Silvia Bombardini

Project Description The Shoplifter’s Monologue The Shoplifter’s Monologue is a short play set at the turn of the 20th century. It is written from the perspective of a successful shoplifter, Lisa, who reflects on her reasons and techniques for stealing. Her confession is disguised and distributed as a pair of stockings, an item frequently stolen from department stores at this time. Informed by Bombardini’s wider research into shoplifter's clothes in the late 19th and early 20th century, the play considers the role that the sartorial technologies a shoplifter like Lisa might have worn, might have played in her shoplifting practice. The monologue as a format, meanwhile, draws attention to the silence of female criminals in the archives where records of their thefts are kept, and to the absence of successful shoplifters and what they wore from these historical accounts. Bio Dr Silvia Bombardini is an Associate Lecturer, currently teaching at the London College of Fashion, the London College of Communication, and Central Saint Martins. For her PhD at Goldsmiths University, she researched shoplifters’ clothes at the turn of the 20th century. For her MRes, she revaluated luxury counterfeits from feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial perspectives. Bombardini contributed to edited books (Radical Fashion Exercises, The Cultural Construction of Hidden Spaces), and peer-reviewed journals (The Sociological Review, Excursions). Before academia she worked as a journalist for several international publications, and most regularly ran a ‘Coming of Age’ column for Modern Weekly China. Bombardini is also a film curator, has organised screenings in theatres and galleries, worked with MUBI, and curates the documentary selection of the ASVOFF film festival in Paris.