La moda: entre la emocion y el discurso, entre el discurso y la imagen

This paper aims to explore fashion oriented behaviour addressing two main questions: how rational decisions and emotional spurs affect presentation practices, and more in general, how fashion world, innovative par excellence, can give us new ideas for a better world taking advantage of both rational and non-rational resources. Clothing dresses the body which is the primary means of presenting oneself. The clothing is a sort of membrane that fits the body for the performance. In fact, it is generally requested when an individual has to appear before others. What I will try to do first is investigate if it is possible to find a rational organization of such performance. The thesis I want to put forth is that, as it happens in every communication, also in clothing mediated communication, reason has a variable role which crosses emotions, aesthetic feelings and tastes. These dimensions of social action have been less considered by sociology until recently when they have been acknowledged as main components of ambivalent post-modern culture. I will introduce then the ethical dimension of consumption and self-presentation, emerged even more recently also in fashion discourses. In the second part of this essay, I will try to show how fashion can be of relevant help to overcome a series of antinomies through which modernity was used to reading the economic and gender relationships putting them into very precise value judgements. These antinomies are losing their interpretative power in general and appear to be too rigid to be useful also in the case of fashion and self-presentation. If we want to understand contemporary cultural production and the related consumption, we cannot set rationality against taste or ethical motivation. This is particularly true in the case of sustainable goods and practices which suppose the long-denied possibility of putting together beauty desires, and rational planning for common and personal good. The link can be found only through an innovation effort I call ethical imagination.