ctf journal 09 s.carbonaro "the function of fashion"

8/14/2019 CTF Journal 09 S.Carbonaro "The Function of Fashion"

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Textile Craft, Textile and Fashion Design, Textile Technology, Textile Management & Fashion Communication

Special Edition: Fashion & Clothing



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Michelangelo Pistoletto, Venus o Rags, 1967



The unction o ashion?The design o new styles...

o thoughtSimonetta CarbonaroThe Swedish School of TextilesUniversity of Borå[email protected]

Christian VotavaREALISE strategic consultantsKarlsruhe, [email protected]

Premise I don’t know i we are all aware o the act that joining the ongoing academicdiscourse about the “Function o Fashion” means being ready to open aPandora’s box ull o questions such as: How do we dene the unction

o Fashion in current society? Is Fashion utilitarian? Does Fashion inormsociety’s attitudes and behaviour or does Fashion just mirror the zeitgeist , thespirit o the times? What is the semiotic unction o Fashion within society?Is the unction o Fashion the creation o hierarchical and/or competitivesigns unctional to the market economy? Has Fashion to be just seductive? IsFashion the abrication o art, pleasure, or entertainment? Is Fashion Designequal to Design and i so, what is Design? How do we dene Design?...and the list o sel-revolving questions could go on or pages. As you see,the in-built risk o research is that o creating perpetual machines o neverending theoretical questioning. This process is o course very necessary andvery ruitul or the construction o academic knowledge about design andresearch activities, but does not really respond to one o the main ‘unctions’o knowledge that - especially in crisis ridden times as ours - I consider to bedramatically urgent and imperative: the design o (aesth) ethical models orsustainable growth and new prosperity.

Prof. Simonetta Carbonaro is anexpert in consumer psychologyand comfort science. She doesresearch in the area of consumerbehaviour. She is a member of theEuropean Cultural Parliament

and of the Research Centre ofDomus Academy in Milan. She is aProfessor in Design Managementand Humanistic Marketing at theThe Swedish School of Textiles.For more than 10 years Carbonarohas been working as a consultanton innovative branding strategies

and is today a partner at REALISEStrategic Consultants.

Dr Christian Votava is an expertin the areas of strategy, valueadded marketing, innovation and

organisational efficiency and isdeveloping new marketing andmarket research methodologiesfor saturated markets. He holdsa doctorate in chemistry and anMBA, and was active for morethan 10 years in leading market-ing and operating positions inEurope and the USA. Today heis a partner at REALISE, wherehe empowers financial andconsumer goods companies tooperate safely and successfullyin rapidly changing and highlycompetitive markets.

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Research, or better said, design researchers are todayasked to roll-up their sleeves, suspend their argumentsabout “orm ollows unction” (Sullivan, 1896) ratherthan “orm ollows ction” (Deitch, 2001) and go or“FORM FOLLOWS FACTION”, the new dictum o thenew modernity, where

“new modernity is understood to be an unsentimental but humanistic acceptance o the state o the world - aclear-eyed engagement with the recent radical changesin human interaction, access to inormation, awarenesso catastrophic problems, that is combined with deep

personal commitments to hope, passion, and the belie that it is possible or humanity to live in a new way.

Further, i action is understood to mean a group o people who express a shared belie or opinion, and i its Latin root word, actum, is understood to mean anobjective consensus on an aspect o reality, then theexpression orm ollows action perectly summarizesall o the various innovative and humanistic creativeresponses the new modernity o 21 st century.” 1

Furthermore, the Latin word actum also means

something done, enterprise, and last but not leastbusiness. Shortly said: this is a call or sharing our ideas,taking a stance and going or action. And or doingthat, we can start rom here and now. We can start romFashion o course.

Our most urgent task: designing alternatives

Let’s get one thing straight: i there is a chance to nda way-out rom our global emergency, that dependson cultural players – like all o us – willing to contributewith the design o alternatives to the actual (and deeplydamaged) system. We urgently need the design o neweconomic, political and above all cultural models that cantake up, that can deeply change businesses’, politicians’and people’s attitudes, thinking styles and behaviours.In the absence o alternatives - or which the time is ripe

- an unsustainable situation can drag on and collapseseemingly orever. History oers instances o many socio-economic regimes that were collapsing and disappearingorever (Diamond, 2004).

