Clothes and Costumes: Dystopian Storytelling through Fashion

The idea of dystopia, shaped by these socio-cultural changes, continues to inspire fashion. By expressing the fears of the time and allowing the public to confront problems without turning away from their way of life, fashion encourages us all to reflect on our current situation and shows us how to read and react to these phenomena. The analysis in this article is limited to a few examples (eighteenth century; twenty-first century), but it helps us to understand the relevance of studying fashion as a semiotic space for anticipating social events and for strategic interpretation. From this perspective, fashion leads to the semiotisation of people and the status of signs. Dystopian fashion is both haute couture and ready-to-wear, a complex thought that needs to be expressed in a positive or negative way, as a certain hope or as a desperate fear, and as a question to be returned to in the near future.