Faculty

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" (Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, 2023). Previously Exhibition Reviews Editor of Textile History and US Editor of WeAr Global Magazine, she 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), and will be the 2024-25 Social Documentation Teaching Fellow at Wesleyan University. 

PhD, Courtauld Institute of Art (Art History, focus: Dress History); MA, Bard Graduate Center (Design History); MA, Université de Paris IV - Sorbonne (Art History)

"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 86^th: 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.