October 2017

LM 65SCIENCES OF FASHION / DIGITAL FASHION MEDIA

INTRODUCTION

Texts: Rossi G., Fashion and Identity: the concealment or disclosure process?

Presented at the XI. ECSBS in Rome – September 1-4, 2016.

Text: Rossi G., “Broadcasting fashion on the Web: Magazines, blogs and so-

cial networks” article written for the European Journal of Research on Social

Studies, August 2014.

• What has changed from 2014 to today?

• How have relationships and professions in the network evolved?

• How have the rules of the online communications changed?

• What communication scenarios are now open for the future?

• How can we prepare for them? How can we study them?

• How can we study and interpret networks today?

These are only some of the questions you have to ask yourselves and one

another during this course to create a state of mind/thinking that is useful to

work in the fashion system today, especially in the communication part. On

the other hand, we must emphasize that many of the dynamics that highlight

fashion apply to many other sectors and can be applied elsewhere. Online fashion communication is a niche of fashion communication, which is a niche itself of communication in general. The best way to study the dy-

namics of communication nowadays is to immerse ourselves in it, armed with

the proper toolbox. To reach this final goal it’s important not to focus only on

fashion itself, but to learn to be trasversal in our approach, nurtoring this way

our place into the fashion world.

For this reason, during this course we will work alongside theory and prac-tice, exercises and field analysis to more analytical parts. It’s essential for the

success of the course, and for you, to get the full benefit, to put you actively

towards this teaching and not in a passive way, as if the teacher were just

here to tell truths and you record them and repeat them for the final exam.

In this course I would like to have a very interactive method, inspired by the

design thinking approach. Design thinking is a formal method for practical,

creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an

improved future result. In this regard it is a form of solution-based, or solution-

focused thinking – starting with a goal (a better future situation) instead of

solving a specific problem. By considering both present and future conditions

and parameters of the problem, alternative solutions may be explored simulta-

neously.

This approach differs from the analytical scientific method, which begins by

thoroughly defining all parameters of a problem to create a solution. Design

thinking identifies and investigates with known and ambiguous aspects of the

current situation to discover hidden parameters and open alternative paths

that may lead to the goal. Because design thinking is iterative, intermediate

"solutions" are also potential starting points of alternative paths, including re-defining of the initial problem.

In 2015, I published a book called “Fashion blogger, new dandy?” by compari -

son with journalists and fashion bloggers. Why? Because in the early years of

fashion blogging or blogging in general- as researchers of communication, but

also as professionals - what we wondered were the differences between jour-

nalists and bloggers. In my essay I focused on some points: 1) blogging can

be a profession; 2) a profession that only sometimes it’s similar to journalism;

3) always more often a blogger is a testimonial not a witness of contemporary

times; 4) the phenomenon of fashion blogger, in this sense, considering them

as influencers, is not new, think about the dandies in the XIX century, and in

particular the most famous one, Oscar Wilde. So, coming back to “redefining

the initial problem” I mean exactly this: you have to start from a problem, ana-

lyse it, but don’t become fixated on it, you have to be always open minded

and accept new solutions, especially in a so liquid society like the one in

which we live.

We begin straight away in this first lesson by applying this method. The

course is about networks and we must create our own so that in the future

they can be useful to our career. Don’t be lazy, try always to go in depth with

your colleagues, professors, guests of the course, always ask many ques-

tions, read as much as you can. This is also helpful for the part of the course

devoted to storytelling, also for the creative part of the work, you need infor-

mation, and you need to feed your imagination. We can speak about digital

networks or physical ones, about people or about locations. Every day we

must add something, we must enrich our list of contacts. And we must do this

in the proper way, starting from the must haves, the mostly known ones.

For this reason I would like to begin each lesson with 15 minutes of press reviews in which students show/read to the class an article and comment it,

underlining names and networks that are useful to connect with, for examples

exploring related social networks sites. Doing this activity is going to be part of

the final mark for the course of DIGITAL FASHION MEDIA so it’s necessary

for us to develop a calendar in which every student will be active part of the

class. Before the end of the course every student must have presented and commented one or more articles from the international press.

