49th edition

The issue of time’s scan, which had generated during the past many phenomena, among which the one of “fashions” (now over), has been already partially touched in some past editions of product development’s proposals of FILO. This phenomenon has risen to a distinctive feature of the current way of getting dressed, to a verifiable certainty of our daily life. Let’s then move the attention from TIME to mental and personal SPACE, land of our expressions and to the change of sensitivity in that regard.

The first consideration, which is obvious since the beginning, is that this presentation is focused only on street style, or better on the street styles, because nowadays nothing better than what you see on the street represents what is then going against the flow and re-elaborated, if possible, by the creators.

Dress’ digressions, which we see every day, with any possible doubt, are establishing the abandonment of a status of a shared code, of a mean bringing the meaning of some idea of “beauty” matching to the codes accepted by the majority of people and, on the contrary, they are emerging within their new role: the one representing a visible part of the ‘iceberg’ of self-reference, disarticulation (of taste) and fragmentation (of market).

The other appropriate consideration is that, since a public dimension is no longer present, just private activities publicly exhibited can exist and, once established that a shared “ego” is no longer existing as well as a common feeling too, but there are just personal moods, it is perfectly excusable that “desires”, “whims” prevail and that inevitably an aesthetics or a fashion accepted beyond the single person or just a bit more is no longer there.

Within this panorama, which at first sight looks like being chaotic and “illegible” one can find some interesting sparks. The key of interpretation has just to take a step forward, or better to the side, and catch that street styles are ipso facto set out of the temporal system, that was the one referring to “trend” fashion; they define the mere present, the “here and now” as a status of generative but not narrative present and they are out of the shared space of a commonly accepted aesthetics producing that kind of market as the one we knew until the recent past. Let’s take note that at the moment this situation seems it cannot be changed. And it is not even possible to see how it could be changed, considering the dimensions of communicative conditioning which creates this behavioural attitude.

What is often difficult to be internalized is that this generative but also anti-narrative present gives origin to a lack of influential creative visions which are stable on the market in general but also in old and new “institutional” trend setters and creates just impromptu and meteoric inflows of dress’ ways coming from nothing and which quickly return to nothing. Unless we consider those coming from downstream to upstream. That is to say flow’s inversion.

We have to consider whether what seems to be a solipsistic personalism, an absolute unconventionality doesn’t change into a total conformism. The conformism of variability and spontaneity that is not linked to what creators image it will be dressed. If this logic is not understood and one does not become part of it, one is misled and does not catch the interpretation’s code of our present: the time of mandatory freedoms. However, playing on various aspects and meanings of this “non-conformist conformism” is maybe the key for that step back or better “to the side” we have spoken about before, and it can use communication (especially Internet) as creator of inclusiveness. This point becomes important within the youngest market ranges. In any case, a product (even a luxury one) cannot be sold anymore just for the name it brings. The youngest ranges of consumers tend to appreciate more being part of a community, rather than recognizing themselves within a logo. That is why the importance of being “inclusive”. This doesn’t mean that the market should not defend and preserve its features, otherwise the risk would be to destroy the gained market.

A fundamental point for all sections of the pipeline: focusing on the own speciality, tuning the presentations and bringing to the product the adaptations according to clients’ needs. Defining the borders of a space where full possession is reach and where to represent a reference point.

As far as “spaces” are concerned, both real and virtual, the key word to use in these conditions is more properly “borders”. It is possible that borders, disappeared from atlas’ surfaces, will survive for many facets within signs’ system (including the dress’ one too) as lines which vertically cross it instead of drawing horizontally the geometries of any land on earth’s surface.