About

Fashion Highlight journal aims to build an interdisciplinary space to share research experiences in the fashion area.  Studies and practices developed in the fashion system play a crucial role in understanding emerging instances since they concern the interpretation of how society expresses, communicates, and gets organized.
Fashion deals with the sphere of Humanities as well as technologies, configuring a research sector characterized by a strong interdisciplinarity. Within these peculiarities, the research experiences on fashion connect a variety of values that span fluidly across different domains.

ISSN: 2975-0466 [Online]

 

CALL FOR PAPERS | #3 (UN)CONSUMING FASHION CONSUMPTION
Guest Editors: Valeria M. Iannilli e Alessandra Spagnoli, Politecnico di Milano
Deadline: 30th March 2024

Current IssueNo 2 (2023)

Published December 31, 2023

Issue Description

The second issue of Fashion Highlight aims to encourage reflection on the relationship between fashion, artificial intelligence and rights, investigating how fashion, in this rapidly changing panorama, is questioning itself on privacy, intellectual property, inclusion, skills and responsibilities. One of the most relevant issues, in fact, is the possibility that AI preserves diversity, acts inclusively and protects individual identities.

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Table of Contents

Editorial

Essays

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Call for paper n.3: (UN)CONSUMING FASHION CONSUMPTION

Guest Editors: Valeria M. Iannilli, Alessandra Spagnoli

Fashion consumption is an active mode of relating not only to fashion items but also to the community and the world through the generation and sharing of signs and meanings (Baudrillard, 1970) permeating the very essence of thinking, producing, wearing, and experiencing fashion. However, fashion consumption today takes on a different relevance in the light of the transformations of social, cultural, and economic dynamics that impose on the creative, manufacturing, distribution and communication systems, and, not least, on the 'final consumer', a critical reflection on the role and impacts of the fashion system.

The term ‘consumption’ is inherently multivalue and nuanced. Its very etymology holds several facets: consumption means the ‘transformation’ of natural resources into fungible goods, but also of signs and symbols into signifying and value systems; it means ‘destruction’, that is, the reduction to the nothingness of tangible or intangible elements, making them, in turn, unusable through the very act of use; and, obviously, in its most ordinary meaning, it stands

for ‘use’ or ‘utilisation’ which indeed consists in the activity of making use of a tangible or intangible element, but also, in a broader sense, in the act of enjoying services, experiences, or activities that do not entail transformation or destruction. The fashion system has always entwined its practices and processes with this multivalue universe constituting the consumption system landscape of both the creative, material and human resources along the entire fashion supply chain and the fashion object itself, its images and projections. In the current digital and sustainable transformation context, this entanglement opens up ample space for reflection on the practices, processes and impacts of consumption with a more critical and responsible approach. If, on the one hand, attention towards more sustainable forms of natural resource exploitation promotes new business models and new circular forms of production, more concerned with the reduction, recovery and reuse of finished products and their waste, on the other hand, new forms of consumption emerge, collaborative, addressed to extend product life cycles through the adoption of care, re-signification and re-thinking practices fostering more active and conscious consumers participation.

The third issue of Fashion Highlight intends to investigate the dynamics, practices, and impacts of fashion consumption in the light of the transformations taking place, questioning the role and potential that creative communities, players in the - long and complex - fashion value chain, consumers and education can express. Authors from different disciplinary fields are invited to propose critical and theoretical reflections and applied contributions using different approaches and methodologies to provide an original perspective on the proposed topic, including the following trajectories:

. Fashion consumption, investigating the impacts of overproduction and hyperconsumption at an environmental, social and cultural level within a district, national and global perspective; the activation of new processes of fashion distribution, retail and communication.

. Consumed fashion, regarding emerging approaches to the purchase, use and disposal of fashion such as slow fashion, lowerism, or sustainable anti-consumption, and their impacts on the dynamics of creation, production, and distribution; design-for-longevity strategies and caring practices.

. Consumer communities, considering transformations of consumption processes promoted/to be promoted by new, local and global communities; orientation towards more responsible forms of consumption, underlying motivations and future trajectories.

. Consumer culture, concerning the dynamics, approaches and practices through which fashion is narrated, conveyed, and experienced; narratives for/about fashion and recent evolutions in terms of languages, contents, and formats.

Submissions should be uploaded by the website.