WITHOUT BEING ESSENTIALIST, creating an inspirational set of grand narratives providing fundamental insights into core process. The corpus of ideas constitutes a shared framework of interlocking concepts, which can be recast like lego blocks, to many ends, in different contexts, without loosing logical consistency or explanatory power.
Zygmunt Bauman was not a theorist of fashion, but using his versatile analytic tools, he could easily identify a characteristic mechanism of fashion activity.
Bauman in 2000, the transition between solid and liquid modernity, as well as the fundamental pendulum swing between the contradictory forces of security and freedom. Sociologists of fashion have suggested that people’s sartorial behaviour reflects a dual desire to conform and express one’s individuality, and that the essence of fashion is change. Bauman also superimposed those insights on the structures of security, and freedom. Which he had previously devised in the context of globalisation, the transition from the solid universe of certainties, to the liquid world where choice and relative value replaced the vice of authority and conformity thus his contribution to the world of fashion scholarship, while being at the level of macro and micro, can provide insights to apply to many projects. Tseelon found in a large scale empirical study that standing out and fitting in were core motivations for deciding what to wear and what to avoid wearing, and they correlated with confidence and insecurity.
The concept of ethical fashion has become a current currency in the last decade, fashion practitioners and theorists have taken on board the possibility that fashion can clean up its act. In fact such a starting point is problematic given the dilemmatic quality of the whole field, which is based on production of waste, and on exploitation. While it is possible to render some aspects of fashion more ethical than others, and while it is a worthwhile projects, it can not escape the inherent impossibility in the nature of the enterprise.
While not being the first to point it out Bauman starts from the observation that change is a defining feature at the hearth of fashion. Thus affirming the dualistic divide between the physical and social realms, he also likens fashion to a machine that, subject to the laws of physics, can not sustain a constant notion, and subject to norms of social behaviour can not escape constant change.
It means that as a social behaviour operating in the space that Bauman delineated between security and freedom, its feature of constant change lands this behaviour closer to the freedom than to security. Paradoxically, being within the system of fashion is simultaneously constraining and liberating.
To this fundamental metaphor of solid modernity, liquid modernity and pre-modernity, Bauman pairs concepts that capture the level of engagement with the task of self definition. Against the gamekeeper of the pre-modern times, and the gardener of solid modernity, he points out the concept of the hunter who is more preoccupied with the task itself than with the object, or the meaning, of the chase. Bauman notes that the hunt shares features with an addictive, obsessive activity. Similarly Salecl echoes Bauman’s notion of the addictive hunt when she questions whether the insistence an choice is not a way of privileging an obsessional attitude toward life. This provides a fit context for understanding the emergence of shopping not for the purchase of a particular necessity or well defined object but as a pastime, the objective of shopping for its own sake is not to full fill a specific need with an appropriate purchase. Rather, it is shopping for what we do not know we are missing, an exciting entertainment.
Bauman makes an important observation about perpetual nature of the hunt by noting that for hunters, that prospect of an end to hunting is not tempting, but frightening since it may arrive only as a personal defeat.
THE CONCEPT OF ‘IDENTITY’ AND ‘VALUE’
ALREADY MANY SOCIOLOGISTS from the seventies and eighties had warned against the expan- sion of the logic of everyday-aesthetics even in commodity sectors. Only thirty years ago nobody would have thought about having difficulties to choose between an infinite number of clothing brands. The simple white t-shirt was always the same, what is changed? maybe the simple white t-shirt remained the same but the consumer changed. Today we are not buying things when we are in need of it, instead we buy things with a nice packaging and a label that indicates certain premises because we want it. This example to say that, especi- ally in the eighties, the rational logic of the market has had to start to face a new logic of diffusion, that on appearing of the beauty. The consumption turns into a new compass that orients the consumers themselves, not so much and not only in their purchase choices, but the consumption help them in the way which can construct their identities also.
The brand that is essentially considered to be immaterial exists, instead, through all those models of expression that ensure visibility, forms, colours and communicative manifestati- ons. This symbolic strength, and ability to evoke imaginaries and build possible worlds, make the brand a real subject, narrative, an element capable of activating multiple disco- urses around it. A brand therefore has a specific identity, but precisely because of the mul- tiplication of the forms of brand manifestations, it is difficult to put in order among the diffe- rent discourses produced around their expectations. Phenomenon of fashion increasingly present in our daily lives, in every consumer sector, today has more and more space for everyday objects; in addition to clothing, also tourism, alternative medicine, also in the field of nutrition. Therefore in constructing one’s own social identity each one of us is influenced consciously or not by the system of fashion.
