ZoneModa Journal

Fashion as an Italian Emblem: Models and Discourses of Germano Celant's Exhibitions on Italy from 1981 to 1994

2023-09-05T18:38:40+02:00

From the beginning of the 1980s, Germano Celant curated a series of exhibitions on Italian art and culture, aimed at enhancing Arte povera no longer as an international trend but as an Italian heritage. Together with design but also with cinema, architecture and other creative and productive sectors, fashion played (or should have played, for curator’s purposes) a strategic role that this contribution aims to illustrate. The juxtaposition of works of art with objects of a different nature responded to a previous cultural and curatorial model, which Celant adapted for his very specific purposes. The significant new expansion of the Italian fashion and design industry in the 1980s helped generate interest in Italian creativity, including contemporary art and exhibitions. If on the one hand, this led to a virtuous circle of mutual support, on the other it also inevitably ended up leading to some shifts in meaning.

Fashion Retail Experience Transformations Informing New Design Approaches and Tools for Managing Technological Integration and Value Creation Through Retail Experience Design

2023-09-05T16:18:03+02:00

This work synthesizes research on transformations happening in fashion retail experience design aimed at a broad understanding of changings in contemporary consumer practices, and complex entanglements and interrelations between different actors participating in the fashion retail experience design process. First, an exploration of the evolution of experience definition is presented, secondly, major transformations in retail customer experience are described, organised by the following overarching topics: retail experience designed to empower brand engagement; retail experience influenced by communities and collaborative media; retail experience as a conjunction between brands and urban environment; retail experience aimed at communication and services offering. Fourth paragraph presents: how in the present research, major transformations detected are informing the future work on a transdisciplinary framework for professionals working in the fashion retail experience design; the reflections on the new requirements for designers working in the retail experience design; a retail experience design tools’ map highlighting the disciplines from which each tool originates and the overlapping between them through the design process phases.

The Evolution of the Flagship Store. Re-Defining the Design of Commercial Spaces for Fashion

2023-09-05T17:28:44+02:00

The research analyses the evolution of commercial spaces for luxury fashion in the last decades, describing how store design has changed since the beginning of the new millennium and suggesting potential future developments.
At the turn of the 20th century, the role of the physical store switched radically from being a container of goods to a much more complex space where consumers’ attention is shifted away from the product towards an immaterial offer originated by interweaving entertainment, culture, and brand promotion. The flagship store, which began to spread mostly among luxury fashion retailers, can be considered as the trailblazer in the creation of experiential environments, that, with certain differences, are increasingly at the centre of today’s retail design practice.
This research aims to understand if what is intended as a flagship store today is still the same type of architecture as 20 years ago and, if not, what has changed and why. Through the redefinition of this term, the work will highlight the differences between the past and the present fashion store and contribute to tracing its evolution and describe the multifaceted relationship between fashion and architecture.

Emilio Federico Schuberth: Intermediality Practices between Fashion, Cinema and Television

2023-09-05T19:05:52+02:00

The essay investigates Emilio Federico Schuberth’s work and his relationship with cinema and television. As one of the most important fashion designers of the Made in Italy, protagonist of Roman social life and costume chronicles, Schuberth has been the first to draw the attention of the press and public opinion to the fashion designer, a new protagonist of show business, cinema and culture. During the 1950s Schuberth built a system of “integrated promotion” between fashion, film, press and television: he created his own personal style, he dressed the most famous Italian and international actresses, he opened his atelier to the cinema industry, he played himself in films and participated in television programs. Schuberth understood the communicative importance of the media system and implemented a communication strategy based on intermediality. The essay describes the methodology of the research, the type of archival sources considered and the use of an interdisciplinary approach, which allowed for a greater understanding of one of the most interesting and least studied figures in Italian high fashion.

Negative Aesthetics, Grotesque Bodies and Disgusting Fashion in the 21st century

2023-09-05T20:32:56+02:00

The aesthetics of body and dress are in a continuous flux. The body, being the locus where fashion challenges the traditional norms, escapes from the narrow boundaries of the conventionally beautiful; the disgusting soma, in the realm of Negative Aesthetics, takes its place. In this paper, I attempt to define what is disgusting fashion and how can contribute to the deliberation of the body from the restricting margins of the aesthetically beautiful. The distorted imagery of the feminine soma is the center of the analysis of the non-beautiful as an aesthetically pleasing phenomenon. Different examples of repulsive clothing are analyzed from a philosophical point of view, in order to understand the relation between the negative emotional responses towards disgusting fashion and its aesthetic value.

Countersurveillance Aesthetic: The Role of Fashion in the Reappropriation of Identity

2023-09-05T14:54:46+02:00

There is an ongoing issue of living in a hyper surveilled world where our data and information are being shared and stored beyond our reach and understanding. This process ends in a general unpleasant feeling of insecurity and loss of our proper identity, but luckily this issue is being addressed, and not just by researchers and engineers, but by designers and artists which are creating clothes and garments that will allow us to regain our own identity. In particular, the field of speculative design is the one embracing all of these projects and the aim of this presentation is, through a series of case studies, to display the swift from speculative design and artistic practice to a form of political resistance. For example, the artistic approach of Adam Harvey or Zach Blas aims at highlighting the potential of textiles, masks and jewellery to hide our precious and unique biometric data. Although the description of “post apocalyptic designs” might seem catastrophic, it is quite the opposite. There is a growing community of people rediscovering solutions and proposing them, envisioning a collective resistance where these forms of fashion will protect both the planet and our identity. In this sense, fashion, expressed through collective actions and social movements, will bring forward the need to introduce better regulation of the usage of data.