A few words about inspiration. You can find it everywhere, in this sense it

would be useful to enlarge this morning press review as a moment of sharing

contents/contacts that would be useful for the growing of the entire group. Ex-

hibitions, TV-series, movies, upcoming designers, everything that you find in-

teresting.

Definition of fashion: a point of view from sociology and semiotics

During this course, Digital Fashion Media, we will address the fashion topic

from a sociological and semiotic point of view. We will assume that fashion is

not just “frivolous appearance”, but means something more in the deepest

sense of the term. We will try to go beyond the appearance, following the

classics and contemporary in the field and contemporary literature, including

noteworthy newspaper articles, texts and references. This is a matter that is

not yet universally canonized on all levels, including academically, and for

deep comprehension, it needs great openness and mental elasticity.

Through semiotic analysis, a "reflection on the signs, their classification, the

laws governing them, their uses in communication" (Eco, Cosenza, 1998, p.

979) is systematized "in the framework of social life" ( Saussure, 1922, p. 26)

to investigate the mechanisms through which society represents itself, or

rather, all forms of communication.

The media does not affect the substance of communication, but at the time of

reception, due to its meaning, the moment when a sense of speech is given it

relates to the context in which it is consumed (and not to the one in which it is

issued). Otherwise you could say that the meaning in this sense is all moved

to the receiver and not to the issuer). This context is not real, but imagined,

constructed by the same discourse involving two actors: the recipient model

(the consumer/reader to whom it is addressed) and the model enunciator/is-

suer (the author of the message, the speaker, brand). When designing any

type of message, you have to model it according to the recipient's expecta-

tions, considering their attitudes at the time and their ability to interpret it dif-

ferently or to reject it. The tension between imagery and imagination that per-

meates fashion speeches is enslaved to the creation of a climate, a Zeitgeist.

In the past we were convinced that transposing one’s identity on the Internet

(chat, forum, social network) was a way to escape reality and become more

alienated, but with the advent of social media this no longer happens, often

thanks to verified profiles and access barriers including the obligation to com-

municate through cell phones, i.e. countermeasures that do not affect the right

to privacy. Often, the smartphone touch screen is viewed as this evil scrolling

device of compulsive abstraction that has fomented crusades about disease

or a source of worsening interpersonal dynamics. Selling our personal data is the price we pay to stay on the virtual stage and be there, wanting to be

protagonists, using social networks, blogging, or present on networking plat-

forms of various kinds - nevertheless apparently it seems - free of charge, the

cost we all pay is to give our other data, to large web companies, our data.

What do these companies do about our data? We will return to the theme, but

fundamentally the data, collected in large, huge quantities, is used to make

users profiling and develop more sophisticated, the so-called semantic web.

If you subscribe to this channel, posting a like and interacting with these

users, then you will be targeting consumers of a certain type, to whom one

can target ads and anticipate the wishes and needs of the user. Do you ever

get the impression when you navigate the web that someone is watching you,

or rather spying on you? Take for example, you are for a hotel for a beach

holiday weekend in Côte d'Azur, for the next few days, you will you notice that

you will only see hotels, shops or services in the area or other types of adver-

tising related to the trip? This is a typical semantic web practice, it is good to

know when we are about to analyse the media sphere, blogosphere and ev-

erything that circulates on the web, in this case related to the world of fashion.

Every social network, e-commerce platform, single brand or e-retail must be handled

by the user by developing a peculiar tactic, starting from the assumption that it is no

longer to hit a target, but to open a breach in the emotional and rational mind of con-

sumer-user, resulting in an active interest in motion. The important information of to-

day's society of communication is not the same as it was in the past, indeed the

lack of information or different sources on the same subject, whereas now there is

too much information, often of poor quality, destined to only produce "noise" and ulti-

mately divert users from a real deepening of the issues at hand.