The shit rom a black outft to a black outlook

Black seems to be the color o our prosperity outlooknot only across Europe’s and the USA’s economies butworldwide today. Macroeconomists, governments and themedia tell us that the global GDP is endangered as neverbeore. “Growth isn’t growing” and nobody knows i andwhen it will start growing again.And this threatening news got us while we were still

under shock because o the results o the Stern Report(2006), the IPCC UN scientists outcomes (2007), theUN-Nature Conservation Body research (2008), just tomention ew o the studies, that respectively told us that,yes, climate change is happening and it is anthropogenicin its nature, meaning that it is essentially caused byhuman intererence; that the costs o climate changewould amount to as much as 20 percent o the globalGDP i we don’t commence immediate countermeasures;

and that we are already loosing two to ve billion dollarsin the orm o natural capital every year.

The end o the beginning?

Is this just a temporary stormy condition, or the“end o the beginning” o a worldwide catastrophe?Catastrophes are o course catastrophic only or transient

lie on this planet – like human beings, because ourplanet Earth, unlike us, is the product o as many asve billion years o natural catastrophes. In act, theenvironmental pressure that we have been imposingon the planet over the last two-three hundred yearsrepresents just one o its many disasters. But or mostlie orms that inhabit our planet, including the humanrace, it’s a matter o lie and death (Lovelock, 2009). Forus, human beings, this is an existential problem. Gaia,

together with her gods and demons, is looking on andleaving us to get on with our sel-made catastrophe. Our1 David Goldsmith, Masterstudent at The Swedish School o Textiles 2009



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pretty blue planet will continue along its path through theuniverse with or without us. It will survive with or withouthomo sapiens sapiens and our wonderul inventions suchas art, science, technology; with or without that specialcreature that invented music, philosophy, and discoveredX-rays and vaccines; with or without that same humanity

that created morality, but also war...that humanity thatmade history.

From homo habilis to ...homo modernicus

A history that describes how mankind, slowly andgradually at rst and then, with rocket-like acceleration,has managed to exponentially increase its population and

its productive power. When we ollow the developmento economic achievements o mankind then we have tonotice that there was not much happening or millionso years. It was only at the beginning o the 19th centurythat the gross domestic product o certain countriesliterally took o (Maddison, 2001).

This enormous growth spurt which is actually still goingon, indicates that at that time, ater the homo habilis,the homo erectus, the homo sapiens and the homo

sapiens sapiens, a new type o human being was born:the homo modernicus.

Our homo modernicus is a European ospring, a rationally-thinking ospring o the Enlightenment. He is a ree anddemocratic Man, who shows his solidarity with others andis guided by the values o the French Revolution. He is aningenious being who made the Industrial Revolution. Heis a pragmatic Man, who grasps the economic dimensions

o consumption economy. And nally, this homomodernicus is also an exuberant Man, who not only threwhimsel -with all the exuberance o an youngster- into theglobalization project in order to be able to keep up withthe exponential trend o economic growth at compoundannual growth rates. But he also went beyond his goal oharvesting the prot o the real economy and launchedhimsel into the hazard o the speculative nancial markets

(Carbonaro ; Votava, 2008).The neoclassical model o growth

According to general economic knowledge, the economicgrowth o the modern age, which has kept up or nearlytwo centuries now, is a actor touching on selsupportingprocesses, which are based on two main tenets: Withregard to the supply side, growth made it possible to

invest in research and development which producedsignicant technological innovations until now. This ledto new products and more ecient production processeswhich, in and o themselves, reinorced urther growth.That is why productivity today is 20 times that o 1820. Inthe eyes o economists technology is thus the true drivingorce o growth. They rely on technological progress tosolve the repercussions o any environmental pressure and

do not see any incompatibility between economic growthand environmental protection.

