Design, Research, and Education. Contemporary Ways of Fashion

Fashion is certainly one of the most active disciplines in stimulating innovation processes that focus on the body project by questioning its identity, positioning, posture, and sense of cultural belonging. Hence the need to interrogate the languages and tools of a creative vocabulary in constant transformation that, today, seems to focus on the extremes of the evolution of the representation processes, starting from the phases of concept, construction, and clothes manufacturing. While creative directors work on archive materials to hybridize the codes of a brand by updating its cultural heritage, some fashion designers process images into a real digital platform that exploits the artificial intelligence algorithms of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) or text-to-image prompts, while others still nostalgically claim a return to analog practices. The paper explores some design experiences by intersecting the work of professionals with that of young designers trained in fashion university schools, to understand the multitude of methodologies in use, questioning the resonances and dissonances of a complex procedural process that culminates in the realization of an entire fashion collection.