There is so much to information out there, sometimes of not good quality and pre-

sented in a fragmented way. We often don’t question the meaning of what we are

reading, almost hypnotized by the screen that is facing us. The same is true for texts

and images that invade us but are ultimately lost because they are all the same, cre-

ated without direction, technical skills, just to immortalize the moment, to be able to

tell the world I was there. Unfortunately, the continuous updating and overload of

content has led to a substantial and grammatical reversal of the quality of texts.

Speed does not rhyme with superficiality, but with briefness and love of synthesis,

without failing to respect the good faith of the reader and his/her intelligence.

We will therefore be in this position when we analyze DIGITAL FASHION ME-

DIA, without having to compromise on proper grammar, alternative vocabulary

or the elegance of the form "just because we are in fashion". Unfortunately,

this attitude, or to consider fashion as B series, is a serious defect that is often

found in those who work in this field, or even in general, daily and periodical

publications, where it is often assigned to the last pages and focuses on gos-

sip or the latest on the runways.

On the contrary, writing in the world of fashion presupposes a general high-

level culture, given the transversality of the subject, the ability to place a par-

ticular product in a market (and hence marketing knowledge, especially finan-

cial) or even place it in a society that is changing and that can interpret

change just through fashion.

Six memos for the next Millenium, by Italo Calvino

In this regard, I believe that, as it is often the case, the best lesson comes

from literature, in particular by Italo Calvino’s american lectures “Six memos for the next Millenium”, which the author should have held at Har-vard during the 1985-86 academic year for the prestigious "Poetry lectures".

Unfortunately, Calvino died before leaving in September 1985 and the lessons

were posthumous in 1988. Nevertheless, they remained a classic in world lit-

erature for all students, regardless of their field of study. In fact, the contents of those lessons are some of the disarming modernity, as if they were

written yesterday. Each lesson is inspired by the value of literature that

Calvino considered important and considered the basis of literature for the

new millennium. The order of lessons is not random; it follows, in fact, a de-creasing hierarchy; it begins with the most important feature (lightness) and proceeds with the treatment of the less essential.

1) Lightness

“After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making

diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition

of my work. O would suggest this: my working method has more often than

not involved the subtraction of wight, sometimes from people, sometimes

from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried t remove

weight from the structure of stories and from language”.

“Above all I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all knowthat there is a lightness of frivolity.

Infact thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy”.

“At this point we should remember that the idea of the world as composed of

weightless atoms is striking because we know the weight of things so well. So

too, we would be enable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could

not appreciate language that has some weight to it. We might say that

throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature:

one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above

things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of

magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and

concreteness of things, bodies and sensations”.

2)Quickness

“I do not wish to say that quickness is a value in itself. Narrative time can also

be delaying, cyclic, or motionless. In any case, a story is an operation carried out on the length ot time involved, an enchantment that acts on

the passing of time, either concracting or dilating it. Sicilian storytellers use

the formula ‘lu cuntu non mette tempu’ (time takes no time in a story’ when

they want to leave out links or indicate gaps of months or even years. The

technique of oral narration in the popular tradition follows functional criteria. It

leaves out unnecessary details but stresses repetition: for example, when the

tale consists of a series of the same obstacles to be overcome by different

people. A child’s pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things

he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems

and songs the rithmes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there

are events that rhyme”.

“Since in each of my lectures I have set myself the task of recommending to

the next millennium a particular value close to my heart, the value I want to

recommend today is precisely this: In an age when other fantastically speedy,

widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all

communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of

literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, nit blunting but even sharpening the differences

between them, following the true bent of written language”.

“The motor age has forced speed on us as a measurable quantity, the

records of which are milestones in the history of the progress of both men and

machines. But mental speed cannot be measured and does not allow

comparisons or competitions; or can it display its results in a historical

perspective. Mental speed is valuable for its own sake, for the pleasure it

gives to anyone who is sensitive to such a thing, and not for the practical use

that can be made of it. A swift piece of reasoning is not necessarily better

than a long-pondered one. Far from it. But it communicates something special

that is derived simply from its very swiftness”.

