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Fashion Tales, 19-20 June 2015

Date

Enterprise of Culture team members, Regina Lee Blaszczyk and Tereza Kuldova, will be giving papers about their research at a conference in Milan this June.

This international conference, organized by ModaCult - Centre for the Study of Fashion and Cultural Production, will bring together scholars, curators, fashion designers and business people from around the globe to share meanings, images and methodologies used in the production of fashion tales that nurture the social imaginary toward sustainable lifestyles.

Researcher Dr Tereza Kuldova, based at the University of Oslo will speak on Charitable Non-Love of ‘Ethical’ Fashion: Philanthrocapitalism and the Reproduction of Poverty in the Indian Fashion Industry.

Project Leader of the Enterprise of Culture, Professor Regina Lee Blaszczyk, will deliver a paper called Better than Nature: Synthetic Fibres and American Fashion at the New York World's Fairs, 1939 and 1965. Her talk will draw on original research in business archives at the New York Public Library and other primary sources to examine how fashion was presented to the American public at the New York World’s Fairs of 1939 and 1964. It will consider how the famous Seventh Avenue garment district in New York approached the fairs and how the internationally significant fibre manufacturer E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company expressed its views on the role of technology in American style at the fairs.

Regina Lee Blaszczyk said:

‘My paper raises important questions about the role of the supply chain in the evolution of the fashion system that is with us today. It considers the evolution of the mass-market fashion system as invented in the USA and acknowledges the role of high-tech materials and high-tech manufacturers in the global democratization of fashion. Without DuPont fibre innovations and their dissemination across the globe, there would be no low-cost polyester-spandex fashion in high-street chains such as The Gap, M&S, H&M, Zara, New Look, Next, and Primark. In short, my paper explores the beginnings of how ‘high-tech’ became the darling of the high street.’

See here for more information about the conference, which takes place on 19 & 20 June 2015 at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.

Image: Detail from publicity photograph from DuPont PR archive (courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library)