Lecture Exhibition
Mad Fashions, Stylish Eccentrics & Those Who Satirized Them
Thursday, August 27 6:00-7:00 pm Buy Tickets General: $20 | Member: $15 | Student: $10
While a serious business, the fashion industry has often been perceived as frivolous. A world populated by insiders obsessing over the cut, color and style of a garment. For some 300 years, cartoonists have cast their satirical lens on fashion, capturing trends at their most absurd. In this visually immersive lecture, Alex Aubry, Director of SAIC’s Fashion Resource Center, explores the role of satire as a visual record of social mores, tastes and opinions on fashionable dress. While using humor to ridicule vanity, excess and eccentricity, the most talented satirists were also keen observers of society. For those who followed them, satirical cartoons also ignited larger conversation around gender roles, class, and morality in a rapidly changing world.
About the Speaker
Alex Aubry is the Director of the Fashion Resource Center at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute. His research, publishing, and curatorial work centers the Global South within histories of French haute couture. He served as the International Features Editor for Harper’s Bazaar Arabia for twelve years. He has contributed to books on museum development and collecting, in addition to exhibition catalogues such as Contemporary Muslim Fashions at San Francisco’s de Young Museum in 2018, the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland’s collaboration with Pierre Cardin for her retrospective at Madrid’s Reina Sofia in 2025, and the history of non-Western couture clients for the exhibition ‘Worth: Inventing Haute Couture,’ at Paris’ Petit Palais Museum in 2025.