CODES

Fashion as truth. Spinning around memories and their meanings

We see our world through a  filter-perfected, polished, conformed, photoshopped. We no longer decipher. Between unedited and altered, genuine and counterfeit, tangible and conceptual, fact and fiction, fake and deep fake. Technology creates alternate realities and identities, a world of digital clones. (Balenciaga, SS 2022 Fashion Show)

The fluidized reality through the web channels resets the relationship between time, space, and matter that had always determined and timed our activities. Through the code, we can be everywhere, in another time, with other identities, partakers of a new world. Basically, the way of communicating and therefore of making culture changes.

Re-thinking nature, generating new shapes and colors, unexpected dynamics, hybridizations.Nature is us and everything that surrounds us. The difference between nature and culture disappears or rather merges, becoming both matter and subject, dissociated from the obsolete static concept of ideologized and idealized beauty.

The digital cloning mentioned in the text that opens the presentation of Balenciaga’s SS2022 collection is already underway with the aim of penetrating the market now almost exclusively online with new dynamics towards an audience without references to the history of fashion, experience, loyalty, like the sought-after millennials of Generation Z.

This is the meaning of the marketing moves that exchange the codes of fashion houses, such as recently Aria between Gucci and Balenciaga, Fendace between Fendi and Versace.

What to us sons of the 80s seems a betrayal to the sacred symbols that have always solicited our sense of luxury and exclusivity, is nothing but an opportunity for fun and surprise for those who were born digital, used to revoking your choices for greater convenience. The freedom of a choice that can be lightly revoked does not identify it as taking a specific direction with conviction.

Therefore, the sense of giving new value to past codes in a strongly narcissistic society like the current one, which prevents one from leaving the narrow horizon of one’s own ego, belonging to the culture of relativism, thus escapes the sense of which everyone decides for himself what the ‘self-realization, without anyone having to or can interfere in the choice.

Over the years, we have been able to see in the various interpretations that stylists have given of historical brands, visions that have changed the history of costume and clothing, how precisely those codes can be refuted, overturned, lose their founding meaning. . The narrative that fashion gives us goes beyond a reason for continuity and actualization of those fees in favor of the survival of financial companies that make turnover their only vision.

Thus also the way of perceiving historical brands changes, no longer closely linked to their origin, but to storytelling that still speaks of contemporaneity, whatever the topic.

The possibility of distinction by product quality also disappears, fascinated by an image rather than by the feeling of wearing it. Or rather, it would be said that the algorithm forces us to pause where attention is required for the purchase, leaving us deluded that we have made an informed choice. On the other hand, even the gene is selfish, as Richard Dawkins cited, it wants to pass on its imprinting, not favor our good. Nature has no morals exactly like the market.

Invisible codes, the genetic and the algorithmic, merge and confuse infinite possibilities between real and virtual, making them one and the same. The continuous technological advancement focuses on a single reading plane with the refinement of his discoveries, which brings the brain synapses closer and closer to the electronic impulses generated by the machine. So what should bring us back to the human, to its origin? If in the post-computational era technology promises to be able to achieve everything, imitate everything even in its most elementary form of life, will it do so also with the unpredictability characteristic of the human species?

And what we call creativity, genius, inventiveness, freedom of expression will also have its own “normality” that brings it back to a predetermined purpose?

Alessandro Turci speaking