Francesca Granata will be giving two lectures about her book, Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Carnival, and the Grotesque Body in April 2017. She will be speaking in London on April 6th at the Somerset House – a talk organized by the Somerset House in partnership with the Fashion Research Network.

On April 20th , Granata will be speaking at the Fashion Resources Center at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

Experimental Fashion is a study of designers and performance artists, including Leigh Bowery, Rei Kawakubo and Martin Margiela at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body through strategies of parody, humor, and inversion. The book argues that the proliferation of bodies-out- of-bounds in fashion during this period was influenced by feminism’s desire to open up and question gender and bodily norms and particularly the normative bodies of fashion. It was also tied to the AIDS epidemic and mediated the fears of contagion and the obsessive policing of bodily borders that characterized the period.