Research

Abstract
This paper addresses the urgent need to deconstruct established approaches within the fashion system that continue to draw superficially and stereotypically from cultures perceived as “other.” Emerging from the research initiative Fashioning Cu-Se (Fashioning Cultural Sensitivity), the study explores how digital technologies, cultural archives, and educational practices can foster more ethical and inclusive relationships between fashion and cultural heritage. Based on data-driven analyses of international fashion collections and subsequent student-led research at the University of Bologna, the project highlights both the potential and the limitations of digital fashion archives as tools for equitable access and intercultural dialogue. The Threads of Identity section, part of the Fashioning Cu-Se platform, demonstrates how native perspectives and digital tools — including AI-generated imagery — can support culturally sensitive storytelling and critical reflection on creative reuse. Ultimately, the paper calls for a redefinition of fashion’s visual language through inclusive, interdisciplinary, and ethically conscious methodologies.

This paper investigates how contemporary fashion contributes to the construction of alterity through practices of seriality, repetition, and display, while situating its visual mechanisms in relation to those of art and the museum. The central argument is that the “elsewhere” does not correspond to a stable geographic reality, but rather to a culturally produced image that is continuously reiterated through recurring aesthetic repertoires—ranging from the “exotic” and “tribal” to the “Mediterranean” and the “traditional.” In this framework, seriality is not understood as mere formal repetition, but as a mediological device that enables the circulation and sedimentation of contemporary imaginaries.

Drawing on media theory and studies of serial imaginaries, the analysis connects fashion, photography, advertising, museum practices, and digital visual culture, highlighting how these systems collectively contribute to the construction and naturalization of alterity. The museum, in particular, emerges as an ambivalent space: while it preserves and classifies, it also reinforces cultural taxonomies that distinguish between “costume” and “fashion,” thereby temporalizing and folklorizing certain cultures.

Alongside these dynamics, contemporary artistic practices employ seriality and performance to render visible the mechanisms underlying the production of imaginaries, critically interrogating the construction of the “Other” and its cultural and political implications. The paper concludes by proposing the figure of the spiral as an interpretative model: a movement of differential repetition through which imaginaries of alterity are continuously transformed while maintaining recognisable structures.

Abstract

Fashion communication is characterized by media ecosystems in which images, text, sound, and formats are integrated into complex narratives, making “fashionmedia” a phenomenon in which fashion itself and its representation tend to overlap, thereby redefining aesthetics and the circulation of images [2; 6; 4]. In this context, fashion is configured as a cultural industry capable of producing shared meanings [3], and images become cultural devices that stimulate interpretation and public negotiation. In this study, controversies generated by fashion campaigns distributed through digital platforms constitute a privileged observatory for analyzing how audiences actively participate in the redefinition of symbolic meanings, developing greater awareness of their role in communicative processes [1; 5].

The paper presents the results of a qualitative study based on focus groups, in which digital fashion campaigns that generated online backlash were used as visual stimuli to explore audience interpretative processes. The corpus includes campaigns circulated across different media that triggered public debate and communication crises [5]. The focus groups were complemented by visual content analysis and template analysis, aimed at identifying recurring configurations in the construction of images that generate friction and controversy. The analysis focuses on three main dimensions: the criteria through which participants identify campaigns as problematic; the emerging types of critique, highlighting how participants perceive a widespread tendency to “normalize” problematic practices and representations in fashion (including the use of cultural stereotypes, paternalistic tones, and symbolic simplification); and the ways in which audiences rework and imagine alternative forms of communication, in an exercise aimed at exploring new cultural representations.

The study highlights the role of audiences as reflexive actors in the transformation of digital communicative practices. The findings show how the “active audience” paradigm is evolving toward publics capable of recognizing the cultural implications of images and formulating ethical expectations toward global communication. Communication crises thus emerge as moments in which shared symbolic norms are renegotiated.