The Art History and Architecture Collection is a vital resource for academic libraries, offering extensive insights into various themes such as art movements, single-artist studies, decolonising art, gender and masculinity, citizenship, architecture and design. This collection aims to broaden the scope of art history, addressing a diverse range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present.
The collection encompasses theories and histories of materiality, exploring the intricate relationship between making and thinking, fashion and culture, production and consumption, textiles and industry.
| Key series |
| Rethinking Art’s Histories |
| Studies in Design and Material Culture |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 17 |
| 2023/4 titles | 28 |
| 2013-2022 titles | 74 |
| Total collection | 128 |
| Keywords |
| Singleartist studies |
| Subcultures |
| Design |
| Architecture |
| Citizenship |
| Surrealism |
| Art movements |
| Decolonising art |
| Queer art |
| Gender – masculinity |
| Modernism |
| Postmodernism |
| Thema subject categories |
| Architecture |
| Avant-garde |
| Ceramics, mosaics and glass: artworks |
| Colonialism and imperialism |
| History of art |
| Material culture |
| Performance art |
| Theory of art |
SDG coverage
Art history and architecture collection
The Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today exhibition played a crucial role in promoting Made in Italy imports to the United States and in reviving their modernity in foreign markets. The chapter contributes to this perspective by explaining how the exhibition was also a significant moment of fashion promotion during the postwar years, consolidating Italian originality and opening doors for a wider appreciation of Italian fashion in the United States. There are five sections analysing the exhibition in terms of its contribution to fashion history. These explain the selection of fashion merchandise on display and how it evolved as it travelled through twelve major American museums. In particular, the chapter presents a detailed analysis of the San Francisco and Brooklyn exhibitions’ legs, shedding light on previously unacknowledged accessories by Ferragamo and Roberta di Camerino exhibited there. The findings of this research provide a more comprehensive understanding of Italy at Work and the so far unrecognised impact of fashion trends in its constant redevelopment through the twelve steps of its three-year tour, between 1950 and 1953. Eventually, the chapter explores the intricate power dynamics between the organizers, the various intermediaries, and the US fashion market, along with the impact of Italy at Work on the career of commissionaire Giovanni Battista Giorgini and the genesis of the Italian High Fashion Shows in Florence.
The book discusses the transition that took place between 1944 and 1953, allowing Italian dressmaking to move from being considered a practice of copying Parisian models to achieving the status of ‘couture’, an attribution of value and recognition of individual originality. Building up from what has been researched so far on commissionaire Giovanni Battista Giorgini, the book sets out to demonstrate that the Italian High Fashion Shows were not so much an ingenious intuition of Giorgini but rather his clever attempt at consolidating trends and sentiments that invested several Italian and American fashion intermediaries of the time. The book contextualizes the earliest appearances of discourses on an ‘Italian fashion scene’ in US magazines and newspapers, mapping their descriptions of a collective identity of Italian fashion exports and highlighting the attention on simplicity and ingenuity. The same attributes are then examined in the promotions of Italian fashion merchandise operated in the United States and, with less success, in Italy until 1951. The six chapters document the gradual expansion of Italian fashion exports to the United States: from handcrafted accessories and textiles; to a small series of sportswear, knitwear, and the quintessentially Italian moda boutique; to the eventual inclusion in the early 1950s of high-end sartorie, finally recognised as original representatives of the new Italian couture.
The final chapter explains the methodological contribution of the book in its critical reassessment of the Giorgini archive. Here, the value of the archive is acknowledged as a complementary piece in the puzzle that is the international business history of fashion in its own right, but also as an example of how a fashion professional built the documentary foundation of his legacy. With this in mind, the conclusion suggests that while recent studies have identified Giorgini’s political intentions in his efforts to promote an idea of Italian fashion abroad as a form of ‘soft power’, these should instead be seen as ‘soft power ambitions’, in line with David W. Ellwood’s conceptualisation of the term coined by Joseph S. Nye. In addition, there had been similar attempts by other organisations before and after Giorgini, who sought the patronage of influential American citizens and members of the diplomatic community to promote their Italian fashion events. The final sections list the specific contributions of each chapter and conclude by contextualising the impact of the Italian High Fashion Shows on the subsequent emergence of the ‘Italian Look’ and the international relevance of the ready-to-wear industry in the late 1970s. The chapter concludes by explaining how the Shows laid the conceptual and discursive groundwork for the industry, which helped it later move away from equating Italian fashion with transatlantic tourism and an almost folkloristic gaze.
