Our Story

The ModaCult Centre was founded in 1996 by Laura Bovone, who served as its Director until 2018, building on the long-standing tradition of the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.

At the time of its foundation, "Fashion Studies" had not yet emerged as an established field in Italy. The founding group of ModaCult focused more broadly on the study of cultural production, understood as encompassing all those processes and products whose economic and social value derives primarily from their symbolic content: 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 was therefore conceived as a driving force of late modernity, to be studied not only in the abstract as a system of values, institutions and dominant models, but also through its more material expressions, professional articulations and the forms of resistance to the mainstream that emerge 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 viewed as merely subordinate, but rather as a dialectical protagonist within the creative landscape. Consequently, the consumption of cultural objects was no longer regarded as a passive activity, but as 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.

From these beginnings, the titles of the Centre’s annual conferences and publications demonstrate its increasingly close engagement with international Fashion Studies, its leading scholars and its 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 come about a bit by chance, or rather through a fortunate series of combinations. The seed of our Centre was sown during the discussion with some British colleagues, scholars of culture, creative industries and entertainment, following a meeting devoted to research on cultural intermediaries. It was one of the first major research projects undertaken by the group of scholars gathered in the Department of Sociology of our University. The research focused on creative professions in the broadest sense and highlighted the central role of culture in their success: an underlying connective element that was not immediately visible, but was nonetheless there.

English colleagues found it interesting, but not very specialized. An the suggestion of the then Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences, Professor Alberto Quadrio Curzio, an economist, the idea emerged to focus specifically on fashion — an obvious subject for Milan, perhaps, 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 Centre was the natural next step, in 1996."