Peter McNeil - Italy Design World Centre

The Power of Luxury: Art and Culture at the Italian Courts in Machiavelli’s Lifetime
The Australian Institute of Art History
The University of Melbourne
19 and 20 February, 2013

Session Four - Made in Italy Then and Now
Wednesday 20 February 3.00 pm

Peter McNeil
Italy Design World Centre: from the Linea Italiana to the Made in Italy

Abstract

‘Quite simply we are the best’ stated Italian architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni. ‘We have more imagination, more culture, and we are better mediators between the past and the future’. Italy has become a legendary centre of design and continues to act as a place of pilgrimage for designer-students and fans of design. In considering design we need to consider multi-facetted aspects of designing, making and production, distribution and end-use or consumption. Italy throws up a unique set of circumstances in each case. My lecture today will attempt to sketch some of the ways we can connect Italian style over a very long period of time to some of the high points of 20th-century object design.

Peter McNeil is a Professor of Design History at University of Technology Sydney and Foundation Professor of Fashion Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Associate Dean, Research, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, UTS. He is also currently an investigator within Fashioning the Early Modern: Innovation and Creativity in Europe, 1500-1800, a one-million € Humanities in the European Research Area funded project. Editor and co-editor of nine works on fashion, including the best-selling Shoes (2006; 2011); Nordic Fashion Studies (2012); Fashion in Fiction; Men’s Fashion Reader; and award winners: Critical and Primary Sources in Fashion (4 vols, Berg, 2009) and The Fashion History Reader (Routledge, 2010). He is a regular critic and reviewer.

Image notes
Salvatore Ferragamo with Sophia Loren. source Little Style File blog link

nb. Entry created May 5 2013. Dated to Feb 20 (date of presentation) for indexing purposes