ZoneModa Journal 05 E-Book

ZoneModa Journal

• Herausgeber: Pendragon
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Zonemoda Journal 5 - Fashion Convergence

Leseprobe

ZONEMODA JOURNAL

issue 5 (2015)

Fashion Convergence

Editor in Chief

Antonella Mascio

International Editorial Board

Pamela Church-Gibson

Paola Colaiacomo

Roberto Grandi

Yuniya Kawamura

Emanuela Mora

Enrica Morini

Roberta Paltrinieri

Eugenia Paulicelli

Adelheid Rasche

Giorgio Riello

Roberta Sassatelli

Junji Tsuchiya

Marcia Veneziani

Fashion Convergence guest editor

Antonella Mascio and Junji Tsuchiya

Editorial Advisory Board

Daniela Baroncini

Nicoletta Giusti

Mariella Lorusso

Giovanni Matteucci

Roy Menarini

Federica Muzzarelli

Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli

Giampaolo Proni

Simona Segre Reinach

Lucio Spaziante

Ines Tolic

Elisa Tosi Brandi

Editorial Assistants

Alessia Di Paolo

Maura Vecchietti

Design

Alessandro Gori

Translations and revisions

Alessia Di Paolo

Maura Vecchietti

ZoneModa Journal

Scuola di Lettere e Beni Culturali Università di Bologna – Dipartimento di Scienze per la Qualità della Vita – Campus di Rimini

via Santa Chiara 40 - 47900 Rimini (Italy)

[email protected]

ZONEMODA Journal

© 2015, Edizioni Pendragon

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eBook Design:

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First digital edition 2016

No parts of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Pendragon.

Alessia Di Paolo translated from Italian into English: the editorial, the introduction, essays by I. Tolic, A. Di Paolo, the article by M.F. Stella, the interviews section, the review by E. Tosi Brandi, A. Manzato, the exhibition review by A. Di Paolo, A. Malfitano, E. Vai, I. Letteriello, L. Ferrari, the flash session and, from English into Italian: the essay by S. Medved, the exhibition review by S. Segre Reinach.

Letter from the editor

Antonella Mascio

In continuation with the editorial choices of the past volumes, the fifth issue of ZoneModa Journal –edited by myself together with Junji Tsuchiya – collects the efforts of the entire editorial staff. In particular we followed two directions : the research on more innovative topics connected to the fashion universe and the scientific validation of the review. On the research side, we focused our attention on a still unexplored relation, that between ”Fashion” and “Convergence”: the attempt has been to investigate the ways in which the actual communication platforms affect the creation and the valorization of media product related to fashion, besides the constitution of new forms of social relations.

What emerges from the issue seems to highlight how the fashion universe becomes perfectly part of the contest of the convergence culture (Jenkins 2006): the projects analyzed in the volume surely contribute to the evolution of the view on the use of media languages, which are also changing because of the influence of fashion, open to new possibilities and formats.

To obtain the qualitative validation of the review, we have been all involved on several fronts. In particular, we started a relationship with the Italian agency in charge: the National Agency for the Evaluation of University and Research (ANVUR). The result was positive: the scientific nature of ZoneModa Journal has for now been placed in the areas 10 (Antiquity, philological-literary and historical-artistic sciences) and 11 (Historical, philosophical, didactic and psychological sciences). In particular, Class A has been rewarded for the L1 sector (languages, literatures and English and Anglo-American cultures). We are pleased for this achievement, which we consider the starting point of a valorization process of ZoneModa Journal: we keep working for a wider validation, including other fields such as sociology, semiotics, architecture, traditionally close to Fashion Studies.

Another important item we would like to communicate with pleasure concerning our permanent attention to the internationalization of the review, is the entrance of Pamela Church-Gibson (University of the Arts, London, UK) in the review scientific committee, an important personality in the Fashion Studies scenario who enthusiastically accepted to join our project.

