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The Business of Fashion, Italian Style

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The Enterprise of Culture worked alongside curators at the V&A’s Research Department to organise a study day on the business history of fashion, Italian style on 7 February 2014.

Featuring presentations from business historians, fashion historians and curators from the UK and Europe, The Business of Fashion, Italian Style provided an opportunity for participants to meet researchers working to connect fashion studies, economic history, and curatorial practice.

The study day was attended by a wide audience of undergraduate students of fashion, post-graduates, researchers, curators and academics, all wanting to learn about curatorial and business-history approaches to the history of the fashion business, and vice versa.

Speakers included fashion curators & other researchers who contributed to The Glamour of Italian Fashion, 1945-2014, a recent V&A exhibition and catalogue on Italian fashion.

Talks included:

The history of Italian fashion companies (Emanuela Scarpellini, University of Milan)
Incorporating business history into a fashion exhibition (Sonnet Stanfill, V&A)
The Italian knitwear industry (Elizabeth Currie, Fashion Researcher)
The Sozzani sisters and Italy's fashion industry (Oriole Cullen, V&A)
The Italian textile firm Nattier (Lucia Savi, V&A)
The Business History of the Fashion Industry since 1945 (Regina Lee Blaszczyk, University of Leeds)

The day also included a chance to see one of the V&A’s latest fashion exhibitions, Club to Catwalk: London Fashion in the 1980s.

The Glamour of Italian Fashion, 1945-2014 exhibition ran from 5 April – 27 July 2014 at the V&A, London. It took a comprehensive look at Italian Fashion from the end of the Second World War to the present day. The story was explored through the key individuals and organisations that have contributed to Italy’s reputation for quality and style.