Tra le pieghe della moda. Il Fashion messo in mostra e i suoi canoni mediatici

The ‘fashion phenomenon’ presents a complex stratification of values, which, in a logic of an intrinsically commercial nature, combine aestheticising creativity and operational knowledge. Implementing this union intersects its expressive elements—from the conceptualisation to the realisation of the finished product, via its representation—with the idealised construction of new, possible social declinations for self-assertion. This transfer of meanings takes place, with the narrative positioning of the product, between elitist performative actions—the immersive spectacularisation of the catwalk—and mass communication—the multimedia window-dressing of advertising—. What happens when the testimony of these symbolic, formal, aesthetic and phenomenological values is transferred onto the plane of more properly ‘objective’ cultural representation, as the subject of institutionalised ‘showcasing’? What are the exhibition codes that are implemented and, above all, what are the levels of narration that activate them? If the act of staging is, in fact, the giving of accomplished form to events whose task is to ‘expose knowledge’, how is the self-celebratory nature inherent in the fashion on display resolved, and which are the media canons that prove compatible with the exhibition infrastructure? Translating the opposition proposed by Mieke Bal between the work, here explored in the system commodity/art product/exhibition product, as a "selfsufficient entity" and "theoretical object", the contribution identifies some paradigmatic attitudes, such as - the relational posture (the exhibition as a critical device); - the self-representational posture (the dramatisation of self); - the absent posture (beyond human presence)