Study day at the V&A

The Business of Fashion, Italian Style

One of the project’s Associated Partner, the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, collaborated with the Leeds team to organize a study day on The Business of Fashion, Italian Style, at the museum in February 2014.

This afternoon event featured presentations from business historians, fashion historians, and curators from the UK and Europe, providing participants with the opportunity to interact with researchers who connect fashion studies, economic history, and curatorial practice.

Sonnet Stanfill, curator of twentieth-century and contemporary fashion at the V&A and a member of the Enterprise of Culture team, planned this event, drawing on her role as chief curator for the upcoming exhibition, The Glamour of Italian Fashion, 1945-2014.

The V&A study day was held in the seminar room of the museum’s research department. The intimate setting allowed for interactions among speakers and participants. Forty-one people attended, including undergraduate fashion students, postgraduate researchers, independent scholars, curators, and academics, all wanting to learn about the intersection of curatorship and the business history of fashion. In the event evaluation forms, participants ranked the V&A study day as either ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ and commented positively on the ‘mix of academic and curatorial talks’ and the ‘quality of the papers and the chance to meet colleagues’.