New Frontiers of the Fashion Imaginary

Understanding the forms acquired by the fashion imaginary in the twenty-first century therefore requires analysis of how diverse categories of social actors contribute to changing the collective representations of fashion. The idea of conducting such analysis first arose some years ago within the ModaCult research centre of the Università Cattolica of Milan. It then took concrete form as the conference entitled Fashion Tales 2015: Feeding the Imaginary, organized in June 2015 in collabora- tion with the International Journal of Fashion Studies. On that occasion, more than 120 scholars took up the challenge of analysing how fashion imaginary is produced from an interdisciplinary and international per- spective. This book is not a mere collection of proceedings; rather, it is part of a broader project intended to gather and publish the results of the Milan conference (see Mora, Rocamora and Volonté 2016b, Bovone and Mora 2017). It deals with a paramount issue for fashion studies: how is fashion imaginary produced and circulated in the twenty-first century?