Books
A selected bibliography documenting a lifelong research into how we dress, think, and relate to the world.
[ Filter by: Italian Identity / Global Fashion / Curatorship & Media / Memoirs & Animality ]
Foundations of Fashion Studies & Italian Identity
Italian fashion as a cultural system.
Biki. French Visions for Italian Fashion
Milano: Rizzoli
(2019)
The story of Milanese, Italian, and international fashion told through the words and images of one of its protagonists, Elvira Leonardi Bouyeure — known as Biki — the “dressmaker” of Callas.
La cultura della moda italiana
/ Made in Italy.
Guest Editor, ZoneModa Journal, no. 2/2011.
(2011)
What is the place of Italian fashion in the current context? What culture does it represent in the particular moment in which there is a renewed appreciation for craftsmanship within industrial production? What are the elements that still come into play today, and which instead definitively belong to a past organization? The authors have generously responded to these questions, and each of them, as the reader will be able to appreciate, has highlighted more than one aspect that makes up the complex puzzle of Italian fashion.
Mode in Italy.
Una lettura antropologica.
Milan: Guerini & Associati.
(1999)
The book analyzes the phenomenon of Italian fashion not only as an economic industry or an aesthetic fact, but through a socio-anthropological lens, exploring the cultural practices and social meanings connected to it. “Made in Italy” is examined as a phenomenon of Italian culture in the world, investigating its roots and its evolution.
La moda.
Un’introduzione
Roma–Bari: Laterza.
Seconda edizione: 2010
(2005)
The volume provides the essential coordinates for understanding one of the most emblematic social and market phenomena of contemporary society: fashion. It examines its meanings and ambivalences from its European origins to today’s global circulation, its role in shaping identity, the history of fashion theory from nineteenth-century human sciences to contemporary fashion studies, its main expressions (from haute couture to prêt-à-porter and fast fashion), the dynamics of fashion marketing, and the international geography of fashion capitals.
Global Fashion & Transcultural Perspectives
Overcoming Eurocentrism and relations with Asia (China and Taiwan).
Un mondo di mode.
Il vestire globalizzato
(2011)
All fashions, somehow, originate as a form of “emancipation from Paris,” yet each story of this emancipation is different, distinctive, and rich in implications related to the past, sartorial histories, trade exchanges between countries, manufacturing specializations, and the emergence of new “fashion capitals.” Contemporary research in the anthropology of fashion therefore moves in two main directions: understanding the global diffusion of Western brands and studying the various local fashions that assert themselves independently of the West.
Roma–Bari: Laterza.
Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape
(2018)
The transformation of China from a major site for clothing manufacture to an intensely fashion consuming society has been widely documented. Less has been written about the making of Chinese fashion. In Fashion in Multiple Chinas, expert authors explore how a multitude of Chinese fashions operate across the widespread, fragmented and diffused Chinese diaspora.
London & New York: I.B. Tauris / Bloomsbury
(ed. with Wessie Ling).
Global China
(2021)
The making of fashion is an example of the intricate and multifaceted relations of China and the rest of the world through the construction of a globally desired esthetic. Our special issue, Global China, aims to highlight the complex entanglement of China and fashion-making in the transglobal landscape. This has to do with fashion in, for, with, and of China, but more specifically, we consider the idea of Global China as a concept by analyzing the emergent features in fashion and the fashion industry in the 21st century. Our aim is to mark post-reform China as a baseline to reframe the cultural and economic context of global fashion.
Special Issue
Manuale di sociologia, comunicazione e cultura della moda. Vol. IV: Orientalismi. La moda nel mercato global
(2006)
Within the broader process of globalization, fashion has become a transnational industry marked by the gradual decline of Eurocentrism, accelerated by the massive shift of textile production from West to East and its economic and cultural implications. This ongoing transformation reshapes practices and imaginaries of producing, wearing, and communicating fashion, fostering the rise of new fashion capitals in Asia, South America, and Australia alongside the historic ones, and a new generation of designers from countries once considered “exotic” by the West, who creatively reinterpret local textile traditions. The book traces the stages of this change, from early forms of exoticism to contemporary expressions of Orientalism that permeate our ways of dressing and self-presentation.
