O aparelho da moda : magia, automação, subversão

Abstract

What are the mechanisms hidden behind contemporary industrial fashion? How does the transubstantiation of a common object into a fashion object work? What does a fashion image reveal, and what does it hide? This thesis aims to answer these and other questions surrounding the modus operandi of the industrial fashion through the investigation of its value creation mechanisms, its images, its technologies and the way it makes believe that it is the only legitimate fashion. The central hypothesis is that industrial fashion works like a Flusserian apparatus: complex, opaque, automated and, progressively, permeated by new technologies – above all by artificial intelligence. This thesis reveals a fashion that, invested with statistical and financial logic, increasingly takes away the space for human agency and freedom. Ultimately, the thesis encourages us to consider that, in the “fashion apparatus”, remain fissures and contingencies, openings that enable acts of subversion and transformation, as demonstrated by Rei Kawakubo, a creator who is capable of proposing new models of world experience based on fashion. More than a critique of the industrial fashion system, this research seeks to demonstrate that fashion is a space for dispute, whose outcome is still open.