Workshop: from Courts to the City: Fashion, Bodies, and Power Between the Ancien Régime and Totalitarianism (1760-1945)

The laboratory aims to guide students through a historical and cultural journey across European fashion from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, highlighting its connections with the social, political, and cultural dynamics of the time. Particular attention will be devoted to the phenomena of stardom, orientalism, the construction of gender identities through dress and practices of public representation, as well as the biopolitical dispositifs that shaped the social and aesthetic body, from the nineteenth-century corset to the figure of the "new man" in totalitarian regimes. The objective is to provide critical tools to interpret clothing as a complex language capable of reflecting power, social and aesthetic transformations, through an integrated analysis of visual, material, and iconographic sources.

At the end of the laboratory, students will be able to recognize the main historical transformations of fashion between the 18th and mid-20th centuries; critically analyze the role of fashion in the construction of social and cultural identities; interpret visual and material sources related to fashion history; use a specific and appropriate lexicon for the discipline in both oral and written communication.