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Laura Bovone
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Costumes, Symbols,
Communication
(Volume I)
Edited by
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
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Introduction ................................................................................................ xi
Fashion in Historical Perspective
Giovanna Motta
Chapter One
From Antiquity to the Ancien Régime
Dress and Culture in the Hittite Empire and during the Late Hittite Period
according to Rock Reliefs............................................................................ 2
Murat Turgut
Chapter Two
The Centuries of the Bourgeoisie
Fashion and Trends at the Tsar’s Court from Peter the Great
to Nicholas II ............................................................................................. 68
Elena Dundovich
vi Table of Contents
Chapter Three
Soviet Fashion
Chapter Four
Traditional Costume
Cultural Identity and Fashion: We are What We Dress and Vice Versa ... 200
Emma Gago Sánchez
The Romanian Traditional Blouse Ia: A Cultural Identity Passport ........ 215
Liliana ğuroiu
Chapter Five
Dressing your Faith
The Reform of Ecclesiastical Clothing and the Vatican II Council ......... 250
Marco Iervese
Turkey’s Headscarf Issue Unveiled: Fashion, Politics and Religion ....... 263
Iulia-Alexandra Oprea
viii Table of Contents
Chapter Six
Youth Culture, Counterculture, and Marginality
Haute Couture and Science Fiction: Space Fashion during the Sixties
and Seventies ........................................................................................... 291
Valentina Mariani
Chapter Seven
Fashion, Health and Sustainability
The Cosmetics Industry: Market Evolution and Customer Behavior ...... 337
Martina Musarra, Carlo Amendola and Raffaella Preti
Chapter Eight
Fashion Theory
C. Garve and N. Elias: Two Interpretations of Fashion and Costume ..... 379
Anna Maria Curcio
Chapter Nine
Language, Media and Advertisements
LAURA BOVONE
1
Most of the examples and quoted interviews were collected during the ongoing
survey “Sustainable practices of everyday life in the context of crisis: toward the
integration of work, consumption and participation,” funded by MIUR-PRIN
2010-2011 and coordinated by Laura Bovone (Università Cattolica di Milano), in
collaboration with the universities of Milan (coord. Luisa Leonini), Bologna
(coord. Roberta Paltrinieri), Trieste (coord. Giorgio Osti), Molise (coord. Guido
Gili), Rome, “La Sapienza” (coord. Antimo Farro), Naples, Federico II (coord.
Antonella Spanò).
Laura Bovone 327
Bipolar narratives of
Modernity Postmodernity
rationality image, emotion, ambivalence
industrial progress (mastering nature) ecology (70s Æ)
work ethic (masculine) consumption (feminine)
gendered division of labor world feminization/aesthetization
conformism experiences
Fashion
work/class-related clothing (hat) dream, masquerade (t-shirt)
top-down fashion street styles, oppositional dress
Not all sharing activities in fashion imply the social and even political
commitment observed in WeMake, which aims to gather different
professionals together in a new sort of social enterprise. Clearly
crowdfunding, which is about finding economic support or advance
purchasers for a new product (e.g., Wowcracy, an intermediary platform
created by a young and aggressive Italian team, registered in London), is
generally more business oriented; the same can be said for crowdsourcing,
where, in many cases, new solutions are not only welcomed, but even
paid, or openly exploited (e.g., Burberry’s Art of the Trench project, where
consumers are invited to upload photos of themselves wearing trenchcoats
to the official website). In both cases consumer adhesion turns out to be
decisive for production. Swapping activities are supposed to be mostly
informal, but actually range from the transnationally structured and totally
for-profit Rentez-Vous platform, to the small family business run through
the website Reoose, and the locally based, but still partially economically
oriented Swap in the City (“Sure since I started swapping, I have changed
my relationship with things... before I used to care more about my things
… now I am more detached, I can more easily get rid of them because I
think that probably someone else can take advantage of something I keep
without using, so if I discard my dress, it is as if it had another life”), to the
more morally and socially oriented Gas or Il tuo armadio, an ethical
purchasing group based in Milan where a group of friends volunteer. In
repair and knitting circles, the social/political aim is often more important
than the economic aim (Minahan and Wolfram Cox 2007; Reiley and De
Long 2011).
To summarize, sharing activities imply a multilevel and multifunctional
entanglement and an important relational commitment: Gauntlett (2011),
recalling Ivan Illich (1973), speaks of conviviality. All this gives new
impetus to ethical fashion, which is a part of post-postmodern culture. The
following elements, either brand new or strongly increasing, in particular
should be noted: the paradoxical mix of very up to date technology and
traditional communitarian aspirations; the cross collaboration of design,
production, distribution, and consumption; the multifaceted search for
sustainability (through making, bartering, DIY and DIT, repairing,
332 Ethical Fashion as a Post-Postmodern Phenomenon
aesthetics, but that is also able to: synthesize a series of ethical and
cognitive elements; retain tradition and project itself into the future; create
feelings of belonging; and bring about new grassroots derived values that
are translatable into rational planning.
According to Appadurai, we can consider EI to be a cultural
elaboration acting within the social imaginary and drawing us towards big
epochal changes; in this case building a bridge between production and
consumption and transforming them into innovative fruitful “communities
of practice” (Wenger 1998).
As far as ethical fashion is concerned, we can consider it to be an effort
of imagining shared solutions for the difficult combination of aesthetic
innovation and social and the environmental sustainability of production
and consumption. That said, the new digital potential is important, but I
assume that at stake is something much more than collaboration through
digitization (Crewe 2012).
Attention to fashion has often been indexed as useless, if not immoral,
behavior. A similarly stigmatizing judgment has long been incumbent on
all consumption activities and usually contrasted with the virtuous activity
of production. Accordingly, the masculine work ethic has often been
contrasted with the (immoral) aesthetic of the female or young consumer.
Similarly, the productive mind-set of modernity and its work ethic are
contrasted to post-modern consumption.
My thesis is that fashion, the culture industry par excellence, is able to
assume a fundamental role in dismantling this dichotomous mentality of
modernity/postmodernity by highlighting its obsolescence and constitutive
weakness.
Bibliography
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization. Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press.
Belk, Russell. 2010. “Sharing.” Journal of Consumer Culture 36: 715–35.
Laura Bovone 335