Expert and professionals: information directly from the Fashion System

Would you like to improve your knowledge of accessory design by listening to what the greatest milliner in the world has to say? Would you like to analyse  market perspectives in the Middle East with the CEO of the leading distribution and retail group for luxury brands in the Gulf area? Do you want to know about the man whose inspired project turned the Pitti Fair virtual?

For its students, Polimoda organises the “Guest Lectures”, a series of seminars with illustrious guests and experts from the fashion industry, marketing and communication, at the Aula Magna of Villa Favard, Polimoda’s completely restored new headquarters.

During the academic year, students of the institute have the unique opportunity to talk about fashion and beyond, with  leading exponents of the fashion system, experts in marketing, communication, design and branding, who put their skills and knowledge at disposal.

These events, combined with a teaching staff made up of experts and professionals with many years’ experience in the fashion sector, ensure a cutting-edge training, constantly updated and aligned with the professional reality, direct evidence of the latest trends in the fashion industry and a practical approach to the world of work.

Among the famous speakers at the latest Guest Lectures:
•  Patrick Chalhoub, CEO of the Chalhoub Group;
•  Stephen Jones, the most famous milliner in England;
•  Fabrizio Rensi, Business Development Director in Europe & Middle East for Calvin Klein;
•  Raïssa Verhaeghe, experienced Fashion Industry Executive and Vice General Manager at Bvba 32;
•  Sara Lenzi and Gianpaolo D’Amico, co-founder sounDesign project;
•  Francesco Bottigliero, General Director of Fiera Digitale – Pitti Immagine Group;
•  Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti Immagine s.r.l.;
•  Eelko Moorer, Dutch accessories designer.

The Young Luxury Consumer - An anatomy of consumer motives and behaviour

Wednesday
May 15, 2013
11.00am
Aula Magna
Villa Favard

The traditionally held view that the ‘luxury customer’ is over 35 years old with abundant disposable income is outdated. As more and more people experience and consume Luxury in different ways the palette of target customers has grown exponentially, both in diversity and numbers. But what do we know about the younger consumers of luxury? What drives their behaviour and attitudes towards it? Do they themselves know? This presentation takes a magnifying glass and looks at some key inner thoughts and attitudes that influence –subconsciously- the young adult luxury consumer.

George Bouvier BA MSc
Director of Executive MBA (Fashion)
London College of Fashion
University of the Arts London

Dress Thinking

Thursday
May 9, 2013
5.30pm
Aula Magna
Villa Favard

The rising prominence of fashion in both the popular and academic fields is a fairly recent phenomenon. Sociologists, philosophers and radical thinkers from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century have been interested in the fashion system as a means of expressing aesthetic taste, political ideas and social identity. Nowadays however, this interest in fashion has been supplemented by the emergence of critical literary writing that it can finally call its own.  The importance of this change is reflected in the variety of groundbreaking texts which now attribute their significant cultural force to fashion. 

This preface goes some way to introduce themes that show fashion in an animated dialogue with important protagonists such as; art museums, archives, dictionaries, cities and Renaissance women…

GIULIA BONALI

Giulia Bonali is an Italian academic living in London. Since completing her MA in History of Design and Material Culture at the Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum, Giulia has been teaching undergraduate BA Fashion Design at the University of Creative Arts (UCA) London, and at the University of East London (UEL).  In 2011, Giulia was appointed joint module leader for first year undergraduates studying BA Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores University. Currently, Giulia has begun a PhD at the Birkbeck University of London focusing on the study of fashion as a starting point to explore the period of cultural transformation that followed the April Revolution in Portugal in 1974.

Curating Fashion, Fashioning Art. On the Productive Co-existence of Art and Fashion

Lecture by Annamari Vänskä, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Curator

Thursday
April 18, 2013
5.30 pm
Aula Magna
Villa Favard

In everyday life, art and fashion have always merged. In the art world, however, fashion has long been treated like a stepchild. Art is by definition timeless, i.e. beyond the influence of fashion trends. Fashion, on the other hand, is synonymous with continuous change. Fashion is always at risk of becoming old and dying.

For centuries, fashion was a cuspidor of high culture. Moral philosophers and feminists rallied against it. Fashion, to them, represented either moral decay or a patriarchal social system oppressive to women.

Fashion did not do well in academic circles either, and for a long time it was considered too frivolous for serious study.

Negative attitudes are now subsiding. Fashion has achieved cultural status similar to art. Moralists have calmed down and feminists have been allowed to wear make-up. Academic chairs in Fashion studies have been established all around the globe. Fashion is increasingly conquering museums and acquiring large publics and wide media spread.

The lecture discusses recent developments in fashion and art by analysing how both fields have benefitted from the proximity of the other. The lecture brings forth examples of how fashion is transformed into art, and how art is used in highlighting the value of fashion as art. The lecture specifically discusses a recent curatorial project by Vänskä, which she curated for the World Design Capital Helsinki in 2012, and which is now being transformed into several new exhibitions in the USA and in Japan in 2013 and 2014.

www.annamarivanska.com

Architecture of Fashion:
from retail environments to Brandscaping

Thursday
March 7, 2013
5:30 pm
Aula Magna
Villa Favard

The Fashion system in the broader sense of the meaning permeates every single aspect of our daily lives.
It uses all means to make itself noticed and expand its influence.
It uses photography and cinema, music and art. Not least, it  “dresses up” in architectures.

Dichotomy between architecture and fashion, between ephemeral and permanent blurs. Their relationship gets tighter and tighter.
The Fashion System wants from architecture innovation, surprise, flexibility, mutation.
It wants to be represented at its best, to be legitimated.
It wants to have a set scene for brand values.
Architectures must be charged with a lot of other meanings, they must be mise en scène of the zeitgeist, and of the brands.

Architecture for fashion is a fashion statement itself, ephemeral ideology, Eye-deology.

Vitruvius goodbye!
Principles, they change. What counts today is legitimacy of appearence.
Fashion stores punctuate the urban landscape and they tell stories of brands, company missions, global aesthetics; they mix up with the attempt to propose complex lifestyles, examples of a global design or total living.

Through 30 years of architecture for fashion and communication strategies, from Elio Fiorucci to Rei Kawakubo through Calvin Klein to Giorgio Armani, learning the japanese lesson and overturning the logical with Prada we wonder what the next scenario of such a conflictual love-hate relation is going to be.

From epicenters to guerrilla stores’ luxury raves, from minimalistic aesthetics to pop editorialism all signs point to one thing.

Good design, alone, is not enough anymore.

CLAUDIO MARENCO MORES

Architect; graduated in Venice with a thesis on the use of architecture as a marketing tool.
He studied at the IUAV Institute of Architecture in Venice, Oulu University, Finland, Domus Academy and IED majoring in Marketing for Luxury Goods.
Marenco Mores worked as fashion editor while researching on strategic marketing.
He is currently Merchandising Manager for Calvin Klein Collection Accessories.