Fashion Studies

Fashion Talk at AUP: Timeless Leopard? Fashion’s Material Culture in the Archives of Italian Colonialism

University Room: Omid & Gisel Kordestani Rooftop Conference Center (Q-801)
6 rue du Colonel Combes, 75007 Paris
Monday, June 15, 2026 - 18:00 to 19:30

About the Talk:
This talk begins with a leopard coat held in the archives of Italy’s former colonial museum. One of fashion’s most ubiquitous and seemingly “timeless” motifs appears here as what it originally was: a pelt. Bringing together fragments—documents, photographs, fashion pages, pelts, and prints—the presentation traces leopard’s movement from animal to commodity and from spectacle to fashion. Rather than reconstructing a linear history, it reveals a series of temporal loops in which colonial extraction resurfaces as aesthetic pleasure and commercial renewal.

About the speaker:
Dr. Monica Titton is a Senior Scientist in the Fashion Department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where she teaches courses in fashion history and theory. Her current research explores the intersections of fashion, craft, and style within the context of Italian colonialism, and examines how these colonial entanglements have shaped the histories of colonialism, globalization, and fashion. The research is supported by the Research Grant 2024-2026 of the Fondation Maison Mode Mediterranée.

About the Series:
Fashion can be framed as a democratic but also a dictatorial force. Seeing the fact (although long suppressed) that everyone has and does fashion, it has the potential to strengthen democracy. It has the power to connect us as citizens, to create and strengthen essential ties for common political action.

At the same time, fashion has the power to divide, to exclude, to individualise, to discriminate. The global western fashion system has dictated economic relationships and fashion as an industry is exemplary of the exploitation and discrimination that capitalism is founded on and feeds on.

In mainstream forms of fashion communication and promotion there is false discourse of fast fashion as democratic. Low prices, wide availability and easy access are framed as signs of equality and inclusion. While the full social and ecologic price is largely obscured.

This series aims to explore the space between fashion as a democratising, distinguishing, discriminatory and dictatorial force. It aims to celebrate the creative power of fashion – individually and communally in its potential to strengthen democratic relationships.

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