ABSTRACT
Fashion is, by its very nature, innovation and mutation. Especially in contemporary times, digital technologies have given a new stimulus – accelerated by the pandemic due to Covid-19 – to the definition of innovative forms of communication: resistance and resilience of fashion that, despite the lockdowns, has not stopped but instead has gone forward, exploiting and experimenting with new communication methods.
Fashion shows thus became a privileged setting for experimentation. Indeed, we are witnessing a sort of mutation of the typical form of the fashion show that, if on the one hand, implements new narrative modes, on the other hand, it creates narratives that we could define as meta-shows: fashion-shows-not-shows that – while losing the concept of the live broadcast, maintain the form of the ‘classic’ event – become real short movies in the form of fashion shows, digital events, or fashion shows in the form of gaming, of digital artistic performance, of talk, to mention some of the contemporary forms of the catwalks.
This chapter investigates how the fashion system has resisted the restraints generated by Covid-19, expanding the communicative vocabulary and implementing new narrative forms, blurring the boundaries between physical and digital.
