Future Bodies. Il futuro immaginato dai fashion designer

Abstract

The article aims to inspect the deconstruction of the body by analyzing contemporary collections of fashion designers who design de-functionalised clothes, meaning that their shapes do not refer to the typical syntax of the body: arms, legs, chest, etc. To answer the question of why the body imagined by some designers has become deformed and beyond-human, it is assumed that they think about the future and imagine it in their design. Therefore this article shortly explores the futures conceived by fashion designers up to the present time. Todaywe can recognise two different imagination currents: the alien thread (Iris Van Arpen, ThierryMugler) and the beyond-human one (Graig Green, Rei Kawakubo, Victor &Rolf and the radical fashion designers presented by NOT A TOY, Fashioning Radical Characters edited by Vassilis Zidianakis). These collections move between the imagined time and the present time with a convulsive self-centred motion, projected towards a future that interprets and reads the present. The article postulates that the technological devolution which has begun in modern times, the post-modern era, has led to a body which is no longer perceived as familiar.