Made in Italy / Made in France: The Fabrics of Culture: Home

This collection of original essays interrogates disciplinary boundaries in fashion, gathering fashion studies research across disciplines and from around the globe. Fashion and clothing are part of material and visual culture, cultural memory, and heritage; they contribute to shaping the way people see themselves, interact, and consume. For each of the volume's eight parts, scholars from across the world and a variety of disciplines offer analytical tools for further research. Never neglecting the interconnectedness of disciplines and domains, these original contributions survey specific topics and critically discuss the leading views in their areas. They include discursive and reflective pieces, as well as discussions of original empirical work, and contributors include established leaders in the field, rising stars, and new voices, including practioner and industry voices. This is a comprehensive overview of the field, ideal not only for undergraduate and postgraduate fashion studies students, but also for researchers and students in communication studies, the humanities, gender and critical race studies, social sciences, and fashion design and business.

Faculty Publication. Arts & Humanities: European Languages and Literatures. Professor Eugenia Paulicelli.

"The author dissects the shoe and all that surrounds it: from its history to painting and literature. After this book, it will be difficult to publish a book with a more complete treatment of the subject."

"Through a highly original and detailed analysis of the memoirs, interviews and other life writings of Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli, this book explores changing notions of femininity in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the democratization of fashion began. Examining the idea of modernity, eternity and the ephemeral in the writings of these haute couturiers, the book reflects on fashion's ambivalent approach to women, which both celebrated and vilified them, presenting them as both ultra modern style leaders and irrational creatures stuck in the past."

"Paris, Capital of Fashion accompanies a major exhibition at The Museum at FIT, New York's only museum dedicated solely to the art of fashion. This lavishly-illustrated book is edited by MFIT's director and chief curator, Valerie Steele, also the author of the acclaimed Paris Fashion: A Cultural History."

"Analyzing what female columnists in fashion magazines and popular women novelists wrote about the "new silhouette," Stewart shows how bourgeois women feminized the more severe, masculine images that elite designers promoted to create a hybrid form of modern that both emancipated women and celebrated their femininity. She delves into the intricacies of marketing the new clothes and the new image to middle-class women and examines the nuts and bolts of a changing industry—including textile production, relationships between suppliers and department stores, and privacy and intellectual property issues surrounding ready-to-wear couture designs."

"...The Fascism of 1930s Italy dominated more than just politics - it spilled over into modes of dress...(Fashion under Fascism) explores the subtle yet sinister changes to the seemingly innocuous practices of everyday dress and shows why they were such a concern for the state. Importantly, (Paulicelli) demonstrates how these developments impacted on the global dominance of Italian fashion today.This fascinating book includes interviews with major designers, such as Fernanda Gattinoni and Micol Fontana, and sheds new light on the complicated relationship between style and politics."

"...'Fabric of cultures' examines the impact of fashion as a manufacturing industry and as a culture industry that shapes the identities of nations and cities in a cross-cultural perspective, within a global framework. The collected essays investigate local and global economies, cultures and identities and the book offers for the first time, a wide spectrum of case studies which focus on a diversity of geographical spaces and places, from global capitals of fashion such as New York, to countries less known or identifiable for fashion such as contemporary Greece and soviet Russia."

"This collection of original essays interrogates disciplinary boundaries in fashion, gathering fashion studies research across disciplines and from around the globe. Fashion and clothing are part of material and visual culture, cultural memory, and heritage; they contribute to shaping the way people see themselves, interact, and consume. For each of the volume’s eight parts, scholars from across the world and a variety of disciplines offer analytical tools for further research. This is a comprehensive overview of the field, ideal not only for undergraduate and postgraduate fashion studies students, but also for researchers and students in communication studies, the humanities, gender and critical race studies, social sciences, and fashion design and business."

With contributions by Elizabeth D. Lowe, Eugenia Paulicelli, Julia Sharp and Amy H. Winter. "A catalogue of over 30 garments and numerous textiles, representing aesthetics and techniques from around the world, selected from the Godwin-Ternbach Museum and the Queens College Costume Collection and complemented by loans from private collections and international designers. Traditional garments and textiles of non-Western cultures are shown along with modern examples from Western societies to explore how the world of fashion has been enriched by different ethnic sources, the reciprocal relationship of fashion and culture, and the central role of clothing in our lives."

"'The Fabric of Cultures: Systems in the Making' is a groundbreaking multidisciplinary, pedagogic and research project that reflects on the art of making, craftsmanship and technology in a globalized world. The catalogue accompanies the exhibition at the Queens College Art Center of the City University of New York. The exhibition and project as a whole call attention to larger systems at play that influence the state of fashion, crafts and aesthetics constantly under development and in flux."

"This is the first in-depth, book-length study on fashion and Italian cinema from the silent film to the present...the book aims to offer new visions of films by directors such as Nino Oxilia, Mario Camerini, Alessandro Blasetti, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti and Paolo Sorrentino, of film stars such as Lyda Borelli, Francesca Bertini, Pina Menichelli, Lucia Bosè, Monica Vitti, Marcello Mastroianni, Toni Servillo and others, and the costume archives and designers who have been central to the development of Made in Italy and Italian style."

"... Eugenia Paulicelli’s broad, well-articulated and rigorously interdisciplinary narrative of the life and work of Rosa Genoni, ‘seamstress/artist’, published in both English and Italian (is) replete with many black and white and color illustrations." --Giovanna Ginex

"The first comprehensive study on the role of Italian fashion and Italian literature, this book analyzes clothing and fashion as described and represented in literary texts and costume books in the Italy of the 16th and 17th centuries. Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy emphasizes the centrality of Italian literature and culture for understanding modern theories of fashion and gauging its impact in the shaping of codes of civility and taste in Europe and the West."