At the closing of this brief editorial, we are announcing the next issue, ZoneModa Journal 6, Future Presents (2016). The theme is hereby introduced by its curators Flaviano Celaschi and Ines Tolic:

“By the end of 1975, Buckminster Fuller held a set of lectures entitled “Everything I know”. Going through his many projects, in that occasion he told about his contribution to build the future: the Dymaxion house, the geodetic domes, the projects for Manhattan, with the Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs. With the idea that we cannot really change if we only work on the present time, Fuller tried all his life to anticipate the time, creating alternative futures or at least better than the present he knew.

Taking inspiration from Fuller’s ideas and futurists close to him, the 6th issue of ZoneModa Journal (2016) aims to represent a meeting point between disciplines characterized by the need, with varying intensity, to create and anticipate events, evolutions or needs (including design, architecture, fashion and communication). Putting aside the visionary projects, already heavily debated, the volume aims to explore the theme of the possibile futures adopting a concrete and effective approach focusing on methods of prospection and anticipation techniques, as much as the prefiguration of cases which the future will or must follow.”

Table of Contents

Pendragon eBook

Letter from the editor

FASHION CONVERGENCE

Introduction

The Revenge of the Nerds and The Big Bang Theory’s Revolution. A look shifting through media and lifestyle

Introduction

From geek/jock duality to nerd pride

“One can now be a geek without being a freak”

The Big Bang Theory: the revenge of the male and female nerds

Conclusion: how to dress like a geek

Suit Up. The Use of Ready-to-Wear Power Suits in TV Series

Introduction

The Good Wife: from Chicago to D.C. and Back Again

Suits: Whispering Importance

The Trickle-Down Effect

Conclusions

From sharing to showing. An explorative analysis about the role of fashion bloggers

Introduction

Theoretical framework: a brief review

Methodology

Results

Conclusions

Fashion tv :apparatus and audiences in fashion factual tv

Fashion makeover

Fashion games

The fashion canon between performance and norms

Fashion fantasy from the world of GoT

Fashion brands in film and TV: from the birth of the star system to TV series

Introduction

Fashion and cinema

From the Fifties to the Seventies: from the costume designer to the fashion designer

From cinema to television

The power of TV and film

Conclusions

Fashion film. A new media aesthetics in the digital era

Transmedia Branding in Fashion: The Case of Burberry

What does it mean to be a transmedia storyteller for fashion branding?

The case of Burberry

Premise and purpose

Narrative

Worldbuilding

Characters

Extensions

Media platforms and genres

Audience and market

Engagement

Structure

Aesthetics

Conclusion

Interdisciplinary convergences in Balena Project, a touring project of the artist Claudia Losi

From the ‘cores’ to the Foundation: a sequence of various, exclusive, changeable and non commercial architecture for Prada

Introduction

The makeover of the Società Italiana Spiriti

The ‘cores’ and the theories of Koolhaas on shopping

Key concepts

Conclusions

Convergence culture at the museum: media, space, and times of the fashion exhibition

Convergence culture and fashion

Fashion and the museum: old media, new love

Fashion exhibitions between space and time

Exhibiting space

Exhibiting time

Fashion curatorship as research praxis

The fashion exhibition as a convergent narration: Karl Lagerfeld’s Modemethode

Aesthetic Economies: the convergence between fashion and art

Bibliographical references

INTERMISSION

Multidisciplinary fashion

Credits

WORK IN PROGRESS

Fashion archives: between memory and design

Fashion Device: representation and communication of Italian fashion from the Sixties to the present day

INTERVIEWS

Interview with Laura Bovone and Emanuela Mora, Modacult, The Centre for the study of Fashion and Cultural Production of Università Cattolica, Milan

The Cultural and Creative Industries [ICC]

Interview with Raffaella Alisa Rosa Podreider. An homage to Rosa Genoni, the Milanese who invented the Made in Italy

REVIEWS

Dress and Ideology: Fashioning Identity from Antiquity to the Present

Daniela Baroncini, Artifici del piacere. Moda e seduzione femminile nella letteratura contemporanea

La tv delle donne. Brand, programmi e pubblici

Fellini e la moda. Percorsi di stile da Casanova a Lady Gaga

Giulia Rossi, Fashion blogger, new dandy?

