About
Simona Segre-Reinach is a cultural anthropologist and fashion scholar. She is Professor Alma Mater at the University of Bologna, where she taught Fashion Studies from 2011 to 2025.
She graduated in Anthropology from the University of Milan, with a dissertation on Haitian Vodou, and later earned an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
Before fully dedicating herself to academic research in fashion studies, she worked as a consultant in communication and socio-cultural change at GPF & Associati, where she was a partner and led projects for clients in the fashion industry.
Her work focuses on fashion from a global and transcultural perspective, with particular attention to the relationship between body, culture, and identity. Her publications have played a key role in the dissemination of fashion studies in Italy.
Among them are Mode in Italy (Guerini, 1999), Fashion: An Introduction (La moda. Un’introduzione, Laterza, 2005; second edition 2010), Orientalisms: Fashion in the Global Market (Orientalismi. La moda nel mercato globale, Meltemi, 2006), and A World of Fashions: Globalized Dress (Un mondo di mode. Il vestire globalizzato, Laterza, 2011).
Since the early 2000s, she has conducted extensive research on the fashion system within Italian Chinese collaborations, carrying out fieldwork in Italy, mainland China and Taiwan. On these topics, she has authored and edited books, articles, book chapters, and special issues of international journals, including Fast Fashion vs Prêt-à-Porter: Towards a New Culture of Fashion (2005), Fashion in Multiple Chinas (with Wessie Ling, 2018), One Fashion Two Nations (in L. Rofel and S. Yanagisako, 2019), the Global China special issue of Fashion Theory (with Wessie Ling, 2021), and Taiwan in Italy (with Wessie Ling, 2025).
Curation and the representation of fashion are central to her theoretical approach and research practice. She has curated international exhibitions such as 80s–90s Facing Beauties: Italian Fashion and Japanese Fashion at a Glance (Rimini, 2013) and Jungle: The Animal Imaginary in Fashion (Jungle. L’immaginario animale nella moda, Venaria Reale, 2017). She has also edited volumes on art, aesthetics, and fashion, including Rodrigo Pais: Perspectives on Fashion (with Guido Gambetta, Drago, 2022) and It’s Snowing (with Vittorio Linfante and Massimo Zanella, Marsilio, 2025).
She is co-curator of the Biki–Jacques Reynaud Archive, housed at the University of Milan. On the figure of Biki, she published Biki: French Visions for Italian Fashion / Visioni francesi per una moda italiana (Rizzoli, 2019) and co-wrote the documentary Biki: The Woman Who Made Maria Callas Divine (Biki. La donna che rese divina Maria Callas, directed by Michele Mally, 2024). She has also taken part in numerous international conferences devoted to Milanese fashion of the 1950s and 1960s.
In recent years, she has developed a strong interest in the ethical dimensions of fashion, particularly the relationships between fashion, animals, and nature. On these issues, she published For a Gentle Way of Dressing: Fashion and Animal Liberation (Per un vestire gentile. Moda e liberazione animale, Pearson, 2021) and Animal (Bloomsbury, 2026).
She is a member of the scientific board of the journal Animot. Critical Studies on Animality.
Former editor-in-chief of ZoneModa Journal, to which she contributed significantly by strengthening its international profile, she serves on the editorial boards of leading academic journals in the field, including Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, and Culture, Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty, and International Journal of Fashion Studies.
She is regularly invited as a scholar to the Fashion Symposia at The Museum at FIT in New York. Her most recent participation was in Fashion and Psychoanalysis (November 2025), where she delivered the lecture Fashion Interprets Psychoanalysis.
She also contributes to Doppiozero, for which she reviews exhibitions on fashion and art.
In Bing Bang Bong. A Nearly Jewish Story (Una storia quasi ebraica, Guerini, 2026), published in the series “Stories in History,” she revisits her own biography through a hybrid form that blends essay and literary memoir.