Re-presentation Policies of the Fashion Industry. Eleni Mouratidou

Introduction to Part 1

      The re-presentation policies appropriating the field of art and culture are studied throughout this part 1 as artifices. This term has a dual dimension in that it designates both a technique of deception and an art of doing. As a technique of deception, artifice refers to its very first use, a “skillful and more or less deceptive means”¹.

      We will see throughout the analyses carried out how the fashion industry’s re-presentation policies propose particularly clever but also misleading product and strategy staging. As an art of doing, the notion of artifice allows us to link the field of art and culture with the re-presentation policies of luxury fashion. By art, I mean the ability to design and realize commercial staging as much as the ability to appropriate forms specific to art and, by extension, culture. Behind the link between re-presentation and artifice lies the process of artificiality in the fashion industry, an artificiality that affects products as much as the strategies that accompany them. These policies will be captured both as “unadvertizing” processes (Marti 2015) and as extensions of “advertising artifacts” (de Iulio 2016). It will therefore be a question of reporting on the way in which elements determining an interdisciplinary promotion policy, working as much on market goods as on their promotion and distribution methods, are staged as a cultural and artistic offer rather than as a management strategy.

The fashion industry’s re-presentational policies studied throughout this section will also be approached as a figuration, i.e. “a representation of the communication process that is not a matter of explanation, as is the case with promise, but is due to the interplay of mobilized forms, within media productions and textualities” (Jeanneret 2014, p. 74, author’s translation). The choice to treat the set of practices and strategies studied as re-presentations instead of figurations resides in the desire to emphasize the spectacular dimension that structures the figurations and that allows us to observe them as forms enriched by a dual representational aura without omitting the ideological and dialogical contributions that organize the same forms. This part will therefore present the interdisciplinarity and the splintering of the fashion industry’s re-presentational policies that occupy the fields of art and culture in a generalized manner.

      Note

      1 1 Le Robert, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française (2000, p. 221).