EXHIBITIONS

China through the looking glass

Bologna Design Week 2015: the first edition of a hub to bring creativity and production together

Fashion loves food Alberto Malfitano

MOMENTING THE MEMENTO

Fashion Exhibition: when fashion tells itself

PretAPorTek: a virtual dressing room to update the shopping, didactic, and productive process and the museum experience of fashion260

FLASH

Festa della Rete. Observation practices of an event between fashion and new technologies

COSPLAY. A rising cultural movement

(COL)LATERAL THINKING

Elio Costanzi (1913-1985). A painter of modern life

CONTRIBUTORS

ZONEMODA

JOURNAL

5

Fashion Convergence

FASHION CONVERGENCE

Introduction

Antonella Mascio and Junji Tsuchiya

In the present age, dominated by the convergent culture (Jenkins 2006), media appear more and more necessary in the circulation of narrations, imaginaries, collective passions and taste forms. The erosion of boundaries between production and consumption determines an increasing relation (and interdependence) among media industries, products and audiences. The heart of this system is the Internet – complex and global meta medium (Colombo 1993) – capable of establishing the possibilities of connection between both contents and people. We can think, for example, at the way Viktor&Rolf employ communication tools: the connection between different languages – web with movies, recreational with fashion show worlds – finds in the Internet one of the most profitable landing places, so much so that they call their own fall-winter 2015-2016 website The World Round Web (www.viktor-rolf.com). It is a convergent and creative communication strategy, in which the message (or the messages) to the audience are defined according to different levels, from the institutional one (the website for example) to those closer to users, such as the Facebook pages, where the two designers publish (also) their fans' posts. It is a procedure typically approved by brands and fashion griffes by now: according to different cases, as well as to different aims, the convergence makes the most of itself in an innovative and original way. Another recent case related to fashion world is Burberry’s The Art of Trech projects (http://artofthetrench.burberry.com) conceived together with the most famous fashion blogger in the world ((Scott Schuman http://www.thesartorialist.com) with the purpose of involving the brand’s enthusiasts in an active dynamic. Such possibilities pivot on different levels and aim especially to stimulate users’ interest.

The ongoing change involves production as much as distribution and consumption of media and fashion products; it has implications in users' social life, defining new ways of contact and relation. Media indeed represent privileged places for the contemporary experience (Meyrowitz 1986, Boccia Artieri 2012): their role is no longer limited to the mereaspect of mediation between one or more realities that they “recall”, tell and reproduce, but it affects the social environment, too, through digital environments where users meet each other and create new forms of relation.

In this framework – mainly characterized by the circulation of technological resources of connection and audiences’ activity, through new communication deals between senders and addressees – fashion takes on new shapes and develops new languages, amplifying the communication dimensions already achieved back in time and insinuating in discursive paths procedures still less attended so far. It also takes part in the success of movie and TV productions through the use of refined outfit, contributing to the creation of complex atmospheres that enrich narration: the clothes used in the media products represent the keys of access to the fiction world, they define the characters and place them in the spatial, temporal and cultural context. As an example, there are some recent successful movies such as The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, 2013) and Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014), or quality drama designed for an adult audience like Mad Men (AMC 2007 – 2015), The Americans (FX 2013 - ), House of Cards (Netflix 2013 -), or successful TV series for younger spectators, like Gossip Girl (2007 – 2012 The CW) or Pretty Little Liars (ABC Family 2010 -), and others.