THE FLUID IDENTITY OF MODERN SOCIETY
THE CLASSICAL THEORIES ON ABOUT CONSUMPTION, Marx, Simmer, Veblen where it was more a question from the perspective of capitalism, money and classes, if we move to analyse consumption in the postmodern era, a commodification create a high symbolic va- lue; one exchanges between money and the purchase of a social identity to be shown in the public.
According to Fabris, consumption fades its tangible meanings to become language and communication, the new consumer is eclectic, who no longer bases his choices on a quan- titative values, rather a consumer chooses the objects of consumption to communicate and to signify something to himself and to the world. The society flows, where the subjecti- vity of experience takes form and substance. First of all we create identities based on the possible and different worlds offered by the consumerism, in particular by the world of brands and advertisements. In this situation the brand becomes in fact, a vector of me- aning and a bearer of values, which are accurately drawn from the collective imagination. In this sense the fashion industry is one of the most interesting for the analysis of a brand identity. The charm of clothing, with its capacity to transform the body, consists in the vic- tory of the cultural sense of nature. Moreover, even according to the Flugel’s interpretation, the habit of fashion, especially for the youth culture, presents itself as an instrument for creating an identity of the person and is closely linked with the system of values. The con- sumption of fashion-dress, becomes the nourishment of an imaginary symbolic and emoti- onal charge, represents a socio-cultural reality as well as an economic one of great impor- tance.
Identities and brands may seem to be very different themes among them, but the con- sumption of fashion is nothing more today than an element that tries to unite men to their external world, to their daily life. This is what the brands-or more generally make consump- tion: give meaning to the personal and social world of each individual. Identity in the in- dustrial age is formed through a single central pivot that was that of the size of the work, through it of defining the differences and similarities between individuals. in today’s soci- ety-the post-modern and post-materialistic one-we look for different dimensions from those of the work that are referents for the construction of one’s own social identity. This seems to be the new substance that constitutes current societies; there are systems of multiple belonging that are no longer mediated by the concept of class, and each of these belon- gings has its own symbolic value and its specific roles.
VISIBLE SELF
IDENTIFICATION AND RECOGNITION, how the identity can be seen; it can be seen as the answer to who I am, what I am? the answers of those questions allows us to define ourselves both in our unrepeatable individuality and in that it is a group, to a social unity, to a world. In any case, as I mentioned before, we are faced with two different meanings of identity, the qu- estion ‘who I am?’ it refers to what we might call the personal identity of the individual, in- dividual-to his subjective particularity, to what makes him recognisable precisely because he is different from all the others. While the question ‘what I am’ is meant to consider being endowed with reasons. Both these different aspects of identity are connected to each ot- her, since the process of identity formation is inter-related, through seductive identifications with cultural and social images, and through prose away from the latter or, at the limit of their denial.
On the other hand, social identity can gradually be defined also through choices and ela- borations deriving from personal identity. Both identities are therefore equally important for the individual; without a personal identity, without a certain difference from the others, the individual falls into a sort of anonymity, tends to no longer have an internalised image of
self, and consequently to be taken for granted by others, as he has no cause of its full ad- herence to socially encoded patterns of behaviour, and unpredictability.
Therefore the identity is considered from the standpoint of an absolute relationship with the outside in fact; no self-consciousness could in fact emerge, no individuality could cons- titute self, nor did it at first give rise to a relationship with others. For this reason, the prob- lem of self-awareness with that of recognition, since both the personal identity and the so- cial identity are created only through the interaction with the others. According to these in- formation we can have a confirmation of our actual being: to be seen by the others, is be- ing able to recognised as an essential right of our existence. This is why it is so important in the life for each of us that we feel loved and respected by the others.
The proof of how the importance of the recognition from the others for each individual th- roughout the course of his life and given by the fact that what we most have fear of being indifference among the others. The lack of re-recognition is, therefore, an inexhaustible disconfirmation of what matters most for an individual, precisely his actual being and the possibility of relating himself from the perspective of another who approves and encoura- ges him. This explains the serious forms of aggression that may contain non-recognition in cases of heavy marginalisation in the case of social rejection.
