'Modus: Measurements and the Origins of Fashion'

This paper rethinks the early history of fashion, and asks questions about the relationship of fashion and history. Often described as a product of 14th-century mercantile culture, fashion is heralded as a quintessentially modern practice. Moreover, it is often defined as one of the indicators that distinguish modern societies from pre-modern ones, which did not know of fleeting fashion trends, but made use of clothes as static markers of status. Many narratives are built on such a simplistic dichotomy. Yet, why did modern bourgeois communities need fashion at all? asks Dr. Emanuele Lugli. As a tool for consumption? As an expression of burgeoning power? Contrary to traditional assumptions of fashion as an utilitarian, proto-capitalist phenomenon, this lecture presents fashion as a way of seeing that originated in communities' deep engagement in measuring. In so doing, it asks original questions about the relationship of fashion, geometry and chronicle writing.

All welcome. Refreshments will be available in BS/008 fifteen minutes before the start of the seminar.