"From Art and Fashion to Homo Civicus"

The issues created by social change in the multifaceted scenery of post-modern culture have strong repercussions on the world of art communication in general and on that applied to fashion in particular. Within a background dominated by an often strong and hostile detachment from politics and institutions (caused by the crisis and then the fall of various ideologies) and by the increasing triumph of the private and its values it is not far-fetched to hypothesise the birth of a society founded more on participation and solidarity, sharing and responsibility than on generic positions of consensus or conflict, which are becoming progressively inadequate to understand complex societies. Thanks to art, such values should become the go-between and the guarantee for a society with a more extensive and widespread participatory responsibility, outlining a completely new function for art, no longer non-utilitarian, but rather the promoter of strong community values. By analysing social change as the product of economic and cultural scenes that have actually substituted the real with the artificial, investment of social and cultural capital with immediate economic return, the future with the present, ideology with consumption (Gorz, 2003), the ensuing hypothesis suggests the need for the “ethicalisation” of economy (Georgescu-Roegen, 2005; Sacco, 2004; Salvadori, 2005 ) that can finally return to the citizen -demoted to client (passive “homo utens”) or consumer (hedonistically single)-, the full role of responsible user. At this point, art communication (Becker, 2004; Crane, 1992; Griswold, 1994; Heinich, 2001) will be able to perform its role as the hinge between social and cultural change and productive economic investment, capable of transforming the user into a responsible “homo civicus” (Cassano, 2005). The same as for art, the material construction of all that becomes fashion passes, first of all, through the production of the value of the manufactured objects (Bourdieu, 1978). Heralded by full processes of negotiation and social sharing of meaning, fashion objects, too, can no longer be simply creative, but must become also ethical and sustainable. The first benefit that can be drawn from creativity is leaving behind the Weberian disenchantment with its rationalisation excesses and recovering, well into post-modernity, a new dimension of Wanderung that can save us by recalling the value of tribalisation. Anti-ideological and anti-logic par excellence, fashion as a mass phenomenon enforces itself because of the showiness of its generalised consumption, compared to the exceptionality of showy consumption only a century ago (Veblen, 1899). In giving in to endless reproduction and technical multiplication, fashion, like art, loses the aura (Benjamin, 1955) that was supposed to signal its bond with class membership. However, unlike art, it does not have the dépense and non-utilitarian dimension that makes it an end to itself. Even haute couture, albeit almost self-referential, can no longer define strong identities within a culture that has made the pret-à-porter the globally valid way of expressing the “liquidity” (Bauman, 2005) of individual identity, even in the face of a persisting need for identification.