An international conference and exhibition | 8-9 Dec 2016 | College of Creative Arts, Massey University, Wellington
Registrations are now open. Early bird rates apply until 16 October.
When designer Yves Saint Laurent departed from the fashion industry in 2002 declaring ‘I have nothing in common with this new world of fashion’, this was an indication of the changes that lay ahead. Fashion had reached its apogee, its end time in the ways that it was being produced, manufactured and consumed. Bloggers have emerged as power elites shifting the terrain of traditional fashion reporting and dramatically altering the ways in which fashion is disseminated. Commerce and media have united to create new ways of experiencing designers collections as runway shows now compete with Internet live streaming, digital fashion films, Instagram and Pinterest. Fashion has claimed the museum and gallery space with major designer retrospectives and installations and concept stores and online sites have now replaced the department store and traditional forms of retailing. For just over two days, The End of Fashion will bring together the world’s leading scholars and fashion designers to Wellington, New Zealand’s cultural capital, to discuss fashion’s future.
Keynote speakers
Valerie Steele – The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York
Valerie Steele is director and chief curator of The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she has organized more than 20 exhibitions since 1997, including The Corset, London Fashion, Gothic: Dark Glamour; Shoe Obsession, Daphne Guinness, A Queer History of Fashion, and Dance and Fashion. She is also founder and editor in chief of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, the first peer-reviewed, scholarly journal in Fashion Studies.
Valerie Steele.As author, curator, editor, and public intellectual, Valerie Steele has been instrumental in creating the modern field of fashion studies and in raising awareness of the cultural significance of fashion. She has appeared on many television programs, including The Oprah Winfrey Show and Undressed: The Story of Fashion. Described in The Washington Post as one of “fashion’s brainiest women” and by Suzy Menkes as “The Freud of Fashion,” she was listed as one of “The People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry” in the Business of Fashion 500: (2014 and 2015)
Pamela Church Gibson – London College of Fashion, University of the Arts
Pamela Church Gibson is Reader in Cultural and Historical Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She has published extensively on film, fashion, fandom, history and heritage; recent books include Fashion Cultures Revisited: Theories, Explorations, Analysis (with Stella Bruzzi, Routledge, 2013) and Fashion and Celebrity Culture (Bloomsbury, 2012). She is the Principal Editor of the journal Film, Fashion & Consumption (Intellect, Bristol), which she founded in 2012. In the same year she hosted the first conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA) and became its first President.
Patrizia Calefato – University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
Patrizia Calefato is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. She is also affiliated professor at the Center for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main fields of research are fashion theory, the social dimension of language and cultural studies. She is member of the advisory boards of international journals; Fashion Theory (Routledge), Journal of Asia Pacific Pop Culture (Penn State Uni. Press), Semiotica (Mouton, Berlin) and the Jomec Journal (Cardiff Uni.).
She is the Director of the series “Culture, segni, comunicazione” (Bari) and a member of the Scientific Committee of the series “Culture, moda e società” (Milano) and “Les Cahiers Européens de l’imaginaire” (Paris). Her publications include: Fashion Journalism (2015), Luxury. Fashion, Lifestyles and Excess, (2014); La moda oltre la moda (2011), Body and Beauty, in J. B. Eicher (ed.), Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010) ‘Fashion as cultural translation: knowledge, constrictions and transgressions on/of the female body’, Social Semiotics, 20: 4, 2010. Forthcoming publications include, Paesaggi di moda, (2016); Il giubbotto e il foulard, (2016), Sustainable luxury and fashion: from global standardisation to critical customisation, in M.A. Gardetti (ed.) Sustainable Management of Luxury, (2016