Fashion, Prostethics, Machine: Being Human and the Body Today

In this chapter, Italian semiotician Patrizia Calefato focuses on the relationships between the ‘clothed’ body and its technological, communicative and substitutive prosthesis, a concept that has been extensively and broadly analysed by social sciences in relation both to the physical and the communicative enhancing of the human body. The prosthetic body, Calefato argues, involves aspects concerning fashion, human rights, aesthetics and law, as well as knowledge and cultural matters. In fact, the substitutive function of the prosthesis cannot be separated from both its aesthetic and communicative functions, which means that fashion has to work with a sort of ‘second nature’ of the body.