ZMJ Call For Papers: Fashioning Opera. Stage and Screen Costumes Across Cultures
The profound meaning of the word “costume” in the Italian language goes beyond the narrow boundaries of “vestimenta”. In fact, costumes are bodies. In this respect, fashion – looked at both as a spiritual fact and applied art – opens up a considerable field of study for historians, aesthetes, and scholars alike. It is significant that it is in Italy that the concept of “costume” understood as the proposition or re-proposal of an event, as the representation of a fact – whether fictitious or not –, and as a means of transforming the performer into what he is not, took shape.
In Italy, the creative explosion experienced through the last thirty years of the twentieth century did not only refer to opera costumes, because fashion designers too experienced a fertile and très jolie period at that time. Fashion and opera became arenas for collaboration. The partnership is a fruitful one: the most theatrical of arts can inspire the most visionary fashion designers to create extraordinary costumes for extraordinary productions. Several Italian designers have tried their hand at theatrical costume: Gianni Versace, Giorgio Armani, Valentino Garavani, Ottavio and Rosita Missoni are just a few names. Versace worked several times with the Belgian choreographer Maurice Bejart in the production of ballets and tried his hand at opera. Giorgio Armani, with his dry and essential style, has often dealt with opera productions where his taste was required; and Ottavio and Rosita Missoni have participated in various opera shows. During the season 2009/2010, Viktor & Rolf, Miuccia Prada, Emanuel Ungaro, and Christian Lacroix made successful sorties as costume designers for operas in New York, Baden-Baden, Naples, and Berlin.
Beyond and off the theatrical stage, opera and film have enjoyed a close relationship since the beginning of cinema. In the silent era, operatic stories and stars graced the screen, and opera music was played live. Through the sound era and the advent of television, opera continued to appear in mediated form. In recent years, digital formats, the Internet, and streaming have affected how opera is experienced and consumed. Moreover, film in all its forms has exerted increasing influence on the staging of live opera.
The relationship between opera and film is a relatively new area of study, emerging with Jeremy Tambling’s pioneering book Opera, Ideology, and Film (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987) topped by the recently published Joseph Attard’s Opera Cinema: A New Cultural Experience (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2024). The intersection of opera and film spans a wide range of genres and behaviors, and the remediations of the operatic spectacle have become the subject of recent investigations (Carluccio and Rimini 2024). “Film” includes television as well as cinema and streaming, in addition to more conventional modes of presentation. Perhaps the main internal categorization is whether an opera constitutes the whole of a film, which is labeled an “opera-film”, or whether it occurs in a regular film, where the possibilities are legion. With a few exceptions, research on opera and film has almost ignored the “feminine” elements of costume design and fashion.
As film scholar Guglielmo Pescatore has remarked in his important contribution La voce e il corpo. L’opera lirica al cinema (2001), opera and cinema may appear as distant forms of artistic expression, with very different traditions and languages: “However, upon closer inspection, a dense network of influences emerges which account for a lively presence of opera on the big screen.” Of course, there is the opera-film, but the interactions can be subtle: from melodramatic conventions to musical commentary, cinema has been nourished by the operatic tradition, its texts, and its public.
Given the hybrid nature of the topic, the monographic issue on Fashioning Opera: Stage and Screen Costumes Across Cultures draws on many disciplines, especially film studies, film-music studies, opera studies, media studies, and performance studies; in order to look at opera through the prism of a neglected field: the historical relationship between fashion, costume, and opera expressed through different media. Submissions exploring, but not limited to, the following are encouraged:
- The opera’s divas and their costumes
- Defining the opera celebrity through costume
- The performers’ private wardrobes and their operatic personas
- Costume and gender politics inside bel canto
- Engaging minorities, diversity, and queer identities through operatic costumes
- Opera reception through fashion and costume design
- Fashion designers’ contribution to opera’s aesthetics
- Costume as performative object
- Transnational audiences, transnational discourses
- Operatic films, film-opera, filmed opera
- Opera costumes and visual arts
- Opera costumes and sustainability
- The profession of the costume designer in dressing the character
- Costume designer, production perspectives
Submissions
Abstracts of no more than 500 words, excluding bibliographical references (word*.docx format), written either in Italian or English, are required to illustrate the objectives of the paper, the research question(s) and the methodology adopted. They must be sent, together with a short biographical note, to: sara.pesce@unibo.it; silvia.vacirca@uniroma1.it; zmj@unibo.it (with object: Abstract submission for ZMJ – Fashioning Opera).
Authors will be notified of proposal acceptance by November 3ʳᵈ, 2025.
Abstract acceptance does not guarantee publication of the article, which will be submitted to a double-blind peer-review process. Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere.
Key Deadlines:
- Abstract submission: October 1st, 2025.
- Notification of acceptance/rejection: November 3ʳᵈ, 2025 (notice of acceptance might include comments and requests for explanations).
- Full-length paper (6000/7000 words) submission: January 12th, 2026.
- Comments of the reviewers will be conveyed together with the editor’s decision (approval with no changes, approval with major/minor changes and/or rejection): February 16th, 2026.
- Authors shall send the reviewed article to the editorial staff by March 9th, 2026.
ZMJ Vol. 16 N.1 is scheduled to be published by July 2026.
