Year 2020 will with no doubt be remembered by current and future generations for the COVID19 outbreak. The crisis is posing the humankind in front of perilous perspectives, in both medical, economic and social terms. At the time of writing, confusion and uncertainty reign. Vice versa, positive thoughts and hope for the future may be possible thanks to the momentum gained by scientific research. Of paramount importance, obviously, has been the run for the vaccine, successfully concluded in the past two weeks, but also the role that digital technologies have played (and still are) during the pandemic.
Putting for a moment the COVID19 on the side, let us remind that just a little over than a year ago an important celebration occurred: 50 years since the first exchange of information using packet switching technologies or, in other words, 50 years since the first experiment with the ARPANET, Internet’s father. On that day, as masterfully witnessed in Werner Herzog’s documentary “Lo and behold”, the team led by Leonard Kleinrock was able to send the first two characters of the word “Login”, before the system crashed. As it has occurred in many other occasions, that far reaching event went almost unnoticed, reported by a short article on UCLA’s Daily Bruin magazine. A little more than five decades from that day, and less from a sequence of events that have brought to the current technological panorama (e.g., 5g, social media, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, etc.), large shares of the humankind are now able to communicate, lecture, work and perform household management while operating in cyberspace. A large share of businesses has been slowly and progressively impacted by such behavior shift, and many more have followed very abruptly and very recently: sitting in front of a computer at home is one of the few places where anyone was allowed to be during the recent COVID19 related lockdowns.
The fashion business could not be unaffected by all this. Could not go unaffected by the general trend, that was inexorably proceeding on its track, technological and social innovation after innovation. Can’t surely go unaffected now, in front of the historical singularity we are experiencing. How is fashion integrating digital technologies? How will digital technologies benefit and disrupt its processes? Will the changes be so deep and fundamental that we may believe the new Coco Chanel is going to be a computer programmer, as the CEO of Yoox Net-A-Porter Federico Marchetti stated in a recent interview?
This issue of the ZoneModa Journal presents itself as a platform for such discussions, involving the thoughts of experts and practitioners from both the digital and fashion domains. Casini and Roccetti open providing a technologists’ perspective to the scenario, while Calanca presents a historical discussion regarding fashion archives and their exploitation by means of semantic technologies. The contributions of Pompa, V. Rossi and Silvestri represent a state of the art of the most recent entanglements between fashion and the digital realm. The issue continues including two specific discussions, related to the use of augmented reality, by Vaccari, Franzo and Tonucci, and to the use of artificial intelligence, by Candeloro. Finally, the contributions of G. Rossi and G. D’Aura provide additional food for thought, regarding how blogger and fashion influencer narratives have evolved during the pandemic and regarding how trends are percolating through consumer interfaces which increasingly involve digital media and communication means, respectively. Enjoy!