This chapter describes how the effectiveness of fashion promotion in Italy was undermined by the disjointed and disorganised fashion councils in Turin, Milan and Rome. Like Giorgini, the councils were indeed concerned with the development of foreign trade and, in particular, the establishment of permanent arrangements with the US fashion market. The chapter therefore provides evidence of a network of intermediaries and fashion professionals competing for the same goal: to make Italian fashion profitable as an export and to establish its permanence on the international market. The councils in Turin, Milan and Rome are thus presented as predecessors and competitors of Giorgini's private organisation, each characterised by a specific configuration of interests: the ‘American colony’ in Rome, linked to film stars and the cinema industry; the industrial scene of Milan and its skilled dressmakers; and the reconstitution of the remnants of a Fascist fashion council in Turin, the city that was once the only legitimised fashion capital of Italy. Despite the contrasts among the different fashion councils, the chapter eventually demonstrates the previously unnoticed first attempt to introduce an original Italian couture collection by the American department store J.L. Hudson’s in Detroit in 1949. Finally, the chapter presents the dressmakers and fashion firms that caught the attention of the American press before 1951, names who would in a few months take part in the early establishments of Giorgini’s Italian High Fashion Shows.
This chapter contextualizes the first five Italian High Fashion Shows organized by Giorgini within the cultural and commercial scenarios outlined in the previous chapters. The themes highlighted by the promotional activities that took place before 1951, including the recent Italy at Work, are here examined in the novel context of a systematized, biannual series of collective fashion showings. The Shows reinforced the definition of an ‘Italian Look’ in the early 1950s, legitimizing Italian couture further and focusing on moda boutique. This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the rhetorical strategies utilized by Giorgini to promote the Shows. In particular, it demonstrates that the use of Renaissance was modelled against prior examples of Fascist propaganda and discourses that had recently been circulating in the American press. The chapter eventually discusses Giorgini’s difficulties in overseeing the Shows and the alleged rivalry with the Parisian fashion industry, deconstructing the traditional narrative of pure competitiveness and instead highlighting collaborative relationships with his French contenders. The analysis concludes with the fifth Show, held in January 1953, by which time the Florentine events had become a set appointment in the transatlantic fashion calendar of seasonal presentations, and Italian fashion and couture exports were firmly established on the American market. The acknowledgement of the international market was by then complete and Italian dressmaking was now effectively recognised with the new term ‘Italian couture’.
The chapter begins with an examination of the buying offices and commissionaires in Florence in the first half of the twentieth century, before turning to the Italian branch of Handicraft Development, Inc., CADMA. The latter, directed by the art historian Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and technically managed by Mario Vannini Parenti, provided Handicraft Development, Inc. in New York with samples of handicrafts to be exhibited and promoted to American retailers and buyers. The aim was to advance the cause of Italian artisans and, as it turned out, Italian fashion artisans as well. The chapter then presents a case study of the reintroduction of Ferragamo shoes to the postwar American market, providing new insights into the relationship between the famous shoemaker and CADMA, and how the two intersected through Vannini Parenti personally. This and an additional case study shed light on how for-profit businesses in Florence, such as commissionaires and buying offices, coexisted with HDI and its associated agencies, which instead had non-commercial objectives. Finally, the chapter serves as an introduction to the main protagonist of the book’s analysis, the Tuscan commissionaire Giovanni Battista Giorgini, and to the events that marked his professional biography before the creation of the Italian High Fashion Shows in 1951. Eventually the chapters highlight the similarities between the objectives pursued by Giorgini, Handicraft Development, Inc., and CADMA, all of which aimed to provide Italian artisans with export-oriented production skills, enhanced reputation, and visibility.
