On Thursday April 9 and Tuesday April 14, Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies Francesca Granata will be presenting two talks on fashion criticism.

Francesca Granata to talk at SVA

“On Fashion Criticism” will take place at Cornell University’s Martha Van Rensselaer Hall (G87) on April 9 from 12:20 to 1:10pm. “Why Fashion Criticism Matters” will take place at the School of Visual Art (136 W. 21 St. 2nd Floor, NYC) on April 14 from 6:30 to 8:30pm.

Francesca Granata founded the non-profit journal Fashion Projects in New York in 2005. Through interviews with designers, critics and curators, it serves as a platform to highlight the importance of fashion in current critical discourses. This talk will focus on its most recent print issue, which examined fashion criticism through interviews with leading critics in the U.S. and beyond. Started in the “women’s section” of newspapers, fashion criticism is still undergoing the process of legitimization that other realms of popular cultures criticism, such as film and music criticism, went through in the 1960s and 1970s a  process that is complicated by the changes that criticism itself is rapidly undergoing. The talk will address the history and present state of fashion criticism and the reason it has remained understudied and undervalued until recently.