Alexis Romano
Alexis Romano teaches Fashion Studies at Parsons: The New School for Design. She was the 2020/1 Gerald and Mary Ellen Ritter Memorial Fund Curatorial Fellow at the Costume Institute (Metropolitan Museum of Art). She earned her PhD in from the Courtauld Institute of Art, and completed MA degrees in art and design history at the Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne (Paris) and the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture (New York).
Alexis' research interests include fashion in relation to photographic imagery, personal experience, the everyday, readymade design cultures, and the tensions between curatorial and commercial display. Her current research project explores women's experience of making and wearing clothing in the 1970s through the cross analysis of image, object and oral history.
Alexis is the author of Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-68 (Bloomsbury, 2022) that situates the development of the French ready-made clothing industry (1945-1970) against the country’s postwar modernisation as well as shifting cultural ideologies and gender and national identities. It examines the industry in relation to the idea of 'modernity' and modernisation, and the everyday, notably in terms of women's lives, the city of Paris, industrial production and visual culture.
In 2013 Alexis co-founded the Fashion Research Network with colleagues from the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Royal College of Art with the goal to reinvigorate the relationship between contemporary, practice-based and historical fashion and dress studies as well as provide a forum for visionary and critical fashion research.
Address: London/New York
Alexis' research interests include fashion in relation to photographic imagery, personal experience, the everyday, readymade design cultures, and the tensions between curatorial and commercial display. Her current research project explores women's experience of making and wearing clothing in the 1970s through the cross analysis of image, object and oral history.
Alexis is the author of Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-68 (Bloomsbury, 2022) that situates the development of the French ready-made clothing industry (1945-1970) against the country’s postwar modernisation as well as shifting cultural ideologies and gender and national identities. It examines the industry in relation to the idea of 'modernity' and modernisation, and the everyday, notably in terms of women's lives, the city of Paris, industrial production and visual culture.
In 2013 Alexis co-founded the Fashion Research Network with colleagues from the Courtauld Institute of Art and the Royal College of Art with the goal to reinvigorate the relationship between contemporary, practice-based and historical fashion and dress studies as well as provide a forum for visionary and critical fashion research.
Address: London/New York
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Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68.
By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.
Articles and Chapters by Alexis Romano
Book, Exhibition and Conference Reviews by Alexis Romano
Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68.
By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.
In contrast to photographs of old, iconic, and static Paris (which traditionally upheld the symbolic construction of haute couture), these images visualised modern Paris in perpetual construction and expansion. Visual shifts reflected the city’s rapid postwar urbanisation, the erection of low-income housing estates and the expansion of Paris to incorporate La Défense, the business district on its western outskirts, which transformed underdeveloped land and factories into skyscrapers throughout the 1960s. The government promoted the new spaces and buildings as symbols of France’s economic modernism and ‘progress,’ yet they increasingly began to symbolise state regulation and the revalorisation of domesticity for women. In spite of this, in mid-1960s France, women began to achieve long-awaited legislation for their rights and the family planning movement gained ground.
The concurrent, large-scale development of the French readymade industry, with its own ties to industrial production and notions of progress, cast another layer onto imagery. For instance, adaptable, standardised clothing such as shift dresses and suits, were pictured in ways that corresponded to ambiguous modernist architectural settings, that blurred the boundaries between public, residential and professional, or that rendered bodies anonymous in relation to threatening, panoptic architectural spaces.
Alongside the continual expansion of the urban fabric and the readymade clothing industry, women’s access and place was indeterminate and peripheral, and the fabrication of their modern identities fluctuated. In this context, this paper considers the ways photographers conceived of the dressed body’s relationship to space, which entailed a shift in the gaze of the model, as well as viewers’ ways of seeing.
It asks how the industry and government worked together to employ prêt-à-porter to renegotiate and reinvent the industry and the country’s postwar identity and cultural hegemony, previously build around the—then declining—haute couture production. Through textual analysis of trade publications, notably the Cahiers de l’industrie du vêtement féminin, I examine factors underlying the industry’s discussion of modernisation, such as technological shortcoming and insufficient productivity. Using imagery and text in the fashion press that related to clothing sold in department stores and made by the Maisons de Couture en Gros, I then consider magazines’ new construction of fashion and femininity, which negotiated components of industrial modernity and disseminated them in relation to prêt-à-porter and the image of women. I show how the press sought to both sanction prêt-à-porter and ease readers’ fears of modernity.