On the demand side, growth created an extraordinaryimprovement in the standard o living in the industrialisedcountries and led to the development o our presentconsumer society, which is itsel an important mainspringo growth. For traditional economists our concepto well-being, as well as the social, civil and cultural

development o societies, is thereore tightly linked toeconomic growth (Sollow, 2007). But this neoclassical

REAL_ISE

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growth theory provides neither details about the socialimpact o economic prerequisites on technologicalprogress, nor does it tell us anything about the durationo the transitional state. Like most economic theories, itis based on a very simplied model, which describes theconsequences o an input parameter like technological

progress or example, on the output parameter, whichis dened by the model, as or instance the GDP growthindex. For this, ceteris paribus conditions are assumed– which means that one thus assumes that all otherparameters remain unchanged.

Today, macroeconomics is still unable to describe theeect o several determining actors which are interactingwith each other on complex and interlinked systemslike our economy, our societies, our cultures and ourenvironment. Nor can it make statements about thereaction time to modiying impulses within such systems.That is why we must be very much aware o the actthat we have entered into the adventure o deregulation,

liberalization and globalization with a stirring declarationo aith but without any rudder. We were, we are,navigating only by sight!

GDP and GNP straight jackets

In 1968 Robert Kennedy, in a speech he gave duringthe primaries o a US election campaign, was alreadyquestioning the GNP as a suitable economic indicator o

prosperity when he said: “…Our gross national productcounts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and

ambulances to clear our highways o carnage. It countsspecial locks or our doors and the jails or those whobreak them. It counts napalm and the cost o a nuclearwarhead…It counts television programs which gloriyviolence in order to sell toys to our children… Yet thegross national product… does not include the beauty o

our poetry… the intelligence o our public debate… Itmeasures everything, in short, except that which makeslie worthwhile…”

To date, and in spite o that prophetical warning, morethan 30 dierent indicators have been developed inwhich the subject o prosperity has been assessed indierent ways. One o the most interesting one is the

Index o Sustainable Economic Welare (which laterevolved into the Genuine Progressive Index) because,or the rst time, this indicator made it possible tomake an actual comparison between economic growthand prosperity. This comparison proves that economicgrowth in all the industrialized countries has indeedgenerated prosperity, although with a steadily decreasingorce. Prosperity growth began to stagnate in the USrom the 1960s onward, and in the 1980s growth even

became negative in the remaining OECD countries (Daly ;Cobb,1989). Despite some criticisms that could be madewith regard to the Index o Sustainable Economic Welaremethods, people today would largely agree that a steadilygrowing portion o the GDP consists o the repair andmaintenance o our society.

The discrepancy between wealth and happiness

It will come as no surprise that the equation linkingeconomic growth and public happiness has today beingrepealed – not by moralists or anti-capitalist activists – butby liberal economists such as Lord Richard Layard. There isscientic proo that – in economically developed countries- the tensions caused by material wealth worsen with theincrease o economic growth.

REAL_ISE

MACRO-ECONOMIC

MODEL

TECHNOLOGY GROWTH



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According to the ndings o the psychologist and Nobellaureate Daniel Kahneman (2003), in our westernsocieties, people’s aspirations are presently movingrom an economy striving or material wealth to aneconomy striving or well-being and happiness. Insuch an economy, those goods that are valued most

highly only have a signicance within communitiesand are not exchangeable, cannot be reproduced orcannot be replaced by others, like or example security,peace, riendship, time, culture, knowledge or simplytruthulness and honesty. These socio-cultural actors,which orm the bases o what people’s aspirations aremade o and that could be the platorm o our utureeconomy, have not really been taken into consideration in

macro-economics to date.It is only recently that some politicians have also come tounderstand that today, the gross domestic product cannotbe an indicator o prosperity any longer. At the beginningo this year, as an example, the French President NicolasSarkozy surprisingly commissioned Jose Stieglitz andAmartya Sen, the Nobel Price Laureates in Economics,to propose new indicators or the quality o lie and or

sustainable economic development by April 2009.

Technology as the driven orce o growth?