“Just as for the poet writing verse, so it is for the prose writer: success

consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from

a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search for the mot juste, for the sentence in which every word is unalterable, the most effective marriage of sounds and concepts. I am convinced that writing

prose should not be any different from writing poetry. In both cases it is a

question of looking for the unique expression, one that is concise, concentrated, and memorable”.

“Among Chuang-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king

asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a

country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not

begun. “I need another five years” said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them.

At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu toook up his brush and, in an

instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen”.

3) Exactitude

“First I shall try to defne my subject. To my mind exactitude means three

things above all: 1) a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in

question; 2) an evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images; in

italian we have an adjective that doesn’s exist in English, “icastico” from the

Greek “eikastikos, 3)a language as precise as possibile both in choice of

words and in expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination. Why do

I feel the need to defend values that many people might take to be perfectly

obvious? I think that my first impulse arises from a hyopersensitivity or

allergy. It seems to me that language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distress me unbearably”.

“It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its

most distinctive faculty - that is the use of words. (…) Literature, and perhaps

literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this palgue in language. I

would like to add that is not just language that seems to have been struck by

this pestilence. We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful

media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the

phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner

inevitability that ought to marek every image as form and as meaning, as a

claim on the attention and as a source of possibile meranings. (…). But maybe this lack of substance is not to be found in images or in a language alone, but in the world itself. The plague strikes also at the lives

of people and the history of nations. It makes all histories formless, random,

confused, with neither beginning nor end. My discomfort arises from the loss

of form that I notice in life, wich I try to oppose with the only weapon I can

think of - an idea of literature”.

“Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write and I realize

that what interests me is something entirely or, rather, not anything precise

but everything that does not fit in whith what I ought to write - the relationship betweeen a given argument and all its possible variants and

alternatives, everything that can happen in time and space. This is a

devouring and destructive obsession, which is enought to render writing

impossible. In order to combat it, I try to limit the field of what I want to say, divide it into still more limited fields, then subdivide these again, and so on and on. The another kind of vertigo seizes me, that of the detail of

the detail of the detail, and I am drawn into the infinitesimal, the infinitely

small, just as I was previously lost in the infinetely vast”.

4) Visibility

“We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the one that

startts with the words and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts

with visual image and arrives at its verbal expression. The first process is the

one that normally occurs when we read. For example, we read a scene in a

novel or the report of some event in a newspaper and, according to the

greater or lesser effectiveness of the text, we are brought t witness the scene

as if it were taking place before our eyes, or at least t witness certain

fragments or details of the scene that are singled out”.

“What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is usually called

“the civilization of the image”? Will the power of evoking images of things that

are not there continue to develop in a human race increasingly inundated by a

flood of prefabricated images? At one time the visual memory of an individual

was limited to the heritage of his individual experiences and to a restrcted

repertory of images reflected in culture. The possibility of giving form to

personal myths arose from the way in which the fragments of this memory

came together in unexpected and evocative combinations. We are

bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer

distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on

television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a

rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so

many will succeed in standing out”.

“If I have included visibility in my list of values to be saved, it i sto give

warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of

bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and

colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of thinking in

terms of images”.

“Will the literature of the fantastic be possibile in the twenty-first century, with

the growing inflation of prefabricated images? Two paths seem to be open

from now on. 1) We could recycle used images in a new context that changes

their meaning. Post-modernism may be seen as the tendency to make ironic

use of marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms

that accentuate its alienation. 2) We could wipe the slate clean and start from

scratch. Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by

reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the

end of the world”.

5) Multiplicity

“What tends to emerge from the freat novels of the twintieth century is the

idea of an open encyclopedia, an adjective that certainly contradicts the noun

encyclopedia, which etymologically implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge

of the world by enclosuring it in a circle. But today we can no longer think in

terms of a totality that is not potential, conjectural, and manifold”.

“Medieval literature tended to produce works expressing the sum of human

knowledge in an order and form of stable compactness, as in the Commedia,

wher a multiform richness of languages converges with the application of a

systematic and unitary mode of thougth, and styles of expression. Even if the

overall design has been minutely planned, what matters is not the enclosure

of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it

- a plurality of languages as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial”.

