Fashion studies

The course prepares students to appreciate the interaction between classical, Graeco-Roman aesthetics, with its peculiar evaluation of both body and dress, and Jewish-Christian anthropology: they meet in the most systematic form in the imperial and late-ancient age, thus opening the way for medieval aesthetics. The course therefore aims to teach how to read ancient documents, both literary (with a particular attention to Christian literature: New Testament, apocryphal literature, Gnosticism, apologetics), and iconographic, to reconstruct the evaluation of the body and dress in the most diverse social contexts, from the daily life of the working classes to the clerical and monastic world, from the aristocracy to the emperor himself. The student will therefore learn how the ancient perception of the body and dress must be studied in its historical effectiveness (the concrete situations in which the visibility of both is possible), but also in its ideological context.