The Advisory Committe members for Costume Colloquium IV are:
- Gillion Carrara, Director, Fashion Resource Center, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, United States
- Daniela Degl’Innocenti, Curator, Museo del Tessuto di Prato, Italy
- Carlotta Del Bianco, Vice-President, Fondazione Romualdo Del Bianco – Life Beyond Tourism, Florence, Italy
- Jonathan Faiers, Reader in Fashion Theory, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
- Joanna Marshner, Costume Historian and Curator, Historic Royal Palaces, Kensington Palace, London, United Kingdom
- Roberta Orsi Landini, Costume & Textile Historian, Florence, Italy
- Alexandra Palmer, Nora E.Vaughan Senior Curator of Textiles & Costume, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada
- Rosalia Varoli-Piazza, Special Advisor to the Director General of ICCROM and Art Historian, Rome, Italy
- Mary Westerman Bulgarella, Costume & Textile Conservator, Researcher and Consultant, Florence, Italy
Brief biographies of Advisory Committee members:
Gillion Carrara is director of the Fashion Resource Center of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, as adjunct professor, she teaches the Shape of Contemporary Dress. She has published book reviews in Dress, the journal of the Costume Society of America and spoken on topics of contemporary and avant-garde dress at regional and national CSA symposiums. Her exhibition critiques of ‘Dior:The New Look’ (Chicago History Museum, 2006-7) and ‘4 Lines:a Fashion Exhibition and Installation‘ (SAIC Fashion Resource Center, 2007) were published in Fashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (Berg Publisher, Oxford, England, vol. 13, nos.1&3). She is a frequent speaker at the Alliance Francasie, the Arts Club of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago. Gillion presented ‘Scattered Remnants in the Present’ at the first Costume Colloquium: a Tribute to Janet Arnold in 2008 and ‘Soundsuits – Nick Cave in Dance’ at Costume Colloquium II: Dress for Dance.
Daniela Degl’Innocenti graduated from the University of Florence with a major in textile history. Since 1997 she has been curator of the Textile Museum of Prato where she oversees the conservation and preservation of the Museum’s collection as well as their permanent and temporary exhibitions. More recently she has organized the exhibitions ‘Intrecci mediterranei. Il tessuto come dizionario di rapporti economici, culturali e sociali‘ (2006), ‘Thayaht. Un artista alle origini del Made in Italy’ (2007) and ‘Lo stile dello zar. Arte e moda tra Italia e Russia dal XIV al XVIII secolo’ (2009), in collaboration with the Hermitage State Museum. She has published many studies on textile studies and continues to conduct courses at the University of Florence, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure and Polimoda. In the international arena she has collaborated with a United Nations project in the Gabinete de Conservaciòn y restauraciòn de La Habana (Cuba) as docent for the course ‘Conservaciòn y restauraciòn de textiles’ (2003). Daniela lectured at the first international conference on textile conservation held in San Paolo, Brasile entitled ‘Tecidos e sua conservação no Brasil: museus e coleções‘ (2006).
Carlotta Del Bianco is Founder Fellow and Board member of the Romualdo Del Bianco Foundation® in Florence. Her interests in costume stem from her university research on theatrical costume of Edward Gordon Craig, 19th-20th century British set and costume designer. Prior to receiving her University degree she collaborated with the Stibbert Museum reordering the costume collection and after she worked on the cataloging of the photographic archive of the Medici Burial Clothes. Carlotta’s particular career path has taken her into promoting occasions for the international and inter-cultural exchange among specialists and students in artistic and cultural fields. Since 2006 she has had an active role in defining the orientation of Life Beyond Tourism® which is promoted the Romualdo Del Bianco Foundation®. She is an active member of the ICOMOS Italian Committee (International Council of Monuments and Sites) and since 2008 is in charge of the coordination of their Italian youth committee. Recently she has become an Associate Member of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for Theory and Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration (TheoPhilos).
Jonathan Faiers is Reader in Fashion Theory at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. He received his BA in Fashion and Textile Design (St Martins 1980), a Post-Graduate Diploma in Theatre Design (Slade School 1982), an MA in Critical Theory (Goldsmiths 1994) and his PhD on the Representation of the Museum Space in Mainstream Cinema in 2001 (University of London). His work explores the interface between popular culture, textiles and dress and he teaches and acts as external examiner for a variety of UK institutions including Central St Martins, Chelsea School of Art, Kingston University and the Royal College of Art. His interdisciplinary study Tartan was published by Berg in 2008, and his next book Dressing Dangerously: Dysfunctional Clothing in Film will be published by Yale University Press in 2013. He has written articles, presented papers and organised colloquia on subjects including: knitting and formlessness, Balenciaga and ecclesiastical dress, Classicism, fashion and science fiction (the subject of his paper presented at CC III), tweed and gender subversion, criminality and tailoring and textiles and the production of space. As a visual artist his installations have addressed subjects such as the Kashmir shawl and Huguenot silk weaving. Luxury: History, Culture and Consumption, a new peer-reviewed, critical journal edited by Jonathan will be launched by Bloomsbury in 2013. He acts as a member of the Publications Advisory Board at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Joanna Marschner is senior curator Historic Royal Palaces in the UK and has special responsibility for the collections of royal and ceremonial dress at Kensington Place. Joanna studied history and history of art as an undergraduate, and museology at postgraduate level. Her PhD thesis was on the subject of royal collecting and connoisseurship in early 18th century Britain. She is author of several publications including ‘Splendour at Court. Dressing for Royal Occasions since 1700’, ‘The Royal Wedding Dresses’ and ‘Diana, princess of Wales. Fashion and Style”, and has written articles on subjects ranging from fashion history and social history, to interior design and museology. She has been chair of the Dress and Textiles Network for museum curators in the UK and chair of the Costume Committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) 2001-2007. She is now working on a major project to transform the visitor experience of Kensington Palace and its collections.