“I have come to the end of this apologia fro the novel as a vast net. Someone

might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of

possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the

writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would

answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of

experiences, informations, books we have read, things imaginated? Each life

is am ecyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, anmd

everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way

conceivable”.

“But perhaps the answer that stands closet to my heart is something else:

think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work

that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only

to enterinto selves like our own but to give speech to that wich ha no

language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring

and tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic…”.

6) Consistency

Calvino died before writing this sixth lecture, about consistency. From the

italian edition, many scripts are collected to form this last memos, in particular

focused on the moment in which an author begins his work, the moment in

which he/she had to decide what to put in and not, to open the door to a new

“written world” or to close it to a neverending possibilities of develops and

ends and characters.

These are the values that you have to keep in mind also in approaching this

course, the parameters used to judge your work and guiding the teacher in

the design.

FASHION AS LANGUAGE. WORDS ARE IMPORTANT.

Roland Barthes, one of the founding fathers of fashion semiotics

The application of semiotics to fashion is seen in the volume of Roland

Barthes. The Fashion System (1967) is one of the foundations on this subject,

although in some respects the content may now appear dated. In fact,

Barthes chose to analyse fashion as a complex model, not from real fashion

(worn clothing) but from fashion writing (fashion magazine analysis).

Barthes has analyzed fashion as a system of symbols existing independently

from language, and then concludes that the linguistic model is dominant on

other semiotic systems given the need for verbal language to express its

meanings.

FASHION> LANGUAGE> SIGNS> SENSATION

SUBJECT: GIVING SENSE TO FASHION AS LANGUAGE

Barthes fashion system is the opposite of the contemporary one, the advent of

the web has completely disrupted the dynamics expressed by the author. To

privilege the semantics of written fashion, or to consider it the only way to go,

could not have been enough to describe the system at the time of Barthes,

even though it should be borne in mind that this choice was born from

Barthes’ methodological and disciplinary orientation and the little development

of visual semiotics. To understand "how to talk about fashion", you need to

better understand what we mean by fashion. This, together with the knowl-

edge of operating codes and digital languages it is crucial to understand the

dynamics and thus to the efficient use of DIGITAL FASHION MEDIA (DFM).

Fashion is the expression of the new. It is in the present, interprets it, while

looking to the past and pointing to the future. To better understand this

mechanism we can cite as the image the famous "tiger swing" (tigersprung), described by Walter Benjamin, in which the fashion is compared to a tiger in

the act of leaping on the prey but instead of leaping forward, leaps backwards,

looking to the past. This dynamic implies a non-progressive, but not cyclical,

advancement. That is why it is crucial to adopt a broad-minded perspective,

not just of the here and now when speaking and fashion writing. Fashion is

not just about the single garment, but the whole world it represents, or rather,

signifies. The extravagance of fashion is motivated by the fact that it absorbs

historical, social and cultural changes, assuming the task of interpreting the

present time.

The fashion press, in agreement with Barthes, is surrounded by an aura of sa-

credness: it certifies what’s “in” and what “is not in”, allowing the public to buy

some products and not others, anticipating what’s next, educating the taste of

those who follow it, making one get used to the "new". The relationship be-

tween verbal and visual texts has changed very much in recent decades, es-

pecially the latter. It is, however, useful to dwell on the text first to understand

how to obtain certain definitions. Fashion has a whole language. We think of

terms like classic, vintage, fantasy. For a neophyte, they are obscure or im-

precise, but for the expert, they are not, Even though their very meanings be-

come mute, sometimes imperceptibly, with the passing of time.

Let's look at some examples. What today is considered a "classic", such as

the black fitted dress, a novelty for the masses of the 1960s, which was made

popular by the iconic Audrey Hepburn of the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

and the creations of Huber de Givenchy, despite his birth in 1926 with Coco

Chanel. The iconic black dress was compared by Vogue America as the

“Model T Ford” the first large-scale car available only in black, to emphasize

the adaptability of the dress for every shape and occasion, while in Great

Britain the dress was coined as “little black dress” or LBD for short.

