ZONEMODA CONFERENCE 2019: Be cool! Aesthetic Imperatives and Social Practices (original) (raw)

2019

Special plenary session “Not just glossy words: The language of fashion in the digital media era”, organized by the research group supervised by Emanuela Mora (Università Cattolica of Milan): an excursus on the recent transformation of the Fashion Media System aiming at stressing the performative role played by the fashion media in providing an aesthetic and practical imaginary for the aestheticization of reality and human experience. In the last 20 years, there has been a huge growth in fashion coverage. Fashion-related news and information are now picked over and analysed in newspapers, supplements, weeklies, websites and the thousands of fashion blogs: fashion brands and retailers started to publish their own magazines rivalling the most established titles; a rising amount of magazines and platforms grew out of the traditional editorial world of fashion. Within these editorial subjects, fashion is considered under multiple, often even co-existing, perspectives: as a "serious business”, as a feature of more general attention to lifestyles, as a form of contemporary visual arts, etc. The platforms, magazines, newspapers often consider different target in terms of audience, editorial projects and aims. They focus not only, neither mainly, on the commercial aim for their direct advertising investors. Sometimes they do not even sell traditional advertising spaces; they rather pursue cultural/artistic goals and develop collaborations and projects with brands, organizing events, designing objects or special issues etc. In this way, they promote their titles as performative platforms for PR or communication practices and their professionals as the actors of them. Their audiences, therefore, are not mainly the general public of fashion’s amateurs; rather a hardly recognizable and uniform cohort of people living and working inside or at the boundaries of the fashion world. The fashion media, therefore, play a performative role in the process at the core of the conference: they provide an esthetical and practical imaginary for the aestheticization of reality and human experience. The new fashion media are both places where the professionals create and enhance practices for the aestheticization of reality and productive realms and resources that suggest tools, meanings, values, visual materials useful for the transition toward the aestheticization of life to the audiences. The session proposes an excursus on the recent transformation of the Fashion Media System through 4 contributions: Keynote lecture: #parisienne: Social Media Stratification in Visions of Parisian women Prof. Agnès Rocamora, LCF, UAL London A reading of the transformation of fashion Coverage in Italy Prof. Emanuela Mora, Università Cattolica of Milan Did you say influencer? On the actual role of digital influencers on the field of fashion Prof. Marco Pedroni, eCampus University When grannies go viral: the new image of fashion in the representations of senior bloggers Dr Ambrogia Cereda, eCampus University / Università Cattolica of Milan