Roberta Orsi Landini, textile and costume scholar, has worked for over 20 years on the textile and costume collections at the Pitti Palace in Florence. She is author of numerous articles, essays and books and has collaborated with an array of public institutions and museums in Italy and abroad. From the onset of the Galleria del Costume in 1983 she has collaborated on several projects, exhibitions and publications, among which ‘Moda alla corte dei Medici’, on the conserved Medici burial clothes and ‘I principi bambini’, on court infant clothing. For the Stibbert Museum she conceived and curated the exhibition and catalog entitled ‘L’abito per il corpo. Il corpo per l’abito‘, which confronted western and Islamic dress. Roberta instigated and oversaw for many years the didactic activities of the Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio and the Roberto Capucci Foundation in Florence. Her most recent book publication, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580: lo stile di Eleonora di Toledo e la sua influenza, is a culmination of her meticulous and accurate detailed dress research on archival documents and coeval imagery. Forthcoming is her next book, Moda a Firenze 1540-1580 Lo stile di Cosimo I de’ Medici.
Alexandra Palmer received her BA in Art History (University of Toronto,1979), her MA in Costume and Textiles (New York University, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art,1981), and her PhD in Design History (University of Brighton,1994). Since 1996 she has been the Nora E. Vaughan Senior Curator of Textiles & Costume at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. She has contributed to international museum catalogs including ‘The Golden Age: Haute Couture 1947-1957‘, V&A, London (2007); ‘RRRIPP!! Paper Fashion’, Benaki Museum, Athens (2007); ‘Christian Dior et le Monde’, Musée Dior, Granville (2006); and ‘Un Secolo di Moda’, Villa Medici, Rome (2003). She has edited and authored chapters in Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (2005), and Fashion: A Canadian Perspective (2004). She has contributed to a wide range of scholarly books including La Moda in Canada (2008), Framing Our Past: Constructing Canadian Women’s History in the Twentieth Century (2001), and The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (1999). Her book Couture & Commerce: The Transatlantic Fashion Trade in the 1950s (2001) won a Clio Award for Ontario history, and Dior: A New Look, A New Enterprise 1947-57 (2009) won the 2010 Millia Davenport Publication Award. Alexandra is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and the Exhibition Editor for Fashion Theory: the Journal of Dress, Body and Culture.
Rosalia Varoli-Piazza was educated in art history at the University of Rome and received an MA at the State University of New York at Binghamton. For 26 years she was Director/Coordinator of art history, and responsible for the textile conservation section at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome. She has pioneered interdisciplinary approaches to numerable art conservation projects, among which is the international pilot project of “The Minimal Opening of Emperor Federick II’s Sarcophagus in the Palermo Cathedral” of which she is editor of the published results. In 2002 she was promoted to ICCROM from the Istituto, in agreement with the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali (Italy). Here she has been a Senior Program Coordinator, overseeing the courses of ‘Sharing Conservation Decisions’ (2002, 2004 and 2006). She has also been a consultant for the French Ministry of Culture for the restoration of the Salon d’Apollon at the Louvre, and the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles and has published on a variety of subjects including the theory of conservation. She has had a long involvement with several international organizations for textiles and conservation including ICOM-CC (Member of the Directory Board,1996-1999 and Coordinator of the Textiles Working Group,1996-2002) IIC (Fellow), and CIETA. Currently Rosalia is Special Adviser to the Director-General of ICCROM.
Mary Westerman Bulgarella received her BFA in Art History (1973) and MFA in Art Conservation (1976) and subsequently trained and specialized in the conservation, display and research of textile and costumes. Her professional work focuses not only on interventions and their documentation but also on the problems pertaining to the research of material and methods storage and display and she has published many essays on a variety of related subjects. She helped set up the Textile and Costume Conservation Laboratory at the Pitti Palace where she was employed for over 20 years. There from 1983 to 1993 she worked with a team of international experts on the conservation of the Medici burial clothes, on which she has written several articles and given numerous lectures. Mary has studied, taught, lectured at as well as collaborated with an array of museums and institutions in Italy and abroad. She is presently a freelance conservation consultant and researcher as well as organizer of conferences on significant textile and costume themes and coordinator of the Costume Colloquium Advisory Committee.
