Accessibility statement

Modus:Measurements and the Origins of Fashion

Thursday 26 February 2015, 5.00PM

Speaker(s): Emanuele Lugli

Modus: Measurements and the Origins of FashionThis lecture 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, asks Dr Lugli, why did modern bourgeois communities need fashion at all?  As a tool for consumption? As an expression of burgeoning power? Contrary to traditional assumptions of fashion as a utilitarian, proto-capitalist phenomenon, this lecture presents fashion as a way of seeing how it originated in communities' deep engagement in measuring. In so doing, it asks original questions about the relationship of fashion, geometry and chronicle writing.

This lecture is hosted by the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Location: BS/008 Berrick Saul Building

Email: crems-enquiries@york.ac.uk