The introduction explains the starting point of the book, a methodological reflection that assesses how the business vision of commissionaire Giovanni Battista Giorgini and his establishment of the Italian High Fashion Shows in Florence in 1951 have crystallised into a mythologised place in the history of Italian fashion. The text adopts the historical perspective of historian Marc Bloch’s preoccupation with origins to closely read the celebratory narrative that mythicized Giorgini in Italian fashion history until the early 2000s. It contextualises the research presented in the book with previous studies of fashion under Fascism, to highlight the continuity that exists between the regime and democracy in terms of business practices, fashion professionals and manufacturers. The chapter then presents the theoretical framework, grounded in the new business history of fashion studies and particularly on Regina Lee Blaszczyk’s work on fashion intermediaries. It outlines the need to understand the social realities of postwar Italian fashion through a detailed study of the activities situated between production and consumption, well represented by the main actors discussed in the book: the G.B. Giorgini firm, the non-profit agency Handicraft Development, Inc., its Italian branch CADMA, and other Italian fashion councils. Finally, after a critical evaluation of the primary sources discussed, especially those in the Giorgini archive in Florence, the chapter explains the book's contribution to the field of transnational history, as it rewrites a history of the cultural and commercial interactions of postwar Italy with North America within the larger configuration of the international fashion market.
The chapter explains how a non-profit agency called Handicraft Development, Inc. was established in the United States with joint efforts from Italians, Americans, and Italian Americans. This agency played a crucial role in helping Italian fashion merchandise emerge in the American market as luxury export goods. The chapter is divided into five sections that explain the multifaceted issues that were overcome. One of the main issues was the perception of American customers towards Italy in the immediate postwar years. Many Americans associated Italy with Fascist models of production and propaganda, which created a negative image of Italian fashion merchandise. Another issue was related to production: Italian handicraft makers needed training and consultancy to learn how to adapt local aesthetics to American consumers. This was important to ensure that Italian fashion merchandise became desirable to the American market. To bolster the reputation of Italian fashion merchandise in the United States, it was deemed necessary to enhance its perceived quality, which would require a corresponding increase in the price. However, it was important to ensure that the price increase did not render the goods unattainable, to maintain accessibility for interested buyers. This was a crucial step in positioning Italian fashion merchandise as a high-end commodity in the American market. The chapter ends by discussing the impact of the House of Italian Handicrafts showroom in New York on promoting Italian fashion as non-competitive to Americans, while also bolstering its artistic tradition.
The chapter discusses the state of international fashion and its circulation in 1944, as the war slowly drew to a close. It introduces some key figures who will appear later in other chapters, such as department store director Stanley Marcus, journalists Carmel Snow, Bettina Ballard and Marya Mannes, and socialite and fashion designer Simonetta Visconti. Their relevance is discussed here in terms of their contribution to the earliest discussions of the emerging novelty of Italian fashion as it appeared in US fashion columns and magazines before the end of the war. The chapter chronicles relevant appearances and mentions of Italian fashion in American fashion magazines. It focuses on Rome as the narrative was subjected to the latest developments of the war: liberated in June 1944, Rome became the first Italian city to have a fashion scene worth mentioning. It presents a brief account of the fashion houses that continued to operate, such as Gabriellasport; contextualises them with reports from the Italian fashion magazine Bellezza, which was still linked to the Fascist administration, and the supporting fashion houses based in northern Italy; and finally outlines the tropes often used by American journalists to describe products (leather accessories and sandals), people (Italian female socialites), and their characteristics (the timeless grace of the nobility, the hardworking stamina of the artisans). This, in turn, begins the rehabilitation that Italians need as a country to emerge on the international fashion market as a solid commercial and political ally of the United States.
The conclusion deals with some of the very thorniest questions of Siqueiros’s mural production. Siqueiros was indeed at times authoritarian. He never wavered in his support of a Soviet Union that was increasingly seen by progressive communists as an unsalvageable shill for Stalinism; he had a “star” position within the communist art world of the time that gave him privileges unavailable to the working class he sought to represent. Yet, the murals of his late career are highly valuable. They dramatize the need for organization, leadership, and analysis as core components of an effective left-wing politics. They never descend into the kind of theoretical solipsism that began to characterize Marxist debate in the academy in the 1970s. They were unfailingly attentive to the travails of the global working class and, as such, create a kind of dialogue with the dead meant as a productive spur to revolutionary political action. They stand as a testimony to the one-time power of the organized, international, communist movement which in many contexts—and despite its many problems—served as a progressive political force. Thus, they stand too as an emblem of the massive cultural and political gap that separates Siqueiros’s time period from our own, in which progressive politics lacks a coherent center and seems too often to fail at the day-to-day work of political organization based on a rationally arrived at program.