Mode eccentriche: carcere e creatività

Very particular forms of cultural production are presented in this paper which explores three Italian brands: Sartoria San Vittore, I Gatti Galeotti and MADE IN CARCERE. These brands are coming from cooperatives working in San Vittore jail in Milan, Lecce and Trani’s jails and they are located in a very particular position within Italian fashion system. They are economic realities found at the borders of mainstream market, sometimes dealing with problems of economic sustainability, trying to achieve a difficult equilibrium inside a highly competitive market, but at the same time being repository of social instances combined to interesting products’ innovations. Within such experiences, who inherited typical Italian traditions with a perspective based on the promotion of the sense of beauty and well made, creative work seems to develop not only as an aesthetic research, experimentation, planning ability, but also as a form of social redemption and inclusion. Main characteristic of these goods is indeed their peculiar allocation between centre and periphery, between leading settings and niche experiences, between global trends and local particularities. Prison fashion brands are able to show new cultural ferments introducing, in daily garments, original emotions and stories, which talk about periphery but also of creativity, inclusion and handcraft and work with the logic of beauty and well made in order to recover and re-socialize border people. They create a sustainable aesthetics which points to new productive horizons and new life styles and consumptions in accordance to contemporary scarcity of economic and cultural resources.