Fashion Statements. Fashion Communication as an Expression of Artistic, Political, and Social Manifesto between Physical and Digital

Fashion is capable of becoming a “manifesto” in its own right, giving not only clothing but above all communicative form to futuristic visions and declarations of intent on the contemporaneity in all its aspects. These fashions manifesto have historically taken different forms, of clothing (as in the functional experiments that led to the creation of Thayaht’s TuTa and Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova’s Varst, through the Space Age visions of Rudi Gernreich, Paco Rabanne, and Pierre Cardin and the political actions of Archizoom with their Vestirsi è facile), of written texts (such as Giacomo Balla’s Il vestito antineutrale. Manifesto futurista or more recently in Franco Moschino’s La Ricetta, Virgil Abloh’s Artist Statement, or Martin Margiela’s type-written statements), as well as statements in the form of spatial, performative projects, increasingly suspended between the physical and digital worlds (such as those of Miuccia Prada and Alessandro Michele). In today’s fashion communication, a relationship is increasingly consolidated between the different communicative modalities (offline and online), creating different forms of public involvement becoming real manifestos. With the mediatization of fashion and the pervasiveness of social media, increasingly direct and engaging communicative actions are defined as statements of precise points of view, defining fashion communication activities capable of reading and staging contemporaneity in all its many aspects and facets: aesthetic, economic, but above all, social.