Roma: Melteni
Curatorship & Visual Narratives
Fashion on display, archives and visual storytelling.
Jungle. L’immaginario animale nella moda
(2017)
Jungle, The Animal Imaginary in Fashion is the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name held at the Reggia di Venaria Reale, in Turin. Accompanied by critical essays by M. Bobbioni, P. Calefato, V. Caratozzolo, C. Corbetta, L. Gallo Orsi, S. Gnoli, A. Mancinelli, F. Muzzarelli, L. Scarlini, and S. Segre Reinach, this volume lays the groundwork for a historicization of the evolution of the animalier phenomenon in fashion and, consequently, in our collective imagination.
Roma: Drago
Exhibit!
(2017)
Exhibit! explores the multifaceted landscape of the fashion exhibition from different perspectives—sociocultural, historical, and aesthetic—with particular attention to the intersections between art and the market. By outlining an original perspective on cultural consumption, the volume offers readers a new vision of exhibition-making, with the aim of problematizing both the status of fashion and that of the brands in the contemporary context.
(con Luca Marchetti). Milano: Bruno Mondadori Pearson.
The Size Effect: A Journey into Design, Fashion and Media
(2019)
At the end of the last century, the so-called “new technologies” started to question the process of design, production, sales and consumption through a radical change, which today re-defines many concepts both in industry and every-day life. The notion of “size” – a cross-cutting term in the cultural and creative sector – has gone through a phase of crisis from which it is now re-emerging, enriched with new meanings and possibilities. Through different perspectives this volume presents and develops new paradigms that explain the complexities of the contemporary era and its new “sizes”.
(with A. Mascio et al.).
Milano: Mimesis.
Rodrigo Pais.
Sguardi sulla moda
(2022)
The book presents photographer Rodrigo Pais’s view of Italian fashion between the 1950s and 1960s. Showing Pais’s work through the lens of fashion offers a still little-explored reading of his oeuvre and confirms the social, cultural, representational, and political value of Italian fashion. With Pais — a photojournalist for Vie Nuove and later for l’Unità — fashion emerges as a significant node within a visual and anthropological narrative of postwar Italy and the relevance of Italian fashion in its intersections with cinema and politics.
(with Guido Gambetta).
Roma: Drago.
Memoirs, Literary Inquiries, Nature & Animal Studies
The intersection of sustainability, ethics and personal storytelling
Animal
(2026)
The fashion industry has long relied on animal bodies—for fur, leather, silk, and wool—while simultaneously fueling a pervasive "animal imaginary" in its aesthetics. This volume in the Fashion in Action series interrogates this dual dependence, calling for a profound shift toward a post-animal paradigm. Intersecting the voices of philosophers, scientists, and activists with those of designers and consumers, Animal is a global call to rethink our relationship with nature and inspire a future that honors life in all its forms.
London & New York: Bloomsbury.
Bing! Bang! Bong!
Una storia quasi ebraica
(2026)
Personal memory and collective history intertwine, between fragments of recollection and a love song, in the author’s diary: an inquiry into “almost Jewishness” that moves through the ambiguous territory of roots, where identity is not a matter of official record but a belonging shaped by desires and genealogies. An intellectual memoir that seeks no definitive answers but instead probes the mystery of what we inherit and who we choose to become.
Milano: Guerini.
Per un vestire gentile. Moda e liberazione animale
(2022)
Gentle dressing — which entails no exploitation or cruelty toward animals — is not merely a passing trend but will grow and spread as a new fashion destined to endure. Its development stems from multiple concerns and desires aimed at a broader idea of sustainability: combating climate change, sparing animals from suffering, safeguarding workers’ rights, and wearing attractive, high-quality garments. The various protagonists of this ethical and aesthetic quest share the same passion for the correspondences between the human and the non-human, and for the diverse manifestations of what we call nature. And from next-generation materials, new forms may emerge: of dress, and of coexistence.
Milano: Pearson.
It’s Snowing
(with V. Linfante and M. Zanella)
(2025)
A journey through time where every generation rediscovers its own dream of snow. A fascinating story spanning over a century of style, innovation, and creativity: It’s Snowing! reveals how winter entered the collective imagination and became an aesthetic and a culture as well.
Venezia: Marsilio.
Italian and English Edition.