Fashion & Costume Historian. Archivist & Researcher.
Background: First-Generation Latin-American; Second-Generation Immigrant; born in San Francisco, CA, raised bicoastally in Miami, FL, established career in New York.
Education: MSLIS ALA-Accredited in Archival Studies (candidate), St. John’s University; MA in Fashion Studies, Parsons School of Design; BA in Studio Art + Art History minor, University of California, Riverside.
Studies: “Women’s History: 10 Objects, Many Stories“ at Harvard University/ HarvardX; “History of Italian Fashion” at Lorenzo de’ Medici (The Italian International Institute); “Race and American Film” and “Gender in American Culture” at the University of California, Berkeley.
Work: Rivas lives bicoastally (NY and CA) and works internationally as an independent researcher, freelance writer, project archivist, creative consultant, collections specialist, and global lecturer. She is also a Board Member of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, Inc. (A.R.T).
Clients include Helen Uffner Vintage Clothing; Levi Strauss & Co. Archives; Garde Robe by UOVO; The Wardrobe; Parodi Costume Collection; WindowsWear Museum; Coach Archives; andARCHIVE; A Current Affair; The New School Archives and Special Collections; California Museum of Photography, et al.
Current Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies in the Art & Design department and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies interdisciplinary program at St. John’s University; Former educator at Berkeley College and the Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online Division; Guest speaker at Cardiff University and Parsons School of Design; Creator of the Archaeology of Fashion: And The Discourse on Secondhand Objects, a podcast and research platform.
I am a fashion and costume historian, archivist and researcher trained in preserving material objects and enriching hybrid collections in diverse spaces.
With historically-informed references for innovative storytelling through archival research, my areas of expertise focus on providing chronological, cultural, and creative contexts for artifacts —often in literary, seminar, workshop, database, and deliverable formats— in addition to executing organizational management, performing collections care, curating engaging projects, driving pedagogical initiatives, participating in collaborative productions, and contriving digestible content for various institutions.
My current inquiries examine the entanglements between nontraditional archives (personal closets) and material culture (clothing) across frameworks to sustain the memories of worn history. My upcoming book Cultivating Identities of Second-Generation Immigrants Through the Archaeology of Fashion: A Discourse on Secondhand Objects (Lived Places Publishing, 2026) intellectualizes how we think about everyday garments through intergenerational secondhand cultures to understand the lives of its wearers. I am interested in how fashion, personal style, and the clothes we wear reflect an image of our story and self-identity, used as material (auto)biography in our sartorial evolutions.
As an advancing scholar, practicing educator, industry professional, and cultural memory worker, my objectives center on providing non-specialists access to fashion history and advocate fashion, clothing, and dress practices as legitimate scholarship subjects within academia.
What is fashion archiving? What does researching fashion in archives mean?
Fashion archiving provides insight into library and information science within the contours of fashion studies and vice versa. It also raises questions about the role of archivists as guardians of information that interweaves with positions of guardians of material memory. It asserts that clothes are more than “just clothes” and are potent resources ripe for academic and public research.
The objects stored in archives inform our interpretation of fashion as a historical and cultural component. They inherit ways in which civilizations cultivated communication, mediated its expansion, and motioned into its selected continuance. Collections that are different in chronology, geography, provenance, and purpose allow the freedom to create research routes to salvage the past, unravel the present, and envision the future.
My background in fashion studies (concentration on fashion history and theory) applies specialized knowledge about certain subjects, objects, designs, designers, and their significance, complemented by my current training in library and information science (concentration on archival studies) for the technical skills in ensuring the long-term physical survival of these material objects.
Why is fashion archiving important?
Preservation is a political act. It requires a selection process of principles where feminist thought challenges the assumptions of whose life experience is of value within the archival space, determining what information will be accessible in the future. Therefore, the fine art of fashion archiving can be a radical profession in its effort to give a voice to material objects and their stories, especially artifacts excavated from marginalized communities and minorities. It bares itself as a feminist practice, revealing articles of clothing as repositories of embodied historical knowledge for cultural heritage in the organization and management of human and social records.
With an extensive educational and professional scholarship, my advancing curiosities include researching, writing, archiving, preserving, lecturing, consulting, collaborating, and curating stories within the fine & applied arts and social sciences. I want to migrate subjects within woven histories of archival material off the shelves of private settings and into the public sphere while drawing connections to everyday life through dress. My goal and mission are to materialize accessibility for fashion intellects, industry professionals, nonexperts, and a global audience not only in the 21st century but for research needs a hundred years from now.