Patternmaking as Vehicle for Social Change: A Participatory Practice Research with Diverse Women’s Communities in London

2023-09-05T18:46:05+02:00

Often criticised for its negative social impacts, fashion can also be a powerful tool to improve people’s lives. Many companies, research and community projects are creating a counter-narrative to the mainstream fashion system by including the voices and practices of marginalised communities. In community-based research, many fashion and textile techniques are used to engage people and foster social change, but there are limited examples of patternmaking being used in a participatory way for this purpose. Patternmaking is commonly considered a technical and uncreative step in the fashion design process. This research however presents patternmaking as a creative practice of fashion design and explores it through the lens of fashion design for social innovation. The aim is to explore how patternmaking and garment making can foster social change within diverse women’s communities in London. The project employs participatory practice research as research strategy and the approach consists in a series of participatory making workshops, that progressively lead the participants to develop their own creative practice. Two series of workshops with women living in a deprived area of London have shown that participating in the workshops has led to skill acquisition, creativity development, community engagement and the improvement of wellbeing and self-confidence.

Fashioning Circular Fashion: A Transformative Challenge across the European Fashion System

2023-09-09T21:31:05+02:00

Today, we are witnessing a shift in the fashion industry’s production paradigm. The impact of different processes along the supply chain is evident. Consumers have started to turn towards brands that invest in effective organizational strategies and supply chain management models that consider their effect on the planet and respect for people. The circular economy is widely recognized as the main business model addressing the highlighted issues in the fashion industry. However, there still needs to be a gap in the environmental, economic, social, and cultural sustainability levels achieved when this model is implemented. In her Ph.D. research, the author investigated this specific dimension of sustainable development, the implementation of the circular economy model in the fashion system, which can take place through the adoption of systemic and project-based actions involving the entire supply and value chain from workers to companies. Working within the analyzed context, from production to the market, the paper illustrates the identified directions that strategically incorporate design-driven solutions to achieve sustainability goals through practices and processes to establish effective and responsible recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse paths.

Leveraging Multistability and Ambiguity in Wearable Technology Design: A Postphenomenological and Design Perspective

2023-09-05T20:45:57+02:00

In contemporary western societies, wearable technologies and systems for self-tracking are becoming increasingly popular and represent a rapidly growing and interdisciplinary field of research and practice. While much research is dedicated to improving these devices to better serve individuals’ goals from a utilitarian perspective, there is also a growing body of knowledge investigating their impact on people’s self-perception and self-image, beyond efficiency and usability. This paper proposes to further the current understanding of how data representation designs from wearable technologies shape individuals’ experiences and behaviors by combining design research with postphenomenological inquiry. To achieve this, I use the method of variational cross-examination to compare data representations from a traditional commercial wearable tracker with a speculative research-through-design biosensing smart shirt. The paper offers two main contributions. Firstly, it brings wearable self-tracking devices as a productive field of inquiry closer to fashion-related studies. It shows how design research plays a crucial role in the ongoing debate on the impact of wearables on individuals and societal levels. Secondly, it proposes an approach to bridge theory and practice, revealing the mutually beneficial and dialogic relationship between postphenomenology and design. Specifically, it expands the postphenomenological concept of multistability from a tool to analyze interactive fashion design artefacts to a productive and generative design resource to develop intentionally ambiguous and open-ended designs.

Uniformization in the Digital Age

2023-09-09T22:03:07+02:00

This paper introduces the concept of uniformization within the theoretical framework of sartorial networks. The model of sartorial networks deals with self-organized vestimentary cultures and is designed to analyze spatiotemporal dynamics of persistence and innovation in the field of postmodern vestimentary fashions, in particular in the Digital Age. It is derived from interdisciplinary research within the tension field of fashion, media, communication and network studies. Postmodern trend pluralism is often linked to mass individualization, whereby groups or individuals are unable to articulate either their shared identity or distinction by means of sartorial practices in the media-infused culture of style bricolage and trend revivals. In contrast to these theoretical positions defining fashion in terms of differentiation and time/innovation, the approach suggested in this paper empathizes the aspects of uniformity/similarity and the importance of spatial stabilization within the framework of the fashion mechanism. Uniformization will be described as a process of connecting individuals in space through similarity. Using examples of contemporary everyday fashion trends, it will be shown that bottom-up organized networks of uniformity can emerge as unplanned structures undermining norms, regulations, or dictates, and producing recognizable patterns of conformity based on scattered activity of several participants with equal agency.

Dealing with Objects, Dealing with Data. The Role of the Archive in Curating and Disseminating Fashion Culture through Digital Technologies

2023-09-05T14:54:47+02:00

The article aims to outline innovation trajectories emerging from the integration of digital technologies within fashion culture-intensive domains, especially when dealing with historicized fashion heritage preserved within an archive. Indeed, despite the technologies' potential in unfolding the cultural artefacts' tacit knowledge to rethink fruition and production practices in fashion cultural domains, technological applications within these fields remain not integrated and their experimental attempts pedagogical and superficially descriptive. Through an understanding of the logics underlying the development of new media languages and human-computer interactions, knowledge arising from close readings of archival objects, as well as from distant readings of digital records, will highlight the potential related to the disclosure of knowledge preserved and collected in the archive. Following the Design Orienting Scenarios approach, the archive will serve as the context to develop innovation trajectories to appropriately redefine existing cultural expressions and visualize future cultural patterns for the fashion field.

Fashion Now!

2023-09-10T01:07:04+02:00

Research Interest Group on Appearances, Bodies and Societies (RIG Acorso)

2023-09-26T22:11:03+02:00