The audience has the chance to track down and identify the items showed in the media products, through online platforms used by enthusiastic users, or through the use of dedicated websites (for example http://www.looklive.com). So fashion in fiction enters the audiences’ conversations, the blogs, Facebook and Instagram pages, where the users chat about characters’ clothes, shoes, accessories.

In this volume, Ariela Mortara and Geraldina Roberti propose an interesting study on fashion blogs, which through netnographic research (Kozinets, 2002, 2006) underline the sharing & showing aspects typical of communication 2.0 and capable of also highlighting their success.

Dressing becomes, in many media products, a real performance per se, that represents a specific transition: the one between the fiction and the possible return to reality. We can probably say that the relation, once well-defined and distinct between “in” fiction and “off” fiction, is sometimes replaced by a strong continuity line between “in” and “off”, to the extent of producing effects both in the very fiction and in real world. In a diametrically opposite position we can find examples like The Iconoclasts, a project by Prada(http://theiconoclasts.prada.com) that aims to point at an experimentation and meeting point between fashion and other worlds, raising fashion to hyper-real possibilities, through the creations of famous costume designers (Milena Canonero, Arianne Phillips, Michael Wilkinson and Tim Martin) that during the various exhibitions (New York, London, Paris, Beijing) highlighted a strong contamination between the different dreamlike visions and the utopian fashion dream.

Considering these suggestions we decided to dedicate this issue of ZoneModa Journal to the exploration of the paths defined by the convergent dynamics, with the purpose of enhancing aspects concerning the communication innovation and the presentations with a social and symbolic value. One one hand, indeed, brands and fashion griffes seem to be always more immersed in the coordinatef communication process, thought to be useful for the different available platforms; on the other hand, considering their kaleidoscopic form, cultural and media products seem always more ready to different readings, also contemplating the fashion route.

In their turn, the regular consumers of fashion products, in the perspective of contemporary reflective process, result to be “the subject who desires not only objects and other subjects, but also alternative forms of subjectivity (Edwards 2011, trad. it. 2012, p. 235) and, through the observation, the research and the imitation of clothes, sometimes they find the chance to express themselves. Media and fashion seem both to enlarge their social range, using especially the language of images, taste, stereotypes, suggesting new reference models to the audience, as we can read in the articles of the volume we are introducing.

According to Romana Andò and Luisa Valeriani, indeed, “fashion represents an ideal touch point between content and audience” where the engagement of audiences themselves pushes “to an enlargement of the consumption dimension beyond the individual moment of watching” (in the volume). Their study on The Big Bang Theory (2015 -) gave much food for thought with relation to the audiences’ practices and the nerd/geek subcultural style represented in the text – a masculine gendered style, where there seems not to be a female equivalent.

Paola Brembilla’s essay observes the relation between power suits and prêt-à-porter, considering in particular the clothes worn by Michelle Obama, American first lady and new style icon, who sometimes seems to be inspired by the TV series The Good Wife (CBS, 2009-). But the author’s discourse opens to more points of view, considering the very TV series currently in production, where the office suit appears as closely related to famous and recognizable griffes: “Let’s think for example to Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) in Scandal (ABC, 2012-) with her Dolce & Gabbana, Armani trousers and Prada bags; Donna Karan, Calvin Klein and Boss outfit worn by Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) in House of Cards (Netflix, 2013-); Nessa Stein (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in The Honourable Woman (Sundance TV, 2014) and her Lanvin, Mulberry and Céline touches; it is also the case of some male characters, of whom the most impressive example is Harvey Specter in Suits (USA Network, 2011-), designed by Tom Ford.” (in the volume).

Among the TV series mentioned by the authors we can’t miss a detailed study on the fantasy world, through one of the most representative examples of the genre: Game of Thrones (GoT, HBO, 2011 -). Linda Felletti proposes a study on how the series influenced the fashion world. If it is true that “the Indian designer Manish Arora paid homage to Game of Thrones in the Ready to Wear Fall 2015 collection”, so just as much “body harnesses, leather clothes, gladiator belts and sandals (as those designed by Stella McCartney or Rodarte for Spring/Summer 2015 collection) are the perfect ingredients of a warrior woman style” (in the volume) to which the characters of the series are inspired.

