The Eighth Annual Bernard Blume Lecturer will be Barbara Vinken, speaking on "Fashion Queers: From Chanel to Maison Margiela." 

For over a century, Western fashion has been practicing a juxtaposition of gender stereotypes and sexual desires: cross-dressing is now a fundamental structure for contemporary fashion. Its cognitive potential and its revolutionary potency lie in this harsh yet delightful discordance. The grammatical categories of “male” and “female,” shaped through the clothing regime, are juxtaposed. Clichés of femininity and masculinity are not cemented through the cross-dressing movement; they are playfully outdone. Emanating from the convention which binarity poses, cross-dressing provides more adequate descriptive possibilities than more common discourse of gender fluidity. Fashion demonstrates that gender roles are not founded in nature, do not express biology. Through queering, masculinity and femininity appear, refashioned, as societal modes of being.

Barbara Vinken received a doctoral degree from the University of Konstanz and a PhD from Yale University. She holds the chair of French and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich and is currently (spring 2024) a visiting professor in Harvard’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her main areas of research are the Italian and French Renaissance, the French novel from the 18th to the 20th century, the Italian novel of the 19th and 20th centuries, the reception of antiquity, deconstructive feminism, theories of comparative literature, and fashion theory. She writes frequently for popular media in Germany; recent scholarly publications include Eleganz (Vienna, 2023); Diva: Eine etwas andere Opernverführerin (Stuttgart, 2023); and Civil War and the Collapse of the Social Bond: The Roman Tradition at the Heart of the Modern (Cambridge University Press, 2022). She has been honored with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesverdienstkreuz) and the Gauß Medaiile (2024). Professor Vinken came by chance to her work on fashion, after being asked by a friend for an essay on the topic. She had always loved textiles—her mother was a designer and lived near a flourishing textile region in Germany—and living in New York City at the time gave her an ideal base for her research. Her aim was to take Fashion away from sociology and reconquer clothes for Aesthetics: read a dress like a poem, with its refined intertextuality, its marvelous retroping.