Another example are leggings also known as fuseaux and pantacollant. This

item dates back to Emilio Pucci and the fuseaux, tapered trousers with a

ghetto to stretch the fabric, before silk, then elastic fabric, created in the six-

ties, then disappeared for a decade and reopened in the eighties with panta-

collant. Since the early 2000s, they have become known as leggings, a term

that means "ghetto". They do not only change the modes, but also their

names.

The words of fashion refer to systems of values and meanings related to dif-

ferent cultures, so they are said to be inserted into their own semi sphere.

The precision in the use of terminology and the awareness of the "story" of

the term, linked to a certain object, has been useful to enrich writing and to

provide critical reading, not dominating them.

HOW TO WRITE CONTENT FOR THE WEB

Before diving into the actual DFM analysis, it is necessary to introduce a key

concept of semiotic, that is, of the encyclopaedia of the reader, on the basis

of which who reads will seek its sources of information and the other one who

produces information constructs the platforms and their contents. The ency-

clopaedia of the reader refers to all that system of knowledge, values, and

languages, given by assumptions already acquired when communicating with

someone. If I meet a person at the bus stop and ask when the 63 bus passed,

for example, assuming that that person knows the public transport system,

which refers to a given time zone and so on, from basic information to the

more complex ones.

The contemporary fashion system has undergone radical changes due to e-

commerce and social networks, which in turn have also influenced the style of

fashion printing.

The user-buyer model of social networking and e-commerce, the ideal one

that is addressed to the visual and verbal texts, in addition to the basic skills

for accessing the web, must be familiar with the reference encyclopaedia of

industry, which structures its interpretive path. Its actions have been planned

since the design of the interface through the hierarchical organization of spa-

ces, links, graphic objects and multimedia (cf. Cosenza 2004, p.134) and

while there is some freedom of navigation, the user will be however induced

to make a set of pre-determined actions and to perform certain tasks neces-

sary and sufficient to the correct use of the texts. The success of an e-com-

merce site or even a web-based information platform is a cost-effectiveness

factor that is not just about saving money in buying a particular commodity,

but also saving money time and free the user from opening or closing times

that do not fit his or her life model. A technology is much cheaper, the faster the communications allows it to be.

E-commerce and social networking texts provide a negotiation, made espe-

cially noticeable in interaction that takes place through dedicated tools such

as reactions, comments, and customer service conversations. Nothing is ever

univocal, each element of such processes must be independent, or rather rel-

evant to the system where the texts being analyzed fit into. Digital marketing,

on the other hand, concerns the purely commercially-oriented aspect of brand

awareness, media initiatives, and interaction with blogs or content-generated

content. In this case, quantitative SEO/SEM data and impressions also come

into play, further refined by semiotics, optimizing the relevance of URLs, key-

words, links and page texts, for better indexing of search engines that, while

playing purely on the field of expression, have to give users tangible content.

The popularity of a website is about the number of visits and clicks, so that the

click bait phenomenon, has gone into a business model by inflicting journalistic or pseudo-like practices to the post-truth regime, the term of the year of 2016 entered into the Oxford English Dictionary. Bait clicks

have become a real virus of the system, pushing to propose titles by taking

just one more click and thus making the advertising dealers more ingenious at

the expense of editorial policy and content. Clickbait is a pejorative term for web

content whose main goal is to get users to click on a link to go to a certain webpage.

Clickbait headlines typically aim to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing just enough

information to make readers curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without

clicking through to the linked content. From a historical perspective, the techniques

employed by clickbait authors can be considered derivative of yellow journalism (or

tabloib journalism in the UK), which presented little or no legitimate well-researched

news and instead used eye-catching headlines that included exaggerations of news

events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism. For sites that thrive on thousands of

click-throughs to content, many authors see the use of clickbait as a means to tap

into human psyche by crafting these eye-catching headlines.

