Identity, Gender and Fashion

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Posted 1 year ago

Popular dress is part of an almost immutable community tradition, whereas fashionable dress is cosmopolitan. Nevertheless, fashion has often referred explicitly to the social imagery of a specific group or community, through the use of different ‘texts’. Bogatyrëv maintains that a community invests folk costume with an emotional value. And this makes sense even today if we accept that fashion itself is a form of popular culture: it activates and draws on that complex area of social imagery in which folklore and images stratified in the collective memory coexist; in other words, texts in which the semiotic material is made up of different languages. A good example is the role played by Southern Italy in the construction of fashion imagery. Dolce & Gabbana, Versace and many other Italian designers have recently interpreted this role by alluding in their collections to the part played by the South in shaping Italian cultural awareness, to which, since the end of the Second World War, not only literature and the fine arts, but also the mass media, including cinema and fashion, have all contributed. The male vest, Al Pacino style pin-striped suits, close-fitting white shirts, beachwear based on a La Dolce Vita ideal of male beauty are all aesthetic ideals coming from the Italian deep south. - Patrizia Calefato: The Clothed Body (2004)