We should not only question i and how economicgrowth is really contributing to our well-being andhappiness today, we should also take a much closerlook at the concept o technology as the driving orce o

growth and progress.On one hand it’s true that technology has already provenmany catastrophic predictions wrong. In the past, orexample, we thought demographic growth was goingto throw us back into the dark ages, but increases inagricultural productivity have managed to solve theproblem. Too bad that this same technological “solution”is also one o the actors that increases environmental

pressure and will eventually create the next generationo problems.

The perpetual machine o natural capitalism

The advocates o “natural capitalism” (Daly, 1991) claimthat i technological progress could provide enough reeenergy by exploiting all orms o renewable resources,then we will have achieved heaven on earth. We would

have built up a kind o perpetual production machine, ahappy, everlasting world, ueled by all kind o renewableresources. It is a world where the economy is in perectharmony with all ecosystems, a world in tune with allimaginable consumerist liestyles and a world in which weno longer need to question either our economic system,nor the quantity o material “things” that we need toneed or our pursuit o happiness.

Let us imagine or just a second that this vision cancome true right ater we will have xed our actualglobal economic crisis, beore climate change becomesirreversible and beore we run out o ossil uels. Let usenvision a world o tomorrow in which the developmento a “cradle-to-cradle” design system, based on theprecept that there is no real end or any object wemanuacture, just “reincarnation” (Braungart, 2003),

together with an endless availability o energy, anunlimited access to resources, would make the unlimitedproduction o material things easible.

I think that even i this were to happen, we would stillend up “hitting the wall” simply because the innitegrowth o material “things” would be unsustainable andincompatible with our ways o lie and the meaning o lie.

Time and space are non-renewable resources

The act is that we cannot just consider our physicalenvironment and our material world. We also need totake into account our habitat , and our habits, meaningthe totality o our living space and o our lie-styles inwhich the psychological dimension o the quality o ourexistential space and time occupy a central position. Our

space and our time are also limited (Virilio, 2008) andthey are also - in some sense - non-renewable resources.They should thus be handled with care and be an



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o the “must-have” and are yearning or values whichare not only added, but intrinsic and linked to anotherbasic human need, namely the need to grow, the needto invent onesel again and again. However, only those things that have meaning to us broaden our horizon andstimulate us to keep on rising above our own personal

limits (Weber,1922).

From a “culture o economy” to an“economy o culture”

I’m not talking here o the so called “Economy oCreativity” announced by Richard Florida (2002). AndI’m not talking about Design or Art as strategic tools

or dierentiating new mass-market products in aglobal landscape already drowning in commodities.No. Here, I am talking about the need o an economyo balanced material growth on the one hand, and aneconomy o culture on the other hand, one that impliesthe advancement o science and art, the expansion oknowledge and experience and last but not least theredesign o educational programmes that break downthe barriers between disciplines (Morin, 1999).

It is that kind o cultural development that is necessary ortransorming all our products into symbolic and culturalmeans. Such a paradigm-shit requires a deep cultural andsocial transormation: rom the actual culture o economydriven by the mythology o quantity, mass consumptionbased on mass-production and the promise o an opulentsociety ocused on the possession o ephemeral things toa new economy o culture based on quality good works,good products, good services. Sustainable o course, butalso beautiul, and meaningul.

And a new economy o culture in which culture is notan abstract term, but it is a network o cultural actorsthat can generate and diuse not only a new economyproducing art, inormation, communication andeducation, but also the design o social innovation.

The design o social innovation

People are in act not waiting or macroeconomist andworld politicians to x the problem o our crises riddeneconomies. People are already doing their part. Theywant to make sense, to make a dierence. Individuals

are already starting to explore new systems to work andlive together in a more meaningul and sustainable way.They are starting to organize their own lives dierently.They act. They show by doing that there are other waysto live a good lie without at the same time threateningnature, other people, or their own inner peace. Theyare organizing themselves in time banks, home nursery,playgroups, car-sharing networks, producer markets

retailing, ethical purchasing groups, community supportedagriculture, sel-help groups or the elderly, sharedgardens, vegetable gardens in parks, eco-sustainablevillages, local ood catering, co-housing, neighborhoodsel management, local micro logistics, neighborhoodlaunderettes & restaurants, 0 Km ood services, toolexchange workshops, book exchange libraries, secondhand ashion ateliers, and apparel swap groups.

