On January 18, 2025, Jonathan Alvarez spoke with Hudson River Museum (HRM)’s director and CEO Masha Turchinsky in a gallery talk at the HRM entitled “Clothing and the Criminal Justice System.” The talk highlighted Alvarez’s work and his interest in the role fashion plays among incarcerated people and referenced the exhibit “No Bodies: Clothing as a Disruptor” currently on display in the gallery.
Alvarez is President and a Co-founder of 914 United, a Yonkers nonprofit working to disrupt young people’s involvement with the criminal justice system. The talk centered on how clothing fosters identity, self-expression, and resistance within carceral environments. Himself a formerly incarcerated person, Alvarez navigated the downstate criminal justice system from ages 17-30. Through Alvarez’s lived experience, he explained his own relationship with fashion, before, during, and after serving time.
As a youth in Yonkers, Alvarez prided himself on looking presentable. His clothing and style, as for many in marginalized communities, was valuable. This was stripped away from him when he began his journey through the criminal justice system. He explained the “shedding process” that took place when he was first moved downstate. He was forced to remove all his belongings, donating or trashing any clothing, before being given a cold shower to cleanse, in many senses, the person he was before. All incarcerated people are then given a handful of clothing items—a few white t-shirts, white sneakers, black boots—and all are given buzz cuts unless exempt for religious reasons, and issued numbers, to create a uniform among all the incarcerated.
Fashion and the Individual
This is where the function of fashion comes in to help reclaim that sense of individuality.
But how, in this system, can people use fashion to resist this assimilation? It often starts with contraband. Anything over $50 was considered a security issue, so visiting friends and family members would bring in requested clothing items with receipts to prove the item’s value was under $50. These items, for Alvarez a pair of white sneakers, meant so much to him because they gave him a form of social status.
Making Fashion from Uniformity
Inside the prison system, there is an underground economy, largely comprising West Indian, Caribbean, Jamaican, and Asian people, who tailor, reconstruct, and iron clothing items to give them personalized flair. Like tailoring state-issued jackets to have more stylish shapes or customizing belts with buckles that have an incarcerated person’s city name. This destruction of state property allows them to not only create fashion and identity, but an economy as well. Since many items are requested through a bartering system, it often resulted in real money-making opportunities, creating an economy. It also allowed the incarcerated the chance to continue to pursue these fields when they’re released.
Alvarez’s interest in fashion gave him the opportunity to study it further thanks to the Bard Prison Initiative, which offers the incarcerated a chance to pursue a free liberal arts degree. He set his sights on a bachelor’s in social studies, and his senior thesis focused on what ghetto fashion means in urban communities, tracing its origins back to the Jim Crow South. He would later translate and extend his senior thesis by co-curating a New York City exhibit called Clothing Inside: Addressing American Prisons.
Not long after his release, Alvarez applied to the master’s program at The New School. But the pressure of attending school, taking on an internship working on a fashion show in Manhattan, and working two jobs got the better of him. He reached his breaking point in 2019, but thanks to his support system, he was able to continue. It was this sense of support that gave Alvarez a new mission. From this, he co-created the You’re Not Alone Brotherhood, which would eventually expand into 914United. Using his own lived experiences, Alvarez and his team support youth impacted by the justice system through mentorship, skills development, and community resources. And yes, that also includes fashion advice.
914United Growing its Reach
This past November, 914United held their 2nd Annual Sneaker Gala called “Changing the Narrative,” a night of both style and empowerment. As part of this, Alvarez and his team helped those in the program to purchase two-piece suits that they could wear to the gala. These suits were not just for style—they also represented access, as they could be used beyond the gala for job interviews and the like. Alvarez recalled a moment where one mentee a 914 United was tearing up as he shared the story of his young daughter helping him fix his bowtie.
“The power of the lived experience is a form of currency that has no exchange value”
