The research centre was founded in 1996 by Laura Bovone, director until 2018, following the school of thought of the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Università Cattolica di Milano.
At this time, "fashion studies" were not yet common in Italy, and the founding group of ModaCult concentrated on the study of cultural production in a broader sense, including all the processes and products that owe their economic and social value to their intrinsic symbolic content. For example: the mass media system which is the classical cultural industry, the system of artistic or artisanal production, the wide range of large and small companies that produce material goods (fashion, furniture), leisure and entertainment sectors and communication services that increase the symbolic content of all kinds of goods.
Culture, therefore, intended as the driving force of late modernity, is to be studied, not abstractly as a set of values, institutions, and majority models, but also in its material expressions and professions, as well as the processes of resistance to mainstream that can be found in everyday life. This approach evidently originated in Anglo-Saxon cultural studies and the attention they devoted to "popular culture," no longer merely subordinate to the creative scene, but dialectically protagonist. The attention, therefore, is directed to the consumption of cultural objects, which is no longer seen as passive but as harbinger of new meanings.
ModaCult’s specialization in fashion is due to the importance of the sector and its professions in the economy of Milan in the late 20th century and.
This was only the beginning. Today, the titles of the annual conferences and publications prove an increasingly close connection of the research center with international Fashion Studies, its subject experts, and emerging themes such as: fashion consumption and professions, the relationship with gender and relationship with art, along with the most recent debate focused on digital, sharing economy, and sustainability.
Laura Bovone - founder and director until 2018
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"Sometimes things are born a little by chance, or rather, by a lucky series of combinations. The idea for our centre was born out of the dialogue with English colleagues, scholars of culture, creative industries, and entertainment, after a meeting on the research about cultural intermediaries. This was the first big research of the group of scholars in the Sociology department of the University. It was focused on creative professions in a broad sense, underlining the centrality of culture in their success: a common thread that was not visible at the time, but that was already there.
The British colleagues found the research interesting, but not specialized enough. The Dean of Political Science at that time, economist Alberto Quadrio Curzio, helped spark the idea to focus on Fashion, an obvious choice in Milan, but not necessarily for sociological studies, especially in Italy. "Fashion studies" were more rooted in the Anglo-Saxon environment and still quite new.
In 1995 we created our first conference "Fashion, fashions, metropolitan ways of life" that gathered scholars of fashion studies and was the forerunner of the what would become the successful format, Fashion Tales.
The founding of the centre was the natural next step in 1996."