October 2017

LM 65

SCIENCES OF FASHION / DIGITAL FASHION MEDIA

INTRODUCTION

Texts: Rossi G., Fashion and Identity: the concealment or disclosure process? Presented at the XI. ECSBS in Rome – September 1-4, 2016.

Text: Rossi G., “Broadcasting fashion on the Web: Magazines, blogs and social networks” article written for the European Journal of Research on Social Studies, August 2014.

•  What has changed from 2014 to today?

•  How have relationships and professions in the network evolved?

•  How have the rules of the online communications changed?

•  What communication scenarios are now open for the future?

•  How can we prepare for them? How can we study them?

•  How can we study and interpret networks today?

These are only some of the questions you have to ask yourselves and one another during this course to create a state of mind/thinking that is useful to work in the fashion system today, especially in the communication part. On the other hand, we must emphasize that many of the dynamics that highlight fashion apply to many other sectors and can be applied elsewhere. Online fashion communication is a niche of fashion communication, which is a niche itself of communication in general. The best way to study the dynamics of communication nowadays is to immerse ourselves in it, armed with the proper toolbox. To reach this final goal it’s important not to focus only on fashion itself, but to learn to be trasversal in our approach, nurtoring this way our place into the fashion world.

For this reason, during this course we will work alongside theory and practice, exercises and field analysis to more analytical parts. It’s essential for the success of the course, and for you, to get the full benefit, to put you actively towards this teaching and not in a passive way, as if the teacher were just here to tell truths and you record them and repeat them for the final exam.

In this course I would like to have a very interactive method, inspired by the design thinking approach. Design thinking is a formal method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result. In this regard it is a form of solution-based, or solution-focused thinking – starting with a goal (a better future situation) instead of solving a specific problem. By considering both present and future conditions and parameters of the problem, alternative solutions may be explored simultaneously.

This approach differs from the analytical scientific method, which begins by thoroughly defining all parameters of a problem to create a solution. Design thinking identifies and investigates with known and ambiguous aspects of the current situation to discover hidden parameters and open alternative paths that may lead to the goal. Because design thinking is iterative, intermediate "solutions" are also potential starting points of alternative paths, including redefining of the initial problem.

In 2015, I published a book called “Fashion blogger, new dandy?” by comparison with journalists and fashion bloggers. Why? Because in the early years of fashion blogging or blogging in general- as researchers of communication, but also as professionals - what we wondered were the differences between journalists and bloggers. In my essay I focused on some points: 1) blogging can be a profession; 2) a profession that only sometimes it’s similar to journalism; 3) always more often a blogger is a testimonial not a witness of contemporary times; 4) the phenomenon of fashion blogger, in this sense, considering them as influencers, is not new, think about the dandies in the XIX century, and in particular the most famous one, Oscar Wilde. So, coming back to “redefining the initial problem” I mean exactly this: you have to start from a problem, analyse it, but don’t become fixated on it, you have to be always open minded and accept new solutions, especially in a so liquid society like the one in which we live.

We begin straight away in this first lesson by applying this method. The course is about networks and we must create our own so that in the future they can be useful to our career. Don’t be lazy, try always to go in depth with your colleagues, professors, guests of the course, always ask many questions, read as much as you can. This is also helpful for the part of the course devoted to storytelling, also for the creative part of the work, you need information, and you need to feed your imagination. We can speak about digital networks or physical ones, about people or about locations. Every day we must add something, we must enrich our list of contacts. And we must do this in the proper way, starting from the must haves, the mostly known ones.

For this reason I would like to begin each lesson with 15 minutes of press reviews in which students show/read to the class an article and comment it, underlining names and networks that are useful to connect with, for examples exploring related social networks sites. Doing this activity is going to be part of the final mark for the course of DIGITAL FASHION MEDIA so it’s necessary for us to develop a calendar in which every student will be active part of the class. Before the end of the course every student must have presented and commented one or more articles from the international press.

A few words about inspiration. You can find it everywhere, in this sense it would be useful to enlarge this morning press review as a moment of sharing contents/contacts that would be useful for the growing of the entire group. Exhibitions, TV-series, movies, upcoming designers, everything that you find interesting.

Definition of fashion: a point of view from sociology and semiotics

During this course, Digital Fashion Media, we will address the fashion topic from a sociological and semiotic point of view. We will assume that fashion is not just “frivolous appearance”, but means something more in the deepest sense of the term. We will try to go beyond the appearance, following the classics and contemporary in the field and contemporary literature, including noteworthy newspaper articles, texts and references. This is a matter that is not yet universally canonized on all levels, including academically, and for deep comprehension, it needs great openness and mental elasticity.

Through semiotic analysis, a "reflection on the signs, their classification, the laws governing them, their uses in communication" (Eco, Cosenza, 1998, p. 979) is systematized "in the framework of social life" ( Saussure, 1922, p. 26) to investigate the mechanisms through which society represents itself, or rather, all forms of communication.

