ABSTRACT

Fashion has in fact gained an increasing space in social sciences’ reflections of the last twenty years, carving out for itself an autonomous position inside sociology of culture and other academic disciplines, reaching a relevant number of scholars who define themselves as ‘fashion studies’ scholars and meet periodically during the many interdisciplinary conferences taking places all over the world–or, better said, in those countries which gave enough attention to fashion as a ‘heavy’ phenomenon within the national economy and the social imaginary. The speed rate of the birth and obsolescence processes of new fashions does not apply exclusively to clothing collection anymore: the French semiotician Roland Barthes’ thesis19 stating that fashion is a cultural system of meanings, is still valid. According to Griswold, culture is the expressive and relational part of human life, and it becomes visible through ‘behaviour, objects, and ideas that can be seen to express, to stand for, something else’.