Fashions pass, conflicts remain. In the past year, three things have happened - apparently trivial, of little importance to the uninitiated but worthy of attention to those who analyze costume phenomena - that mark a small crack in the woke world.
(His Majesty's) Giorgio Armani's winter fashion show seemed to everyone to go against the canons of recent years: heterosexual couples walking down the catwalk, huddled together and in each other's sober, clean-cut clothes, the Milan designer's characteristic feature, far from the shenanigans to which the world's catwalks have accustomed us in recent years. According to Armani himself, this was a "precise stylistic choice," an explicit need to return to the sweetness of the classic and traditional.
Alessandro Michele, the historic creator of the Gucci fashion house, who profoundly changed its imagery by using unstructured and genderless shapes, has discontinued his collaboration with the fashion house. The reason is unknown, but it is also rumored that the revenues were no longer up to expectations.
It is recent news that the famous U.S. lingerie brand "Victoria’s secret” has made a U-turn - moving from "inclusive" collections that wink at feminism, featuring plus-size and trans models - and then returning to the brand's classic style signature: sexy underwear worn by very feminine models.
What is fashion for?
The first author to deal with fashion in a structured way was George Simmel in the early 1900s. The German sociologist in the short but dense essay "Fashion" outlines some characteristics of the phenomenon in question: first of all, fashion in Western countries would derive from the ambivalent tendency to "differentiate" and at the same time to "belong," it thus expresses the tension between uniformity and differentiation, the ambivalent desire to be part of a group and simultaneously stand outside the group, asserting one's individuality.
The Futurists in 1914 with their essay "The Antineutral Dress" ironized on the gray and anonymous clothes from the bourgeoisie of that time, defining their style not with the term sobriety but through the expression of "mediocre balance." But while in Simmel's time dressing and styling in a certain way marked important differences of class and class, now, due to low-cost chains mass-producing the cues given by designers, there is little difference between the style of the more affluent influencers and the suburban kid. This reflection, which on the one hand would lead to a trivial consideration that styles transcend class difference, leads us to a more hidden territory leading to the idea that class difference in fashion has given way to another, quieter and less obvious clash: the clash of the sexes.
Beyond status symbols: fashion as the terrain of the clash of the sexes
Dressing and clothing, from mere affectation or at the opposite pole necessity, become the terrain of a political symbolic battle, which is no longer material and related to the creation of status symbols (the eskimo, the Timberlands, the Rolex ...) as much as it is a discussion and rediscussion of sexuality and power between the sexes. Body fashion is a process that has developed more in post-modernity, as there is a social construction of the body, which is not only advertising or marketing, but political with its models and myths. The 2000s marked the culmination of a very clear trend: fashion is no longer sexy, clothes are becoming more and more shapeless, baggy, and slippery on the figure, and some fashion houses, among which Gucci stands out, design an androgynous, funny, flamboyant but definitely not sexy. style. Sometimes this trend is hushed, remaining on the fringes of a fully expressed discourse, other times it is the protagonists of high fashion themselves who make these issues explicit. One example is Miuccia Prada who, already for decades but this trend has strengthened in recent years, has made ugly-chic her signature style.
In short, it seems that the cornerstone of beauty, understood as cleanliness of form and symmetry of the Renaissance matrix, gives way to the funny, the comfortable, the confusing, and the loud. Miuccia Prada makes the aesthetics of the ugly almost a philosophical claim and in an interview says:
"... Ugliness is attractive, ugliness is exciting. Maybe because it is newer. To me the pursuit of the ugliness is more interesting than the bourgeois idea of beauty. And why? Because the ugliness is human."
This discourse might seem to be simply an accident, the whim of an artist who legitimately expresses herself in the forms and ways she finds most congenial, in reality we are faced with a definite attempt to undermine the most basic laws of attraction, and fashion must be anything but sexy. To speak of a process of "social engineering" is perhaps premature and has conspiratorial overtones, but there is no doubt that the big fashion houses, the hot periodicals, and the influential personalities revolving around them were brandishing a new way of conceiving style, silencing the idea that dressing to please men was wrong.
The new generations are literally inundated with these contradictions, a new progressive puritanism, which on the one hand encourages the commodification of the body through the freedom to promote it with platforms such as Only fans, squeezes them into mechanisms of excessive dieting, on the other hand guilts women if they "dare" to dress even to please the male gaze. The cases reported at the beginning of the article tell us that perhaps the Nature of relationships takes its course, no matter how much we want to create at the table mechanisms of loneliness, individualism and gender clash, the mechanisms of seduction remain fortunately human, too human.
Foto Cyril Attias, CC 2.0 SA by ND
A graduate in Psychology, a political activist, she cultivates in parallel a passion for the topics of political communication, the relationship between the sexes and military history.
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