December Member Spotlight: Julia Mooney

The following is paraphrased from Gene Sloan, USA TODAY writer: “In a project that’s drawing national attention, the 35-year-old art teacher at William Allen Middle School has vowed to wear the dress every day she teaches for the first 100 days of the school year (which will take her to mid February) Mooney is using the project to draw attention to what she calls a growing “culture of excess” in America that has filled our closets to overflowing with throwaway garments. “There is no rule anywhere that says that we have to wear a different thing every day,” she says. “Why do we ask this of each other? Why do we require that we each wear something different every day and buy more clothes and feed into this fast-fashion culture?” Mooney is not alone. She is sparking discussion among her students, friends and coworkers about the peer pressure children face to buy the latest fashions and the sustainability of their “consume, consume, consume” habits. She says that the project reminds her to define herself by “the good that I do, not how good I look”. She says, “I think it’s very similar to the kind of art that contemporary artists make today. Many, like Ai Wei Wei, blur the lines between art and activism. Artists by nature question societal norms, so I feel like it fits right into the contemporary notion of what an artist looks like, and provides a harmless demonstration of that to students.”