In the TV universe, beside the TV series, fashion is employed in the factual, too. Anna Manzato analyses the fashion factual phenomenon, with the Italian core TV show Ma come ti vesti?!, broadcast by Real Time since 2008. The factual embodies the typical structure of the makeover, so a “story based on four phases: need/intervention of the sidekicks/transformation/approval of the transformation” in the volume that clearly concerns the change of style of the characters appearing on by the show.

The ideas that the authors of this volume of ZoneModa propose to discuss and analyze with respect to the Fashion-Convergence theme are many and not only related to TV examples. Laura Meraviglia suggested a tour from movies to television, including in her thinking the passage from costume designer to fashion designer, highlighting the importance of mass media screens for the Fashion System. As Alessia Di Paolo suggests, this is highlighted especially through the creation of a new genre, both for media and fashion industry: the Fashion Film. The movie language is used in the fashion narration by also adopting the Internet as a communication channel, pivoting on the typical times of YouTube. It is a “significant position shifting of fashion in the media” (in the volume): from the importance and the supremacy of the fashion catwalks in the glamour magazines of the Twentieth century, to the phenomena of the fashion blogs, of the relentless social networks, of the contemporary live streams, together with other combined and dynamic sources of online communication. This transfer becomes particularly clear when we consider specific examples, related to single brands, in order to underline the peculiarities of the phenomenon, as we read in the essay of Sergei Medvedev that analyzes Burberry as an example of “transmedia branding”.

The part related to the theme and the discussion on the fashion convergence ends with four papers dedicated to the complex relationship between fashion and museum: a relation that is more and more obvious and complex and characterized above all by the innovation of the different events. Specifically, Tiziana Barone invites the reader to a careful reflection on the Louis Vuitton’s Series2 exhibition, hosted in Rome at Palazzo Ruspoli (May 22nd – June 7th, 2015): a real, concrete, and at the same time cross-media performative experience.

Irene Guzman and Valentina Rossi analyzed the Balena Project example, the itinerant project by the artist Claudia Losi based on the symbolic potential of historical events related to the whale, the animal-archetype meant both as evidence and freak show phenomenon. The project, with the participation of fashion designer Antonio Marras too, “known for his interest for the local craftsmanship work, the collective memory and popular culture, as well as the universal structures of the fairy tale and the myth with a particular inclination for the suggestions derived from contemporary art” (in the volume), refers especially to an ancient craftsmanship, to the design “knowhow”.

Ines Tolic proposes a study on Prada spaces: different architecture, variable and not (always) commercial. The point is the very convergence they refer to: “are we sailing to a future made of new relational and programmatic complexity where there is no sense anymore for the distinction between commercial and non commercial spaces?” (in the volume). The answer seems to coincide with the provocation of Rem Koolhaas, hanging in the balance between intellectual life and large business (Sudjic 2002).

Antonella Giannone’s essay is wondering on the role of fashion exhibitions in the fashion world in particular, and in the media system in general. They should be considered as “deeply characteristic expressions of a fashion culture that arises and transforms itself in the media and between media, from the most traditional to the social networks”. A culture that, just for this intermediality, rewrites “fashion spaces and time, and at the same time owns spaces that are traditionally stranger to it, starting from the museum or the art gallery”(in the volume). The example carried by the author is the exhibition dedicated to Karl Lagerfeld, Modemethode, a retrospective of the German designer displayed at the Bonn’s Kunsthalle from March 28th to September 13th, 2015.

The convergence process is clearly going on in the media environment; it refers to the eternal connection – or addition as well – between art world and fashion universe, with all the changes that everyone brings with itself, opening, again, to other and new expressive forms.