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Alessandra Vaccari
Alessandra Vaccari is associate professor at the Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy. Her research and teaching are in the area of fashion history and theory. With a background in contemporary art history, she works at the interface between visual studies and design history. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on three main areas: Italian and European modernist fashion in the early twentieth century; the relationships between time and fashion; present-day fashion cultures and theories in their implications on environmental sustainability and social change.
On fashion and time, she has co-edited with Caroline Evans, Time in Fashion: Industrial, Antilinear and Uchronic Temporalities (2020). She has contributed to the ongoing international debate on modernism in fashion with articles, essays and the books Vestire il ventennio: moda e cultura artistica in Italia tra le due guerre (2004) and Fashion at the Time of Fascism: Italian Modernist Lifestyle, 1922–1943 (2009). The latter was conceived as a visual essay. In the same strand of visual analysis, she wrote Wig Wag. The Flags of Fashion (2005). La moda nei discorsi dei designer (2012) was motivated by her teaching experience in fashion programmes and drawn on her researches on fashion design history. She edited books on fashion design education, fashion imaginaries and Made in Italy. Since December 2019, she is undergoing the research 'Fashion futuring: Emerging models of fashion design in Italy' (conceived with Ilaria Vanni), based at the Università Iuav di Venezia.
