Fashion Tales: Feeding the Imaginary

The book explores the notion of ‘fashion imaginary’, which customarily refers to ‘the stock of images, values, practices and rules that dominate the western fashion industry and that its participants take for granted in their relationship with fashion’ (Mora, Rocamora and Volonté 2016a: 177). The notion of imaginary is challenging to handle because it has been the subject of reflection, use, and definition by many scholars in the humanities and social sciences: Freud, Jung, Bachelard, Durand, Castoriadis, to name some of the best known of them, and whose works generated diverse hypotheses and theories about the nature of a phenomenon difficult to specify. It is not our intention here to discuss the merits of the many different theories on the imaginary produced within the various disciplines. The contents are organized into 20 chapters and 4 main parts. Part 1 explores the relation between fashion and the media with a focus on television, movies and social media. As shown by Romana Andò with respect to the representation of fashion provided by the most popular TV quality drama, audiences and fans appropriate fashion content and commodities—such as clothes and accessories—as identity tools within online interactions. The role of fashion in audiovisual products is increasingly strengthened, on the one hand, in the practices of audiences, which use fashion, the Web and televisual content both as identity-construction tools and as reservoirs of collective representations; and on the other, in the narrative structure itself of the media products (see D’Aloia, Baronian and Pedroni 2017). Luisa Valeriani reflects on this latter aspect, arguing that successful television series like Game of Thrones enact power relations through the choice of costumes.