The media does not affect the substance of communication, but at the time of reception, due to its meaning, the moment when a sense of speech is given it relates to the context in which it is consumed (and not to the one in which it is issued). Otherwise you could say that the meaning in this sense is all moved to the receiver and not to the issuer). This context is not real, but imagined, constructed by the same discourse involving two actors: the recipient model (the consumer/reader to whom it is addressed) and the model enunciator/issuer (the author of the message, the speaker, brand). When designing any type of message, you have to model it according to the recipient's expectations, considering their attitudes at the time and their ability to interpret it differently or to reject it. The tension between imagery and imagination that permeates fashion speeches is enslaved to the creation of a climate, a Zeitgeist.

In the past we were convinced that transposing one’s identity on the Internet (chat, forum, social network) was a way to escape reality and become more alienated, but with the advent of social media this no longer happens, often thanks to verified profiles and access barriers including the obligation to communicate through cell phones, i.e. countermeasures that do not affect the right to privacy. Often, the smartphone touch screen is viewed as this evil scrolling device of compulsive abstraction that has fomented crusades about disease or a source of worsening interpersonal dynamics. Selling our personal data is the price we pay to stay on the virtual stage and be there, wanting to be protagonists, using social networks, blogging, or present on networking platforms of various kinds - nevertheless apparently it seems - free of charge, the cost we all pay is to give our other data, to large web companies, our data. What do these companies do about our data? We will return to the theme, but fundamentally the data, collected in large, huge quantities, is used to make users profiling and develop more sophisticated, the so-called semantic web.

If you subscribe to this channel, posting a like and interacting with these users, then you will be targeting consumers of a certain type, to whom one can target ads and anticipate the wishes and needs of the user. Do you ever get the impression when you navigate the web that someone is watching you, or rather spying on you? Take for example, you are for a hotel for a beach holiday weekend in Côte d'Azur, for the next few days, you will you notice that you will only see hotels, shops or services in the area or other types of advertising related to the trip? This is a typical semantic web practice, it is good to know when we are about to analyse the media sphere, blogosphere and everything that circulates on the web, in this case related to the world of fashion.

Every social network, e-commerce platform, single brand or e-retail must be handled by the user by developing a peculiar tactic, starting from the assumption that it is no longer to hit a target, but to open a breach in the emotional and rational mind of consumer-user, resulting in an active interest in motion. The important information of today's society of communication is not the same as it was in the past, indeed the lack of information or different sources on the same subject, whereas now there is too much information, often of poor quality, destined to only produce "noise" and ultimately divert users from a real deepening of the issues at hand.

There is so much to information out there, sometimes of not good quality and presented in a fragmented way. We often don’t question the meaning of what we are reading, almost hypnotized by the screen that is facing us. The same is true for texts and images that invade us but are ultimately lost because they are all the same, created without direction, technical skills, just to immortalize the moment, to be able to tell the world I was there. Unfortunately, the continuous updating and overload of content has led to a substantial and grammatical reversal of the quality of texts. Speed ​​does not rhyme with superficiality, but with briefness and love of synthesis, without failing to respect the good faith of the reader and his/her intelligence.

We will therefore be in this position when we analyze DIGITAL FASHION MEDIA, without having to compromise on proper grammar, alternative vocabulary or the elegance of the form "just because we are in fashion". Unfortunately, this attitude, or to consider fashion as B series, is a serious defect that is often found in those who work in this field, or even in general, daily and periodical publications, where it is often assigned to the last pages and focuses on gossip or the latest on the runways.

On the contrary, writing in the world of fashion presupposes a general high-level culture, given the transversality of the subject, the ability to place a particular product in a market (and hence marketing knowledge, especially financial) or even place it in a society that is changing and that can interpret change just through fashion.

Six memos for the next Millenium, by Italo Calvino

In this regard, I believe that, as it is often the case, the best lesson comes from literature, in particular by Italo Calvino’s american lectures “Six memos for the next Millenium”, which the author should have held at Harvard during the 1985-86 academic year for the prestigious "Poetry lectures". Unfortunately, Calvino died before leaving in September 1985 and the lessons were posthumous in 1988. Nevertheless, they remained a classic in world literature for all students, regardless of their field of study. In fact, the contents of those lessons are some of the disarming modernity, as if they were written yesterday. Each lesson is inspired by the value of literature that Calvino considered important and considered the basis of literature for the new millennium. The order of lessons is not random; it follows, in fact, a decreasing hierarchy; it begins with the most important feature (lightness) and proceeds with the treatment of the less essential.

1)  Lightness

“After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. O would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of wight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried t remove weight from the structure of stories and from language”.

“Above all I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all knowthat there is a lightness of frivolity. Infact thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy”.