This paper suggests that the study of the ready-made clothing industry can shed light on an ambiguous moment in French history, characterised by tensions and contradictions, between limitations and possibility, change and tradition, flux and stasis, structure and women’s agency. I hope that, through the colloquium’s transatlantic discussion of wider themes of fashion and history in the period 1947-1957, we can begin to reframe the study of French ready-to-wear prior to the 1960s.
The symposium seeks to ask what does clothing as protection mean in the context of contemporary society. As well as physical protection from environmental risk how does it protect one from the social mores or precepts of society? Why are some cultures and societal groups more concerned with this than others? Are contemporary forms of exposure and nakedness or nudity now also viewed as forms of pre-emptive protection? Do we now need more or less protection? And who (or what) do we need protecting from?
This symposium focuses on three key themes:
Protection: Between Dress and Shelter. This section explores the ways in which dress has been used as protection from the elements or the gaze of others. Taking a global perspective, it examines cultural differences in the definition of dress as protection.
Psyche: Between Perception and Display. This section explores the experiential or psychoanalytic implications of dress as protection versus dress as display.
Intersection: Between Body and Skin. Taking the garments we wear closest to the skin as its focal point, this section invites artists and academics who make or consider undergarments to share their perspective.
This one-day symposium at the Royal College of Art explores the increasingly wide scope of spaces where fashion is practiced and studied. As fashion research becomes bolder in its interactions with other disciplines including anthropology, social history and philosophy, the spaces of fashioning, exhibiting and researching the dressed body come into question to a greater extent. Fashion researchers often find themselves investigating spaces as seemingly self-contained as the monographic archive alongside what Marc Augé defines as the open, infinite spaces of supermodernity such as the cultural institution or transport terminal. This symposium considers these ambivalent and changeable “non-places” as one lens for examining spaces where fashion is produced, performed and consumed. Rather than concentrating on the most obvious fashion spaces, for example, the catwalk or fashion capital, it takes a subtler approach in exploring spaces as essential as the body, as alternative as the social media forum or as incidental as the airport terminal.
Just as fashion is both material and idea, this symposium questions how space oscillates between the physical and figurative. Pierre Bourdieu defines “reified social space,” as groupings of people and goods that are “physically realised or objectified” (1999, p. 124). One might consider the magazine or cinema screen as examples of reified space with high capital, in that they visualise and group glamorous models, luxury retailers, and society happenings in close proximity to one another. In these utopian, idealised spaces, fashion is experienced and produced differently from actual, physical spaces, such as the designer’s atelier. Michel Foucault describes the cinema as a heterotopia in that “it is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (1967). Likewise, the magazine works on several levels for the reader’s experience of fashion: the actual figurations on the page and the reader’s interpretations of the content occupy different dimensions and yet inform one another.
The symposium’s reinvestigation of space will consider fashion’s function as both discursive and experiential. According to John Potvin, “the encounters with fashion happen within a space at a given place and do not simply function as backdrops but are pivotal to the meaning and vitality that the experiences of fashion trace” (2009, pp. 1-2). Space is integral to shaping both singular and quotidian experiences of fashion, such as in the diary-like blog’s presentation of everyday fashion imagery.
During the symposium’s course, participants will address the following questions, which we hope will shed new light on past research on the relationship between dress and space to develop new insights and present a more comprehensive outlook of the fashion landscape: what is a fashion space? Why assign a physical dimension to fashion research? Indeed is it possible to conceive of fashion at all outside a tangible space? Conversely, how might we view research sources such as documentary photographs, memoirs, or oral histories as physical sites? Does space function as a methodology itself? How can exploring space help us to rethink represented, written, embodied and worn fashion?
Sources:
Bourdieu, Pierre. (1999) [1993], ‘Site Effects’, in The Weight of the World, trans. P Parkhurst Ferguson et al., Cambridge: Polity.
Potvin, John. (ed.) (2009) The Spaces and Places of Fashion, 1800-2007, London and New York: Routledge.