Fashion & Memory: Jaleesa Reed
Reclaiming the terno across the diaspora
For Dr. Jaleesa Reed, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design at Cornell University, the terno is more than fabric. It is a vessel for memory, a way of negotiating belonging and the layered realities of identity. “To study the terno in detail, I had to ask my mom to bring one back from the Philippines,” she explains. “She just bought one at a mall, but no one has worn it.” The unworn terno marks the beginning of an in-depth scholarly exploration. As a biracial scholar of dress and diaspora, Reed traces how Filipino fashion travels and holds memory across continents.
Jaleesa Reed’s mother in the Philippines, around 18 years old, at Subic Bay Image courtesy of Jaleesa Reed.
Jaleesa Reed and her parents in Virginia, 1991. Image courtesy of Jaleesa Reed.
Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, Reed’s early understanding of identity as a Black and Filipino American unfolded through community. “I grew up around a mixed community,” she recalls. “A lot of people were biracial, though not necessarily Filipino and Black. It was not until college that I realised how different that was.”
It was during her undergraduate years, specifically a course titled “Dress, Society and Culture”, that she began to see fashion as a critical lens for understanding identity. Assigned to study a single garment, she initially chose the barong tagalog, wishing to study the ways Filipino Americans used cultural dress during celebrations. Yet, she found a striking lack of scholarship. “There was nothing on the topic. I could only look at it from the perspective of the fabric,” she says. In her later academic career, Reed shifted her focus to millennial Black women and Black American beauty culture, which became the topics of her master’s thesis and PhD dissertation.
Close-up of a terno from the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection used for analysis. Image courtesy of Jaleesa Reed.
That earlier absence would later become her academic motivation. At Cornell, she discovered a trove of resources documenting the terno’s evolution, research that led to the creation of The Dictionary of Filipino Dress, an open-access resource compiling terminology. “The dictionary came out of realising that the sources existed, but we just could not access them,” she explains. “I wanted people like myself as an undergraduate student, who were curious about Filipino dress, to have a place to start.” For Reed, open access is not only an academic principle, but an act of reclamation. By centralising information that had long been hidden or geographically limited, she invites the diaspora back into conversations.
Still, her perspective remains distinctly her own. “There is an assumption that, because I am Filipino and Black, I have a more personal perspective on my research,” she says. “But I actually feel that it is more like I recognise both perspectives, starting from a third space, where my own experience informs my approach.” From that position, Reed sees the terno as a living garment whose meanings shift with each wearer, generation, and migration.
Jaleesa Reed presenting “The Transformation of the Terno: The Influence of Colonisation on the Traditional Women’s Dress of the Philippines’ at the 2019 Costume Society of America National Symposium in Seattle, Washington. Pictured with Lotta DeBoa, creator of THE FASHION MAP. Image courtesy of Jaleesa Reed.
Today, events like the Ternocon, a recurring competition and mentorship programme, have spearheaded a revival of the terno, celebrating tradition and beauty. “After the Marcos regime ended, people stopped wearing the terno, because it evoked a negative political association and painful memories,” Reed explained. “In recent years, Filipino designers in and outside of the Philippines are working to reclaim the terno’s rich history and meaning.” Across the diaspora, this reclamation takes new forms. North American labels like Vinta Gallery (now REGALO Studios) reinterpret the butterfly sleeve through contemporary silhouettes, adapting the garment to different climates and body types. “They did great work in re-imagining the terno in the context of a North American consumer,” she says.
Image from Jaleesa Reed’s research on the beauty supply store. Image courtesy of Jaleesa Reed.
For Reed, her work on Filipino identity and dress is also interrelated in her mind and practice with her other projects. Her research on Black women’s fashion and beauty culture in the United States also informs her understanding of how communities use style to reclaim presence and agency. “When I think about Black beauty culture, it feels affirming,” she reflects. “And when I look at the Filipino diaspora, it feels like reclaiming or establishing how our presence would look like here. Both are about saying ‘we are here’, but they do so in different ways.” That comparative lens, Black and Filipino, American and transnational, allows Reed to bridge concentrations that are often kept separate.
She is careful, however, not to conflate them. “For Filipino Americans, reaching back across the ocean feels more accessible. It is easier to trace your family back one or two generations. For Black Americans, that same conversation is specific to the U.S., with cultural references grounded in regions and time periods. We can not trace that back to a country or region of the African continent in the same way, so the difference in geography has to be considered in how I approach studying the diaspora for both.”
Beyond her research, Reed’s teaching practices reflect the same commitment to inclusivity and critical self-reflection. At Cornell, she observes a growing number of students exploring their own cultural identities, not only ethnicity, but religion, gender, and other identity markers. “There is a much wider range of non-Western perspectives for students to reference now,” she notes. “When I was an undergraduate, it was difficult to find research that focused on Black American beauty culture and Filipino American dress.” For Reed, this shift signals a crucial transformation within the discipline. “Fashion has always been global,” she says. “These new directions are helping to de-Eurocentrise the field, showing how fabrics and aesthetics have moved through networks of exchange, not just through modes of fashion production, like supply chains.”
Jaleesa Reed presenting ‘Re-examining the Terno: New Approaches to Dress in the Filipinx Diaspora’ at the 2025 Costume Society of America National Symposium in Los Angeles, California. Image courtesy of Jaleesa Reed.
Looking ahead, Reed hopes to expand her work on Filipino dress into a deeper study of how identity is produced and consumed across the diaspora. She is interested in questions of class, access, and the politics of authenticity. “Who can afford an authentically made terno?” she asks. “How do fast-fashion reproductions shape perceptions of heritage? And what does authenticity mean when a garment is bought online rather than hand-embroidered in the Philippines?”
Through such questions, Reed continues to bridge scholarship and lived experience, using dress as a lens to understand how culture circulates and evolves. “For emerging scholars new to studying questions around dress and identity,” she tells me, “what matters most to me is to start by asking why. Why are you drawn to this garment, this culture? If you begin there, if you really interrogate your intent, you can approach it with the respect and depth it deserves.” Through her scholarship and teaching, Reed reframes fashion as an ongoing conversation, one that insists on complexity and care as we imagine what identity might yet become.
To learn more about Jaleesa Reed, please visit her website, The Dictionary of Filipino Dress, or her Substack.
About the Writer
Faith Cooper is the creator of the Asian Fashion Archive. She holds master’s degrees from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York and from Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan, where she researched Taiwanese fashion and cultural identity as a Fulbright Student. Faith is now pursuing a PhD in history at the National University of Singapore, focusing on the cultural history of women’s sartorial developments in mid-twentieth-century Singapore.