Customized T-shirt at www.realiteewear.com



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In the last years all these new orms o social innovation

People creating second hand ashion ateliers - Emude -“Creative communities”. PoliDesign, 2007.



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and bottom-up-driven models o designing prosperity intimes o adversities have been the object o investigationand cooperation o a new generation o scholars,designers and artists – like the group o Ezio Manzini othe Polytechnic University in Milan or the one lead byJohn Thackara in the UK. The cultural leaders and the

creatives engaged in the design o a social innovationgive to policy makers an opportunity to learn rom theircommon success actors and to be alerted to commonobstacles they encounter. They can help to develop,initiate and test new policies, aimed at enabling andempowering individuals or “creative communities” to dobetter and to do more. By exploring new structures o civilsociety they are also setting the conditions or replicationo projects o sustainable liestyles. By understandingthe existential anthropological motivations linked topeople’s new behaviors they can also alert and advise theoperators o the consumer goods industry and serviceabout new sustainable and meaningul lie models,and thereore about the design o new processes, newproduct and service ideas or which latent needs exist(Meroni, 2007).

The long tail o bottom-up prosperity

What we also already see happening is that many creativeindividuals or communities are already transormingthemselves into sustainable entrepreneurs o excellentuniqueness. Seen rom an economic point o view, theentire range o this new generation o artisanal nichesuppliers will not only become more signicant in termso turnover, they will also become an important motor oemployment or our post-industrial societies, especiallybecause their business model is NOT oriented towards theuse o economies o scale.

However, we cannot allow ourselves to envision theproduction acilities o these new niche suppliers onlyas romantic arts and crat acilities without any kindo technology. On the contrary! These new producers,

in spite o the act that they regard themselves asenlightened cratsmen and their crat also as an art, have

become real experts in the employment and use o small,fexible and high-tech machinery, which has meanwhilebecome accessible and aordable or every DIY amateur.And, like every good artist, they know how to sellthemselves. They make contracts with local retailers andeven department stores, which are beginning to open up

or such niche products, because they have understoodthe importance o including excellence in their own rangeo products. But they use the internet – and its viral power– as their preerred sales and – above all – communicationschannel. They are masters o the art o mouth-to-mouthpropaganda using twitter, blogs and video blogs andmake sure that people are able to discuss their products,works and principles in specically themed orums. AsChris Anderson has highlighted in his book “The LongTail”(2007), the internet is an integrated component othe niche provider’s business strategy because it turnsmasses o markets into a virtual mass market or productsthat are either unique or o excellent quality.

Redesigning our next culture o consumption

What would thus become the ocal point o the new

economy o culture is thus a culture that does not seekto renounce material wealth, but redesigns a balancebetween our unsustainable way o consuming and aair and equitable distribution o wealth in the world. Itis a culture that puts our unreasonable liestyles underscrutiny o course, but without demonizing materialgoods tout-court , is instead questioning the meaningo what we do. It is a culture that can change on theparallel unreasonable habits o our private every-day lieas well as in our actual senseless production methods,by transmitting the intangible yet priceless worth oour vital resources. And it is a culture that rees itselrom the dictatorship o dierentiation and the alwayschanging consumption-driven Western liestyles fctionary (Baudrillard, 2005), by showing us the unknown gain odiversity and suggesting new models o a good lie basedon the richness o our cultural diversities.



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In brie: It is a culture that – by challenging the zeitgeist– spreads the seeds o a new prosperity and a new aithin the uture. A culture that reconciles the vision o theworld we are living in with the planet we are living on.

The design o a cultural epoch-making transormation

Those who simply claim that such a transormation isimpossible should rst ask themselves and then tell us ithe current dogma o senseless growth still carries withinit the seed o well-being and aith in the uture. I theanswer is negative, one has to imagine some new courseo action. History has already witnessed some culturaland social movements that have dramatically changedthe stream o time like Christianity, the Renaissance orthe Enlightenment (Ruolo, 2008). All transormationemerges rom that which distinguishes our species romall others: our human mind and spirit.