The term yellow journalism was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sen-

sational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph

Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. The

battle peaked from 1895 to about 1898, and historical usage often refers specifically

to this period. Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in or-

der to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well.

About the click bait phenomenon read this article from The Guardian, How

technology disrupted the truth, 12 July, 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/media/

2016/jul/12/how-technology-disrupted-the-truth

About the post-truth age read this article with three references about new books on

this theme: https://www.ft.com/content/53b00158-409c-11e7-82b6-896b95f30f58

One of today's greatest trends in DFM is the growing use of videos . The

live experience, the runway and the purchasing, is made accessible through

motion pictures that help the reader feel closer to the brand, to desire it.

Chanel, for example, structures its web-based presence with real-world fash-

ion films, which are part of a wider SEM strategy that aims to appear in

YouTube ads or generate traffic to the site through Social references, where

the preview is published. This content is of growing importance not only in the

fashion system, but in all areas, as confirmed by the world leader in the Cisco

IT industry, which plans for the year of 2019, 80% of data traffic generated by video, gained by two-thirds from mobile devices.

DIGITAL MARKETING

CONTENTS - BRANDS - NEWS - MKT

All the words that once had specific locations with limited territories and which

are now more or less happy to live together. The choice of fashion content

(texts / photos / videos) on DFMs is often, if not always, linked to digital mkt

logic. Because? The first moment of truth, the moment when the buyer in front

of the bookshelves takes the purchase decision, first theorized in Procter &

Gamble in 2005, has been reset. The first time the brand interacts with the po-

tential customer, a process that starts from the stimulus of the purchase on ar-

rival at the store, whether real or dignified.

Today, the paradigm of consumer and brand relations has profoundly

changed and the momentum for a brand is immediate, it's zero as Google

claims the theorized zero moment of truth, understood as the moment when

the consumer, once received it stimulus, it connects to the Internet to look for

information and decide whether or not to buy a product. And, often, it con-

cludes buying directly online, even for high-value items and services, such as

luxury ones. The Algalamma Foundation's Digital Luxury Experience and

McKinsey 2012, one of the most in-depth studies on consumer luxury goods

habits and online brand presence, reveals that 15% of all purchases are al-

ready directly influenced by digital. Also Altagamma's study shows that 20%

of the luxury goods bought in the world's most famous boutiques are indirectly

tied to something that has been read, viewed or searched on the web.

Technology today is a commodity for the storytelling brand, what makes the

difference is how it is used. Ideas, creativity, ability to develop engagement,

direct engagement of readers and users, or to create that moment of truth

steadily.

USERS> READERS> COMMUNITY> CONSUMERS

BRAND CONTENT

Trademarks must therefore change from the point of view of the past, they no

longer have to be self-referential, but must become content creators, publish-

ers of themselves. They have to transform their communication from couture

to conversation, as Jessica Michault, the influencer of the influential Suzy

Menkes, from New York Times pages in November 16, 2009. Luxury brands

become a media company, a dream editor. The news is created and pack-

aged inside the company and spread through social channels coming directly

to users. What is left to the traditional media? The critical aspect, to watch

over the system, going to "flee" to brand communication. Moreover, the link

between fashion and fashion printing goes back to the origins of the first and

indeed there are those who argue that fashion itself would not have been born

and would not have developed as a phenomenon "unless it had been the sub-

ject of speeches that promoted it and conferred on it value. This important role

has been played by periodicals dedicated to fashion: their development is par-

allel to the dissemination process of the latter. " (F. Monneyron, 2008, p.14).

INFLUENCER - DEFINITION

Another DFM dictionary keyword is influencer. Influence comes from the Medieval

Latin word ‘influere’, meaning to flow. In its figurative use, the word describes the in-

sight of feelings and opinions in the soul, often with a negative meaning, as if this did

not occur in the full awareness of the infuriated person and referring to the medical

understanding from which the word comes from. The influencers are therefore

those who can trigger an influenza, a contagion, by virtue of a large number of fol-

lowers as certify similar or similar numbers on their social networks. The underlying

concept, inspired by this explanation, is that of the leader of opinion that had al-

ready theorized Lazarsfeld in the mid-1950s.

