Our history

The ModaCult Center was founded in 1996 by Laura Bovone, director until 2018, in the wake of the tradition of the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

At the time of its foundation, "fashion studies" were not yet practiced in Italy and the founding group of ModaCult was oriented towards the study of cultural production in the broadest sense, which includes all processes and products that owe their economic and social value mainly to the symbolic content incorporated: from the mass media system, i.e. the classical cultural industry, to the system of artistic or artisanal production, to the increasingly wide range of large and small companies that produce material image goods (fashion, furniture), opportunities for leisure and entertainment, communication services that in turn increase the symbolic content of all types of goods. Culture , therefore, as the engine of late modernity, and therefore to be studied not only in the abstract as a set of values, institutions, majority models, but in its most material declinations and professional articulations, as well as in the processes of resistance to the mainstream   identifiable in everyday life. This approach was evidently indebted, in an increasingly conscious and evident way, to Anglo-Saxon cultural studies and to the attention they devoted to the so-called "popular culture", no longer trivially subordinate but dialectically the protagonist of the creative scene, and therefore to the consumption of cultural objects, an activity no longer seen as passive but a harbinger of new meanings.

ModaCult's  specialization in the field of fashion is undoubtedly due to its location in Milan at the end of the millennium and to the importance of the sector and its professions in the economy and city life, to which most of the research conducted in recent years is dedicated.

If this is the beginning, the titles of the annual conferences and publications testify to an increasingly close connection of the center with international Fashion Studies, its devotees and emerging themes: from fashion consumption to professions, from the relationship with gender to the relationship with art, up to the most recent debate centered on digital, the sharing economy and the now dominant issue of sustainability.

"Things also arise a bit by chance, or rather by a lucky series of combinations. The seed of our Center was sown during the discussion with some British colleagues, scholars of culture, creative industries and entertainment, after a meeting on research on cultural intermediaries. It was one of the first major researches of the group of scholars who gathered in the Department of Sociology of the University. The research focused on creative professions, broadly understood, and noted the centrality of culture in their success: a connective that was not seen, but was there.

English colleagues found it interesting, but not very specialized. At the suggestion of the then Dean of Political Science, Prof. Alberto Quadrio Curzio, economist,  the idea was born to focus on Fashion, a theme taken for granted for Milan, but not necessarily for sociological studies, at least in Italy. "Fashion studies" were more rooted in the Anglo-Saxon environment and in any case still quite new.

In 1995 we promoted the first conference "Fashion, fashions, ways of metropolitan living" which brought together scholars of fashion studies and was the forerunner of the future and successful Fashion Tales.

The foundation of the Center was the natural next step, in 1996."