The transormation towards an economy o signicanceand meaningulness would thus require that philosophersbesides dealing with ontological dilemmas starthighlighting the relevant questions about the meaning

o a good lie and the set o values and principles wecan share or re-designing a good and responsible lie:economists must reconsider their discipline as part othe social sciences and thereore stop applying simplisticmodels o growth and start designing an economy basedon a model o balanced, air and sustainable prosperity;sociologists must stop writing up their market researchand start understanding the driving orces o humanity.And last but not least, artists and designers and ashiondesigners must apply their skills to giving shape, colour,taste and smell to new visions o (aesth)ethical andsustainable prosperity in such an inspiring way that it hasthe power to challenge the mainstream culture.

Bansky grati



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Artists/designers/ashion designer as “change agents”

As a matter o act, in the construction o such an“economy o signicance and meaningulness”, designersand artists are asked to use their creativity to provokepublic opinion, to spark public imagination through their

interpretations o what a good, clean and air culture oliving would look and eel like or the people o this planet.

In this new economy designers and artists have atremendously political role, since they – and not thetechnocrats – can really involve people emotionally andprovide models to help us all re-imagine the uture. Theyare the ones that can help us to give shape to our visionsand hopes. A uture o happiness o course, but this timeit certainly will be a more sober happiness.

Many people today speak o the meaning o art and alsoo design in the creation o a more sustainable growth(ECP, 2006). But so ar no one understands how to reallyunlock the potential o these disciplines. In the consumergoods industry, designers and, in recent times, alsoartists are regarded as ullling strictly a pure marketing

unction and are not employed as “change agents” or ascommunicators o the new latent needs o people or asustainable and better lie, which is why most o them donot entirely understand the subject o sustainability, letalone how to implement such a thing.

The “sustainability thing”

The result o this is that the conusion on our marketsand in our civil society about “the sustainability thing” istending to increase and that there is virtually no way thatany vision or cultural transormation can be envisioned.We are almost drowning in an ocean o do-good ashiondesign products and ashion design textiles or clothinglabelled as sustainable because they are either organic, orair, or ethical or vegan, or green or ecological.

I am not going to talk about the dierences betweenecological and eco-riendly, between organic and green,



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between ethical and air trade. I just want to point outthat all these terms are generally put in the same bucketo sustainability that has became a ashionable catchphrase o our time. To most people, sustainability is not

just associated with something durable and good or theenvironment, but has also tended to be associated with

some kind o denial and not with cultural and estheticalvalues that would make this objective emotionallyattractive and worth striving or.

Three pillars (without culture) can not sustainsustainability

We all know that the challenge o three pillars modelo sustainability implies a equally balanced ecological,economic and social commitment. But all that is notenough. It is necessary but not sucient, because peopletoday call or much more than just products that will savetheir world, their wallets or their peace o conscience.They are looking or cultural messages that also candeliver a clue or the “ecology o their mind” (Bateson,1973). Cultural productions and goods that express theirstance through a powerul aesthetic impact. That means

everything that embodies strong cultural messages that canreconcile them with a uture they thought they had lost.

Who else but artists, designers, and ashion designerswould be able to merge all three aspects o sustainabilitywith a poetic and daring gesture!? And who else butthey could give us a tangible and understandable signo a social change that is underway right now? Design isnot just the discipline o giving shape to either unctionalor trendy and seductive arteacts. It is a discipline thatcan consciously transmit these “low-level signals” o oursocieties and it is a discipline that can advance, challengeand stimulate us at the same time in that it gives shape to“the new”. Let me take the example o ashion design toclariy how design can be a highly sensitive seismographo socio-cultural changes as well as the stimulus orcultural transormation.

