Italian cinema launched Italian fashion to the world. This lecture is based on Professor Paulicelli’s latest book, "Italian Style: Fashion & Film from Early Cinema to the Digital Age," which tells the story of this launch. The creation of an Italian style and fashion as they are perceived today, especially by foreigners, was a product of the post World War II years. Before then, Parisian fashion had dominated Europe and the world, and had helped shape a Parisian and French identity. The lecture explores how film contributed to the shaping of an Italian style and fashion that ran parallel to and at times took the lead in the creation of an Italian national identity. Fashion and film are powerful industries and media machines that construct powerful symbolic narratives and identities. It is hardly surprising, then, that Italian filmmakers have been fascinated by the transformative power of the language of clothing and fashion and the impact it has on style, consumption, and behavior.

Eugenia Paulicelli is professor of Italian and comparative literature at Queens College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the founder and director of fashion studies in the MA in liberal studies and PhD concentration at The Graduate Center. She has published several books as author and editor. In her writing she has explored the intersections between word and image in literature, cinema, fashion, and the media; the impact of technology in shaping these intersections; and the history and role of women in relation to fashion, the visual arts, and writing (literature and journalism).