Francesca Granata is Director of the MA Fashion Studies and Assistant Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons School of Design. Her research centers on 20th century and contemporary visual and material culture with a particular focus on fashion history and theory, gender and performance studies. Her monograph Experimental Fashion, Performance Art, Carnival and the Grotesque Body (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017) examines the way experimental fashion at the turn of the twenty-first century mediated shifting gender norms and the AIDS crisis.

Ulrich Lehmann is Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Design and Arts at The New School, New York. He studied philosophy, sociology and the history of art in Frankfurt a.M., Paris and London. His research interests are the histories of material culture in Europe from the 1780s to the present day. He has contributed to a wide range of journals and edited collections on fashion and material culture. He is the author of Josiah McElheny: Object Lesson (White Cube, 2013) and Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (MIT Press, 2001).

Philipp Ekardt studied Comparative Literature and Art History in Berlin, Paris and at Yale University where he received his PhD with a dissertation on Walter Benjamin’s image theory and Alexander Kluge’s image practice. Before taking up his current post in London he worked as a research associate at the Freie Universität Berlin and was editor-in-chief of the journal Texte zur Kunst. His first monograph Toward Fewer Images. The Work of Alexander Kluge is forthcoming with MIT Press, and he is currently completing his second monograph, to appear with Bloomsbury, tentatively titled Fashion Forward Benjamin, which analyses the writings of Walter Benjamin in relation to fashion.

Laura Gardner is an editor, writer, and co-publisher of Mode and Mode (with designer Karina Soraya). Formerly online editor for the journal Vestoj, as well as working on freelance publishing projects, Laura is currently pursuing a PhD in the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University. Her research and projects dwell on the performative and critical space of publishing in fashion and the role of print as a medium to disrupt, or propel, fashion narratives.