Fashion under Fascism

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What can fashion tell us about the making of authoritarian regimes? How do clothing, style, and material culture shape political identities, communicate ideology, and define belonging?

At a time when far-right movements and authoritarian politics are reshaping political landscapes around the world, the relationship between aesthetics and power has taken on renewed urgency. Political movements rely not only on institutions and policies, but also on images, symbols, bodies, clothing, and everyday objects to construct identities, project power, and make ideology part of everyday life.

Drawing on the expanded , the event will examine how fashion under Italian Fascism became a tool of political power - producing identities, reinforcing social hierarchies, and translating ideology into everyday practices. It will also ask what this history can reveal about the ways contemporary political movements use appearance, style, and material culture to shape political identity, communicate belonging, and project visions of society.

The lecture by Eugenia Paulicelli will be followed by responses from Elizabeth Leake (Columbia University) and María González Pendás (Cornell University) and a public discussion, bringing historical scholarship into conversation with the political and cultural questions of the present.

Bios

is Professor Emerita of Italian and Comparative Literature, Film, and Media Cultures at the Graduate Center and Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of monographs on Italian fashion, its relationship with cinema and media, and film costumes. Her research explores fashion’s impact on identity and geopolitics, gender history and feminism, labor and know-how in fashion production, and “Made in Italy” from a transnational perspective. She has curated exhibitions in Italy and New York. Her recent projects include “Sarmi New York: A Journey Through Fashion from Florence to Fifth Avenue” at the Museum of Fashion and Costume in Palazzo Pitti, Uffizi Gallery, co-curated with Vanessa Gavioli, and the short film “Ferdinando Sarmi: Untold Stories of New York Fashion,” directed with Claudio Napoli and June Seo. These projects are part of her new research on the Italian diaspora in New York and its contributions to fashion.

is a professor and Chair in the Italian Department at Columbia. Her research interests include twentieth-century Italian narrative and theatre, the cultural history of Fascism and of the Republic, and the history and criticism of Italian cinema. She is a recipient of the Modern Language Association Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies for her first book The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone (2003) as well as The National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers and Independent Scholars. Her book, After Words: Suicide and Authorship in Twentieth Century Italy, was published by University of Toronto in 2011. A co-authored book on the history, literature, and cinema of internal exile during Fascism was published in 2019 with Manchester University Press. With Il Mulino, she published Tex Willer: un cowboy nell’Italia del dopoguerra (2018), which was reviewed in La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera, and presented on the national radio program Rai Fahrenheit.

is an architectural historian of modernity and coloniality in the Spanish transatlantic world. Her research explores intersections of aesthetics, technology, and power through the built environment in the twentieth century, with a focus on histories of fascism, imperialism, and secularism. Her current book manuscript, Holy Modern: A History of Technofascism, Imperial Architectures, and Opus Dei (forthcoming with Duke University Press), examines how a technocratic version of fascism and a secular version of evangelization took shape through architecture in postwar Spain. Her other projects investigate relations of labor, race and concrete technologies in Mexico and the role of architecture and technology in secular and religious formations in global modernity. She has received grants and fellowships from the Graham Foundatio and the Fulbright, among others, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the SOF/Heyman, where she also helped coordinate the Humanities in Practice Initiative. She received her Ph.D from Columbia University and her M.Arch. from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and is currently Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Cornell University.

Event organized by: , Fellow SOF/ Heyman

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