Introduction, in “The Culture, Fashion, and Society Notebook 2020”

Variety, change, pluralism, provocation, the power of assimilation and at the same time the impulse to differentiation, are all veritable keywords and distinctive features of modern culture in general. The main cultural productions and phenomena that we tend to consider as fundamental or even quintessential of the ‘spirit’ of the modern age, so to speak, seem to embody – among other things – the abovementioned features and to present them in different ways. Inasmuch as fashion, as has been convincingly explained by several theorists, belongs to modernity, it therefore seems possible to find all such aspects and features in fashion as well. Fashion freely and sometimes arbitrarily plays with forms, materials, colours, shades, styles, ideas and contents of all kinds. Whether it is traditional and ethnic dress, or countercultural and oppositional dress, or the various arts ranging from photography and film to painting, music and architecture, or still other practices, experiences and dimensions of contemporary life and society, there is nothing, at least in principle, that escapes the attention and the power of fashion. Hence there is apparently nothing, at least in principle, that fashion cannot make us of in order to fuel its drive to creation and its insatiable thirst for ‘the new’ (and also its no less insatiable thirst for commercial success, of course). Without obviously aiming to deal exhaustively and systematically with such a broad and complex topic, that it is probably impossible to adequately summarize and condense in a single publication, the present volume of ‘The Culture, Fashion, and Society Notebook’ series nevertheless aims to reflect, at least to some extent, the abovementioned aspects and features that I have defined as veritable keywords and distinctive features of modern culture, in general, and fashion, in particular. As a matter of fact, variety, change, pluralism, provocation, the power of assimilation and at the same time the impulse to differentiation, are all dimensions that readers will find in the seven contributions collected in the present volume. A volume, the latter, that we may legitimately define as precisely focused on the connection between fashion, culture and society.