The Fabric of Modern Times

Abstract

This essay is concerned with how certain materials-associated not with the decadent materiality of ruins, languorous bodies, and exotic landscapes but instead with the clean, agitated, intensified materiality befitting a new age of electricity and steel-became identified with modern forms of embodiment. It approaches this global tale from the standpoint of a local, differentiated story: that of the symbolic investments made by a generation of Italian designers, architects, artists, writers, industrialists, and engineers in artificial textiles. Like tempered glass, reinforced concrete, aluminum, stainless teel, and plastics, artificial textiles belong to a privileged family of modern materials. Privileged because theirs is a happy, often utopistic, even miraculous materiality, not unlike a secularized version of the Christian theology of glorified bodies according to which the chains that bind matter and human bodies to the corrosive effects of time are shed through the activation of a higher potentiality that was thought to lie dormant within the material world (but was nonetheless imagined as an integral component of it): that inner agitation and