When ashion design was a driving orce o change

For those who can think back that ar - It was at thebeginning o the 1970’s: Vivienne Westwood enteredthe scene with her rebel ashion creations, expressingthe spirit o a new generation o young people and

supporting their anti-establishment cultural revolution.And in the late 70’s, Armani was not just inventingprêt-a-porter. He was much more designing the new,emancipated and possibly also post-eministic woman,who strode with head held high into a working worldlargely occupied by men and masculinity. In the 80’sKatharine Hamnett was the rst ashion designer whodesigned wearable politics. She was the rst designerwho used t-shirts as billboards or spreading awarenessabout the un-ecological and un-ethical criteria o textileand apparel industrial production. In the 90’s the trainedsociologist and political scientist Miuccia Prada was thencreating the intelligent, educated and thoughtul woman,a woman who displayed her emininity in a minimalisticand understated way, which was in contrast to thecynical, opulent yuppie style o those times. Finally, at theend o the 90’s Dolce and Gabbana’s ashion message

captured the secret need o women to reclaim theirsensual, warm and prosperous emininity and releasedthem rom the anorexic and androgynous patterns thatdominated ashion.

These kinds o designers were certainly not changingthe course o consumerism history (today most o themrepresent exactly the opposite: the old luxury status quo),but they wrote history or the way they managed tocapture and mirror in their ashion design the most relevantemergent signals o the socio-cultural transormation oWestern societies in the last century’s decades.

Katharine Hamnet Save the Future campaign



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And Today?

Under the technocratic and short-sighted direction othe marketing departments, today’s ashion and apparelindustry nds itsel the prisoner o the marketing strategyo “mass prestige” also reerred as “masstige”. This

strategy means bringing past dreams o luxury to themasses and, in particular, to the many newly afuentpeople o the emerging countries. Revitalizing old ashiondoes not require much sensitivity nor originality. As aconsequence ashion designers have lost sight o theirartistic creative talent and the apparel industry has lost itsreservoir o cultural messages to be transerred into themainstream product oer.

Today, everyone is just copying everyone else. Zara’sdesigners copy Armani and Chanel, the new hordes oChinese designers copy H&M and the luxury brands copyold Asian and Chinese heritage and transorm it intoa trendy exotic ashionism. And by so doing, ashionhas just become ashion and repetitively reers to itselinstead o nourishing our cultures and contributing tothe evolution o our civilizations. Fashion has been losing

its strong symbolism, its systems o signs and signiers,its meaning and its messages. Miles o cloth are gettingswallowed up by the rhetoric o ashion emptiness. AndFashion is starting to go out o Fashion at rocket speed.

But this could also be a tremendous chance or a restart!

The design o a practical utopia

Allow me to indulge here in a last personal note. In1933 Keynes said, “The decadent international butindividualistic capitalism, in the hands o which weound ourselves ater the war, is not a success. It isnot intelligent, it is not beautiul, it is not just, it is notvirtuous – and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short wedislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But whenwe wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely

perplexed.” (Keynes, 1933)

I believe the same. Certainly any kind o “decadent”capitalism will end, some day, like all historical ormations.But hopeully only once we will have been able tocreate those economic, political, and above all culturalalternative models that will allow us to keep on progressand prosper. In the absence o those alternatives the color

o our uture, as I said at the beginning, is black.

What is needed is not just a good show, but constructivework on a project, the practical utopia o the design oa new prosperity. What I have in mind is a sustainable,air and enlightened new culture o economy, based ona capitalist entrepreneurship that is not coextensive withaccumulation or prot, but consists o great, creativeenterprises, luminous instances o which we have had somany in our Western countries, as elsewhere.

The ultimate task o the next generations – starting now,with our present generations – is to break the economyout o this petriying mold o interminable, unlimitedmaterial growth and senseless wealth accumulationand turn its vital orce to the pursuit o a responsibleand sober happiness based on quality: real quality that

truly counts toward better lie and impels the growtho culture, education, the arts, science, knowledgecratsmanship, experience, and last bit not least wisdom.By transcending itsel, capitalism could most probablycount on centuries and centuries more, because it willenter the last growth phase o the consumer economy,the one o an economy o culture, which is the onlyeconomy that allows or unlimited growth.



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Reerences

Anderson, C. (2007). The long tail. How endless choiceis creating unlimited demand. London. Random HouseBusiness Books.

Bateson, G. (1973). Steps to an ecology o mind.Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolutionand epistemology. London. Granada.

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