Polimoda’s Library, Centro di Documentazione Matteo Lanzoni, houses the most significant collection of publications on the international fashion industry in Italy. This space serves as a primary source of information and inspiration to students, researchers and professionals.
The library catalog features monographs, periodicals, videos and lookbooks, as well as antique, rare and precious publications, which allow you to investigate the phenomenon of fashion from all points of view. From the historical and sociological, to the photographic and cinematographic, the graphic and artistic, and the economic and commercial; this library is different as it was conceived for the creative artist.
From Monday to Thursday: 8.30am – 7.00pm
Friday: 8.30am – 6.00pm
The Library is open to anyone interested in researching the rich collection of materials. Access and consultation are free to all students enrolled at Polimoda and to Polimoda alumni. All other external researchers, students from other universities, operators and companies in the industry, may access the library and its services according to the following conditions and registration fees.
| External students | Other Users | Companies | |
| 1 day | €16 | €52 | X |
| 5 admissions in 1 month | €30 | €150 | X |
| 10 admissions in 3 months | €50 | €250 | X |
| Yearly pass | X | X | €490 |
Users have direct access (open-shelf system) to books, current magazines and periodicals, back issues of selected texts, commercial catalogs and lookbooks. For audio-visual materials, books of particular value and magazine archives, requests must be made to the library staff.
The online catalog of the Library, contains all the information on the resources in the collection, including monographs, periodicals, videos, DVDs and CD-ROMs. It also includes works – dictionaries, encyclopedias, catalogs – which can be useful for obtaining information about the fashion industry, as well as reference material on arts and crafts.
There are several ways of consulting the catalog to obtain information:
If you need help with the search criteria, you can consult the Thesaurus or ask the librarians for help.
The Library houses a collection of films associated with the world of art, architecture, the history of fashion and cinema. These are all films closely connected to the fashion world, where costume forms the essence of a character, whose iconic style has become part of a collective imagination, whose setting is the world of fashion or where numerous and well-known fashion designers have worked.
The films present in the Polimoda Library can be found by consulting the online catalog. Each record includes all the details of the film: the original title, a summary, production information, the cast and the costume designers.
The Library offers a unique collection of fashion magazines. Covering a time span of over 150 years, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, guests will find vintage issues with covers designed by great illustrators, as well as the first color photo covers of renowned journals. This collection is a seminal source of research for fashion, trends, fashion communications and the history of fashion marketing
The current issues arranged on stands are:
The Berg Fashion Library is among the leading resources for students and researchers of Fashion Studies. As part of Bloomsbury Fashion Central digital hub, the database features more than 13,000 color images, eBooks, a museum directory, exhibition archive, reference works and teaching resources. Library visitors may also consult the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, comprised of over 2,000 images and more than 800 in-depth articles. Thanks to its interdisciplinary nature and high-quality visual content, the Berg Fashion Library remains an invaluable resource across the areas of fashion, museum studies, anthropology and culture.
Polimoda Library visitors may use the electronic archive of Vogue (American and Italian editions), the first fashion magazines to be completely digitized and indexed. The Vogue Archive contains the entire collection from the first issue published in 1892 up to the present, reproduced in high-resolution color images. Comprised of over 400,000 pages, indexed by research criteria and keyword, it represents a precious source of research, bringing together the work of the greatest stylists, designers, photographers and illustrators of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Library offers visitors access to the electronic archive of the Dazed Media Collection, which includes the bi-monthly British style magazine Dazed, AnOther Magazine and AnOther Man. Available exclusively on the digital platform Exact Editions, the archive contains all published issues of the three magazines from incipit to the present, each reproduced in high-resolution color images. Indexed by year and keyword, it is available for use anonymously and login-free, rendering decades worth of music, fashion, film, art and culture coverage available for student consultation and use.
Library visitors may consult the Women’s Wear Daily online archive, a database offering unlimited access to more than 500,000 WWD articles and photos from 1994 to the present. Navigated via keyword and date, the archive is a true industry research resource, as it represents the authoritative digital record of the trade journal’s online history. Students and visitors may explore in-depth accounts of the fashion, beauty and retail industries as digitally documented by WWD over the course of three decades.