The influencers are more today than in the past and their effectiveness is measured

not only through the number of interactions and followers but also through the qual-

ity of their media and media activities, how they involve their audience, and how

much this involvement is capable of transforming into something else, whether it's

buying a product or voting for an election of any level.

These mechanisms are not random, but are studied and fall into monetization strate-

gies of user confidence. To influence, the source must be credible and authoritative,

or the perception of the public of its level of knowledge specific to a particular sub-

ject, its reliability, must be extremely positive. These protagonists of the gossip, of

the media itself, of the media chat, have in fact no specific competence, but are

mostly socialite, people who spend their time participating in worldly events.

Starting from this, then we take specific competencies, developed with the passage

of time, the passion of one for photography, the other for architecture, another for

vintage fashion, and the other for the priests because in that period is in a sweet de-

lay. Every stage of life of these subjects becomes subject of media and social inter-

est.

Technology has amplified this phenomenon but as mentioned already is not new,

magazines such as Vogue in the 1960s devoted pages and pages to document how

the world aristocracy was dressed. Think of a writer known as Truman Capote and

his circle of "swans" of beautiful aristocratic women or not, but still married to

wealthy industrialists, whose only pastime was to show off to be captured by photo-

graphs and then to attend certain places recognized as a jet-set destination. In this

today there is more freedom, everyone can choose their own stage, though still re-

main the most recognized places, moments and situations of others, useful to meet

a certain type of audience, media and physically.

Traditionally recognized practice is the takeover of a branded influencer's brand ac-

count for a certain period of time, usually 24 hours, as it has been with Alexa Chung

for Gucci or Chiara Ferragni for the fashion show Dior A / I 2017/2018.

What initially initiates an influencer from the mass is its spontaneity or supposed

such, recognizing in a profile, in a type, the feeling that that person is one as me in

the bottom but progressively as the influencer influences more and its quotes rise,

this progression reverses itself, is perceived as more servile to the brands and loses

spontaneity because it is more bound to corporate mkt logic. In this sense, always

staying on the ridge of the wave for an influencer is not easy. To conclude, the defini-

tion of influencer is by its nature quite vague and intended to be transversal to vari-

ous types of people, bloggers, journalists, actors, models, actresses, philosophers,

writers, but more and more this term goes to describe those who are capable of af -

fect fashion and trends, image and appearance, without presenting itself to the

world with further content to be revealed. What's there is on the plate and you see,

without hiding anything.

Connecting with the famous article of the New York Times journalist Suzy Menkes,

The circus of fashion, published in 2013: “Today, the people outside fashion shows

are more like peacocks than crows. They pose and preen, in their multipatterned

dresses, spidery legs balanced on club-sandwich platform shoes, or in thigh-high

boots under sculptured coats blooming with flat flowers”. (…)

“Ah, fame! Or, more accurately in the fashion world, the celebrity circus of people

who are famous for being famous. They are known mainly by their Facebook pages,

their blogs and the fact that the street photographer Scott Schuman has immortal-

ized them on his Sartorialist Web site”. (…)

“Many bloggers are — or were — perceptive and succinct in their comments.

But with the aim now to receive trophy gifts and paid-for trips to the next

round of shows, only the rarest of bloggers could be seen as a critic in its original meaning of a visual and cultural arbiter. Adhering to the time-hon-

ored journalistic rule that reporters don’t take gifts (read: bribes), I am stunned

at the open way bloggers announce which designer has given them what.

There is something ridiculous about the self-aggrandizement of some online

arbiters who go against the mantra that I was taught in my earliest days as a

fashion journalist: “It isn’t good because you like it; you like it because it’s good.” Slim chance of that idea catching on among the fashion bloggers.

Whether it is the sharp Susie Bubble or the bright Tavi Gevinson, judging

fashion has become all about me: Look at me wearing the dress! Look at

these shoes I have found! Look at me loving this outfit in 15 different images!”