New architectural paradigms for fashion, between permanency and ephemeral, between real and virtual

Fashion needs bodies to dress, products to sell, but also spaces - physical and virtual - that can be not only places of exchange, or simple scenographies, but real architectures able to define the significance of the project and the experiences that fashion can produce. Fashion needs the city, its spaces and its architecture, which it uses in all dimensional and functional scales. Fashion choose existing places or create new ones: spaces that not only fit into a pre-existing urban context but that are created as temporary spaces or as new urbanisation: architectural projects capable of intervening in the context of relationships, culture and dynamics of interaction. The urban spaces become stages for temporary performances (from fashion shows to pop-up stores) or longer-lasting "brandscaping". Fashion, as McLuhan says, is today a language that characterises the global village, reaching an increasingly broad consumer network and new markets. The performative act, the happening, the hic et nunc, becomes for the fashion system a communication channel capable of defining the contemporary form of urban spaces, generating new geographies composed by a proliferation of cultural, productive and educational epicentres. Places where fashion is created, produced, communicated, sold and, above all, valorised as a cultural asset. Spaces become fluid, ephemeral and temporary, interwoven with the " places of memory". Fashion, therefore, as a real cultural driver, capable of redesigning the spaces of creativity, also, and above all through architectural design, always poised between temporary and permanent. The paper - starting from an analysis of the historical and sociological evolution of the concept of fashion and its relationship with urban spaces - aims to investigate the dialogue between the different temporal levels that fashion and architecture have built over the years. Dialogue capable of defining new design approaches, interactions and trajectories suspended between real and virtual.