La moda come traduzione culturale nel pianeta iperconnesso

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of fashion as a transcultural system that expresses tensions, hybridizations and translations across body languages in the context of the contemporary hyper-connected world. The methodology is founded on Fashion Theory conception of fashion as a system of meaning within which both cultural and aesthetic representations of the clothed body are produced. Since its origins, in the last decades of the Twentieth century, Fashion Theory has questioned the genealogy of the forms of the clothed body in different eras and different places of the world, as well as the cultural, social and economic processes that allow those forms to fully affirm themselves as “fashion”. Furthermore, the theoretical pledge of Fashion Theory is to deconstruct the universalistic and Eurocentric canons in the light of cultural studies, gender studies, and postcolonial critique. The paper is also an opportunity to re-read some “classic” texts, between the late Eighties and the early Two-Thousands, by Gayatri Spivak and Rey Chow. Moreover, the recent notion of fashionscapes, inspired by the Appadurai’s global cultural flows, sketches a vision of fashion as a process in continuous translation, creating new landscapes, perspectives and territories, both real and imagined, made of physical and sign matter. Within these landscapes, perspectives and territories, clothed bodies reproduce themselves on a planetary scale. Today, social media, fashion blogs, Instagram and YouTube profiles, are conceived no longer simply as virtual spaces, but rather as spaces that can be physically and communicatively perceived and experienced. The synergy among these spaces plays a significant role in the promotion of transcultural communication in fashion. The crisis originated by the Coronavirus pandemic accentuated, and will continue to accentuate, the process of communicative re-intermediation in the fashion digital environment in the perspective of a new idea of “collectivity”, made of interconnected subjects who are also responsible for others.