Fashion design and Contemporary Art: tools for public space enhancement

Contemporary city is an incubator for culture, the advantaged place where there is either confrontation and clash of emerging styles. Fashion design is a founder brick for contemporary culture. Within the history of fashion design industry, there are many cases of convergences between fashion design, public space and art. Since the second half of Nineteenth century fashion -first with the passages, then the so called monumental galleries, then department stores- reached the compact space of the city. With prèt à porter boutiques were born, then the mid-range shopping chains. So spaces of fashion consumption have become critical for trade, but also an opportunity to develop new languages, for both art and fashion. Art, as a way of facing reality, needed the public space of the city to generate, a constant even in today’s world. The successful relation between fashion design, public space and art is a public/private oxymoron. Fashion and art have both the capability to operate as a defensive barrier for people, but with a stunning external communicative strength. Both usually spring out from conflicts and overlapping groups, each of which is defined by its lifestyle, included in its institutions and social relations, in its beliefs and customs and its use of objects in the material life. Fashion is an “empire of the ephemeral” (Lipovetsky, 1989), but with enough strength to influence urban culture. As well as art. Cultural planning and strategic plans for the urban promotion do not often include people in their planning stage. The result is a substantial disconnection between the urban policy plans and the real identity of citizens with changes in lifestyles, consumption habits, mixing culture. The research question of the paper is how and whether fashion design, together with art, can today act within the framework and the logic of public space development, encouraging the emergence of participative citizenship, and giving operative tools to the city to assert it contemporary identity.