3.0

Average Course Rating

How can we “read” historical contexts through fashion? How fashion reveals what a society values, fears, or seeks to control? This three-credit course explores Italian style as a lens to examine how the body has been freed, constricted, and understood across historical moments, art movements, and political transformations. Rather than a chronological history of fashion, this course focuses on clothing and style as critical tools for analyzing power, identity, and cultural change in Italy from the Renaissance to the present. Throughout the semester we will examine how the fashioned body intersects with social forces. Among them: the sumptuary laws of the Renaissance, the reimagined silhouette of 1930s the “new woman” with the whimsical Elsa Schiaparelli and Surrealism, the Futurist Manifestoes, the body under Fascism, the postwar Made in Italy and the "Hollywood effect", to the analysis of iconic Italian fashion houses juxtaposed to feminist theory and gender studies to interrogate how fashion constructs, constrains and reimagines bodies. The seminar will also take place in the museums (BMA,Walters) exploring the collections and the archives in collaboration with the curators, as well as in conversation with visiting experts in the field of museum and fashion studies.