Courses

This seminar examines the many meanings of fashion, design, and style, especially in Italian culture and tradition; how values are preserved, reinvented and rethought through a lens that is internationally known as "Made in Italy"; how the symbolic meanings and ideological interpretations are connected to creation, production, and consumption of goods. Based on an anthropological perspective and framework, this interdisciplinary course will analyze ways in which we can understand the ‘Italian style' through the intersections of many different levels: political, economic, aesthetic, symbolic, religious, etc. The course will study how fashion can help us understand the ways in which tradition and innovation, creativity and technology, localism and globalization, identity and diversity, power and body, are elaborated and interpreted in contemporary Italian society, in relation to a globalized world. Short videos that can be watched on the computer and alternative readings for those fluent in Italian will be assigned. There are no pre‐requisites for this course. In English.