Fashion and Cultural Heritage

This issue of ZoneModa Journal includes a series of contributions and reflections that substantially show the complexity and articulation of the theme of fashion and cultural heritage, both nationally and interna- tionally. Through specific skills and multiple research approaches, the authors of the essays highlight how it doesn’t exist only one type of cultural heritage, but how different types of research, multiple methods, and multifaceted documentation contribute to creating an articulated and complex vision of fashion her- itage, as shown on epistemological-gnoseological level. In this direction, in fact, it can be said that in order to speak significantly about the cultural heritage of fashion it is necessary to assume multiple perspective visions, and at the same time a direction of thought where the proteiformity of the fashion phenomenon is recognized as a fundamental trait, as Malcom Barnard has well summarized: There is no one set of ideas or no single conceptual framework with which fashion might be defined, analysed and critically explained. ... Rather, there are theories about fashion or, to put it another way, there are fashion theories. What one finds is that various and diverse academic disciplines apply themselves or are applied to the practices, institutions, personnel and objects that constitute fashion. ... There are many academic disciplines, then, that take an interest in the history, analysis, and critical explanation of fashion. Each discipline will have its own idea, or theory, of what fashion is and of what sorts of activities count as analysis and explanation.