship that centers Black women’s sartorial innovation as both critique and celebration. We look forward to welcoming you into what promises to be a thoughtful and dynamic conversation.

Click here to register
Registration closes 24 hours prior to the event.
If you missed the deadline, email conversationsondress@costumesocietyamerica.com.