Professor Christopher J. Berry
Christopher J. Berry is Professor (Emeritus) of Political Theory and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow and an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland’s ‘national academy’). The author of seven books, he is a leading international scholar of the Scottish Enlightenment and recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (OUP). His Idea of Luxury (CUP, 1994) has had widespread influence both outside and inside academia and appeared in a Chinese translation (Century Press, 2005). He has lectured widely on the topic and is a visiting professor on the Masters course in Luxury Goods Management at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan.
Veronica Manlow
Veronica Manlow is an associate professor at Brooklyn College in the Koppelman School of Business, Department of Business Management. She wrote Designing Clothes: Culture and Organization of the Fashion Industry in 2007/2009. In 2014 she co-edited a book entitled Global Fashion Brands: Style, Luxury, History. She is an associate editor for the journal Fashion, Style and Popular Culture. She teaches fashion marketing and is the faculty advisor to the Fashion Marketing Society at Brooklyn College.
Areas of interest are the organisation, culture, leadership and the creative process of fashion design and branding. Fashion is of interest to Veronica Manlow from a social and cultural perspective as it relates to both applied and theoretical questions concerning the individual, industry, modernity and the global economy. She is currently doing research on the career of luxury salespersons and is considering the structural and interactional dynamics mediated by salespersons who must balance corporate directives, relationships with store management and the culture of the selling floor with their own notions of expertise and personal agency.
She is teaches a course on the Business of Fashion at the Graduate Center's Masters of Liberal Studies program in Fashion Studies and has been invited to be a visiting faculty at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology where she will teach a course on luxury branding.
Dr Peter Oakley
Since 2012 Dr Peter Oakley has been Research Leader for the School of Material at the Royal College of Art, supporting the development and management of staff research projects across the ceramics and glass, fashion, jewellery and metal, and textiles programmes. Through his work at the RCA Peter has acquired an extensive knowledge of a wide cross-section of the luxury goods sector.
Peter’s own research interests include the fine jewellery and watch industries and their supply chains. He has a particular interest in manufacturing using gold, precious metal assaying and the development and promotion of ethical gold sourcing initiatives and campaigns.
In the past Peter has worked on design projects and in restoration teams, lectured in the applied arts and developed university programmes for staff employed in the heritage industry. Peter is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institution, an Honorary Research Fellow at UCL, a member of the advisory board for the Sustainable Luxury Forum and a member of the editorial board for the peer-review journal Luxury: History, Culture, Consumption .
Dr Thomaï Serdari
Thomaï Serdari, Ph.D. is a strategist in luxury marketing and branding. She helps clients launch, grow, and successfully manage luxury brands & creative businesses. She actively studies, values, and reports on companies or funds that operate and invest within the luxury goods market. She teaches “Luxury Marketing,” “Advanced Luxury Marketing,” and “Retail Strategy” at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University as well as “Advanced Research Seminar,” “Cultures of Excess,” and “The Art, Design, and Fashion Press: History and Practice,” at Parsons The New School.
Prof. Serdari is the founder and editor-in-chief of PIQluxury , the first online, thematic subscription publication that analyzes, interprets, and visualizes content that has appeared on various academic platforms to make it immediately applicable and relevant to professional challenges all brand professionals face every day.
In addition to her work as brand strategist, Prof. Serdari is the co-editor of Luxury: History Culture Consumption the first interdisciplinary, academic journal devoted to luxury published by Taylor & Francis. She is one of the main contributors to the LVMH Fundamentals in Luxury Retail: A CPC/Parsons Collaboration , an education program designed to provide a wide range of retail skills to Chinese-Americans.
Originally trained as an architect at the National Technical University of Athens, Prof. Serdari received her doctorate in Art History & Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2005. She also holds an MBA from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, with a specialization in corporate and quantitative finance (2009).
Professor Ian M Taplin
Ian M Taplin is Professor of Sociology and International Studies at Wake Forest University and Visiting Research Professor at Kedge Business School, Bordeaux. His key areas of interest and research include work place restructuring and changing employment relations, state-business relationships, organizational innovation and small firm growth in the NC wine industry, management resistance to change, continuity and change in the UK and US apparel industry and luxury goods industries in transition - icon wines and fashion goods. Ian has published a wide range of journal articles and a number of books including Restructuring Within a Labour Intensive Industry (edited with J. Winterton), Avebury, 1996; Rethinking Global Production (edited with J. Winterton), Ashgate, 1997; Understanding Organizational Evolution (with D. S. Fletcher), Quorum Books, 2002 and The Modern American Wine Industry: Market formation and growth in North Carolina, Pickering and Chatto, 2011.