MFF IDEAS PROGRAM 2021 | CREATING THE CONSUMER: Twentieth Century Fashion with Peter McNeil

Being a good citizen in the 20^th century meant being a modern consumer, with a related fear of poverty, backwardness and ‘the old’ ways – unhygienic, unscientific, unsophisticated. The twentieth century – the century of the consumer and consumer excess – is also the century of the couturier, the designer, the branding expert and the fashion ‘industry’ at large. Learn how fashion consumption has travelled in all directions, across class lines, between urban and rural areas, and around the globe. How does fashion relate to the ‘lifestyles’ and celebrities that populated 20th century culture? Can we separate the significance of fashion in people’s lives from the ugly side of this enormous global industry or we are discussing different things?

PROFESSOR DR PETER MCNEIL is Distinguished Professor of Design History at the University of Technology Sydney and lately Distinguished Professor Aalto University. Trained in the history of art with a focus firstly on design and later fashion culture, his research engages with different ways in which visual imagery and materiality shaped lives from the eighteenth century to the present day. His numerous monographs and edited books include the award-winning publications The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives, 2010 (Routledge; with G. Riello); and Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, Renaissance to the Present Day (4 Vols.), Berg, 2009. McNeil was a Principal Investigator in the Humanities in the European Research Area funded project ‘Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800’ and then from 2014-2018 an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor for Costume Methodologies. He is Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His monograph ‘Pretty Gentlemen’: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-century Fashion World was published by Yale University Press in 2018. He is currently writing a comparative study of east-west global fashion systems 1500-1800.

Image: (L-R) Betty Grable, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe pose for a portrait on the set of the 20th Century-Fox film 'How to Marry a Millionaire' in 1953 in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Earl Theisen Getty Images.