Fashionscapes

Along with anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s definition for global cultural flows, I am using the neologism fashionscapes in order to determine the stratified, hybrid, multiple and fluid disposition of images of the clothed body in our time. Fashionscapes set up fashion nowadays according to new patterns, different from both Simmel’s classic model (1895) and the second half of the Twentieth Century ones, based on the relationship between institutional fashion and subcultures, which is perfectly summarised by the catchphrase “from the streets to the runway”. In the last two decades at least, the global economic and cultural dimension of fashion has to deal on the one hand with local, idiolectal and even personal characteristics of clothing, expressed through day to day styles and DIY of clothing and accessories. On the other hand, the typical fluidity of our times produces unpredictable exchanges, translations and fusions of the globally circulating signs of fashion and of the social imagery. In the field of fashion, therefore, are included not only the items of clothing themselves, but also the common objects of daily use and the idea itself of the clothed body. Through clothing, accessories, daily signs which fashion acquires in its own rules and inventions, stories, meanings, passions, values are handed down, bringing fashion beyond fashion itself.