William James in his work ‘Psychology Powers’ points out that ‘we are not only sociable animals, who like to stay in touch with their fellowmen, but we also have an innate propen- sity to try to be seen’, and seen in a favourable way, by our people. Nor can there be a worse function, that which is physically possible, than to be abandoned by society and to go completely unnoticed by the members of society. What if, nobody turns around when we enter, answer our questions or pay attention to what we do?, if every person we meet pretends not to see us as if we did not exist, there would arise in us a sort of anger and desperation with respect to which more cruel physical tortures would be a relief, as these would make us feel. However negative our conditions may be, we would not accept that we did not deserve any attention (James, 1890)
The need to have a socially recognised identity can lead us to build a strong personal identity above all other individuals. It is useful to report that regarding the change has ta- ken place on the way to construct one’s own change that has occurred on the way to build one’s social identity. In relation to the social changes of the traditional references, in fact, the development of the individualist culture of bourgeois type develops, both the new wor- king and life conditions progressively transform the commentary modalities within which the individual and collective identities were previously formed.
CELEBRTY-FICATION AND ‘FAME’
THE NOTION OF CELEBRITY has also some clear relationship to modernity: but even more than this, celebrity is also associated with the emergence of contemporary media over the last two centuries. For instance, the concept links celebrity to the birth of media and industriali- sation when the formation of different industry of culture helped to dialogue a related sys- tem of fame and celebrity. Although Braudy’s extensive study of fame is able to make cla- ims that the system of renown were differently consisted in different eras (Braudy 1989). Our contemporary era appoints a unique system of fame that enclose with its cultural ne- eds and perhaps its political directions.
If celebrity is somehow linked to the formation of power, what kind of relationship to power does the idea of this public individuality? How has it been developed in the last two centu- ries? The discourse around celebrity is that it is insignificant. As opposed to Thomas Carly-
le’s mid nineteenth century delineation of what defined hero-where the sheer action of an individual changed history and transformed lives and nations (Carlyle 1993)-celebrity rep- resents something of an antithesis. Celebrity at the same time has become a way to iden- tify public visibility, but also underlines how that visibility itself is not an achievement or clear accomplishment. This contradictory discourse of both value and valuelessness ma- kes deciphering how celebrity connects to power a little more difficult. On closer view, ce- lebrity as a discursive formation is aligned to a great number of interests that identify its relationship to power. Firstly, the celebrity that intrinsically underlines the instability and va- lue of identity itself. Secondly, celebrities embody and express what can be called a medi- atized identity: they are personas that are both produced and promulgated through forms of exhibition that are depended on particular media. The value of celebrity, isolate visibility and recognition have expanded over these last two centuries. The growth need of being recognised in significance linked to our highly mediatized culture, where the extension of the self into the public world has been a source of at least a sense of greater impact.
ACTING AS IF
ONE OF THE FATHERS of modern psychology, the Austrian physician-turned-psychoanalyst Alfred W. Adler (1870–1937) was an influential figure in his nascent field; amongst many significant contributions, he developed theories around inferiority and superiority (often popularly misnamed ‘complexes’), exploring the ways in which individuals might compensate emotionally and psychologically for perceived physical deficits. Socialist in his political orientation, Adler rejected his peer Sigmund Freud’s emphasis on the central importance of his patients’ childhoods and libidos in favour of an holistic understanding of the interconnectedness between individuals and society, as well as the reciprocal ethical and moral obligations between them – what he termed ‘the social imbeddedness of the individual.’
One of his most persuasive and compelling investigations was around the power of fiction to influence fact, a dynamic articulated in his theory of ‘acting as if.’ Influenced by German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s book The Philosophy of As If (1911), Adler explored the power of exercising mental fictions, a precursor to the later emergence of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.2 A constructivist psychological approach, the Adlerian technique of ‘acting as if’ encourages the patient to act out desirable behaviour – for example, empathetic responses, or assertive decision-making – on a daily basis. By acting and thus feeling differently, and through receiving recalibrated responses from others to this externalised set of behaviours, the patient eventually actualises as a different person – the person imagined through the ‘final fictional goal.’ In Adler’s construct, acting as if is a necessary mindset to inhabit for social cohesion and the greater good of societies built through healthy, empathetic, goal-oriented individuals.
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