Profile
Dr. Alexis Romano is a writer, editor and curator whose work explores 20th-century fashion, photography, women's history, and everyday and subjective aspects of dress. Her current research studies women's experience of making and wearing clothes in the 1970s through the cross analysis of oral history, archive objects and imagery. She is the author of Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-68 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and co-curator of "Staten Island Mode: Identity, Memory, Fashion" (now on view at the Newhouse Center for Contempoarary Art). Previously Exhibition Reviews Editor of Textile History, Alexis is currently US Editor of WeAr Global Magazine, and contributes regularly to arts and culture publications including Vestoj, Aesthetica, Domus and Disegno. She co-founded the Fashion Research Network (FRN) in 2013, a platform connecting the global community of interdisciplinary fashion researchers. She was the 2020-21 Curatorial Fellow at the Costume Institute (Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Degrees Held
PhD, Courtauld Institute of Art (Art History, focus: Dress History); MA, Bard Graduate Center (Design History); MA, Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne (Art History)
Recent Publications
"1970s Fashion and Women: Finding the Everyday at the Intersection of Image, Archive and Oral History," in Fashion in American Life, eds. Hazel Clark and Lauren Downing Peters (Bloomsbury, 2024).
"British Women Designers and La Bohémienne Floue," in Chloé: Gaby Aghion and the Mood of the Moment, ed. Choghakate Kazarian (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023).
"Designing the American Dream: Diane vön Furstenberg's Career in 1970s New York," in Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman Before Fashion, ed. Nicolas Lor (Rizzoli/Musée Mode et Dentelle, 2023).
"Book Review: Black Designers in American Fashion," Critical Studies in Fashion & Beauty 13/2 (2022).
Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women: A Cultural Study of French Readymade Fashion, 1945-68 (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2022).
"La Mode et la Vie de Paris, 1955-1967," in Vogue Paris Cent Ans, ed. Sylvie Lecallier (Paris: Palais Galliera, 2021).
"Fashion, Plastic and Myths in Color," Photography & Culture 14/4 (2021), 463-7.
"Whose Streets? The Fashion Window Now: A Contested Surface," Vestoj (June 2020) http://vestoj.com/whose-streets/
"Book Review: Fashioning Professionals: Identity and Representation at Work in the Creative Industries," Journal of Design History 32/4 (November 2019).
"Book Review: European Fashion: the creation of a global industry," Textile History 50/1 (May 2019).
"Exhibition Review: Camp: Notes on Fashion," Domus (May 2019). www.domusweb.it/en/design/gallery/2019/05/09/camp-notes-on-fashion-.html
"Exhibition Review: The Value of Good Design," Disegno (April 2019).
Co-editor, Special Issue: "Hair Revisited," Fashion Theory. The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture (January 2019).
“Exhibition Review: Items: Is Fashion Modern?,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 25/2 (Fall/Winter 2018), 264-269.
With Ellen Sampson, “Fish(ing) nets and Rhizomes: Creating and uncovering the networks of expanded fashion practice,” MODUS (October 2018).
"London after a Curator: An Interview with Alistair O'Neil," Fashion Projects: On Fashion Curation 5 (August 2018).
With Ellen Sampson, “The Auteur is Alive and Well Dressed: What Designer Retrospectives Miss,” Vestoj (February 2018). www.vestoj.com/the-auteur-is-alive-and-well-dressed/
“Exhibition Review: Sara Berman’s Closet,” The Fashion Studies Journal (January 2018). www.fashionstudiesjournal.org/reviews-2/2018/1/6/exhibition-review-sara-bermans-closet
“Get a Room,” Address: Journal for Fashion Criticism (November 2017). www.addresspublications.com/get-a-room-exhibition/
"Paris, Prêt-à-Porter and Women in the Fashion Press, 1956-65," in Paris Refashioned, 1957-1968, ed. Colleen Hill (New Haven: Museum at FIT/Yale University, 2017), 221-247.
Performances and Appearances
Speaking
Jewish Museum (2023)
New York Historical Society (2022)
International Center of Photography (2022)
Book Launch, Courtauld Institute of Art (2022)
Society for French Historical Studies Conference (2022)
From Productive to Fragmented Bodies: Prêt-à-Porter, Paris and Women, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University (2021)
Expanding the Urban Fabric in 1960s French Magazines, Fellows Colloquia, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2021)
Seeing American Spaces and Dress in 1970s Color Film Photography, Columbia College, Chicago (2020)
Gender and Readymade Fashion, Bard Graduate Center (2019)
Postwar Paris and Fashion, Brooklyn Museum (2019)
Sartorial Stories: Fashion, Autobiography and Staten Island, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art (2018)
Reframing the Gaze: Prêt-à-Porter and the Urban Fabric in 1960s French Fashion Magazines, Chelsea College of Arts, London (2017)
Alexis Romano in Conversation with Dal Chodha and Jane Howard of the Archivist, Reading Fashion Magazines Conference, Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2017)
Co-organizer
Fashion, Identity and the Forgotten Borough's LGBTQ+ Community, Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island (2023)
Fashion and Suffrage, Bard Graduate Center, New York (2019)
Fashion Unraveled: Memory, Wear and Imperfection in Dress Colloquium, Museum at FIT (2018)
What is Fashion Research? Fashion Institute of Technology, New York (2017)