about me

Monica Geraffo is a professional fashion and textile historian and a PhD candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at UCLA.

Interested in performances of luxury, modernity, and nationalism, her dissertation “Cold War Couture: The Re-Fashioning of Synthetic Textiles and French Luxury Fashion into Military Technology, 1945-1969” explores the use of synthetic fabrics by Parisian couture designers in the Cold War Era. She argues that the mass scale of synthetic textile production in the period replaces explosives and chemical weapons to become the main source of chemical warfare.

Monica’s other work can be found via writings in the Film Fashion & Consumption Journal and public appearances with San Diego Comic Con and TEDxBoston. She also works as an independently contracted archivist and costume exhibition preparator, primarily with ASU FIDM Museum Los Angeles, as a co-host of VoxPopcast, a weekly pseudo-academic roundtable podcast, and as the creator of theWARParchive, a multimedia and digital humanities project in textile history.

Growing up as a historical re-enactor and museum interpreter, and as a previous period costumer for AMC and Netflix productions, she is dedicated to de-institutionalizing knowledge through accessible public history and the study of popular culture.