Art and fashion at Wired Next Fest in Florence
For the second year in a row, as an exclusive educational partner, Istituto Marangoni has brought an important contribution to the Wired Next Fest, the most important Italian festival that celebrates science, technology, business, the net, social innovation, and the desire for change and evolution.
In her speech “People on the edge” Francesca Giulia Tavanti, exceptional speaker, guided the public in a confrontation on the increasingly synergetic relationship between the world of fashion and the art through names and stories of characters and the story of an everlasting growing proliferation of collaborations and mutual incursions. Very important signals both for the present and for a look towards the future: the demonstration that the potential of this fruitful dialogue has not yet been fully probed.
People on the edge by Francesca Giulia Tavanti
The debate around the relationship between art and fashion returns to warm the minds by raising new questions and, above all, searching for new answers to a relationship that, in fact, has always existed.
Art and fashion have constantly talked to one another. There is no time in history, in which these two worlds have not mutually nourished one another through contaminations, overlaps, trespassing and real collaborations. However, this fruitful but equally complex relationship has continually generated great controversy. Belonging to the "high" sphere of human knowledge, art has always stressed the difference and kept the "younger sister" at a safe distance. For its part, fashion, confined to the "lower" step of culture, because of its functional and directly connected to real-life nature, has repeatedly tried its own legitimacy by drawing on the whole immense heritage of art.
Has this ransom finally taken place?
Perhaps not totally yet, but things have definitely changed compared to the past. The profound changes that have occurred in art over the last century have questioned its own identity, making it go down or, it would be more correct to say, throwing it down, from the ancestral pedestal where it has always been placed.
Also the relationship between art and the concept of time has changed radically. Contemporary art is not characterized by its longing to eternity, but to the here and now as, for example, performance.
Is this synonymous with changing times and a society much more tied to its present than to the thought of tomorrow?
Perhaps yes, and perhaps because of this, art and fashion, in their being witnesses of a society that has changed and continues to change in a dizzying way even in response to new technologies, are getting closer every day. Instagram is one of the main things responsible for the epochal revolution triggered in our lives over the last ten years and its impact on art and fashion has also been remarkable. In fact, this platform has changed the way we produce, communicate, sell and consume both works of art and products related to the world of fashion. None of the players of either system is exempt from a revision of its function within the paradigm of this social network, where the keywords are fame and ability to remain on the top of the world - an expression that brings us more to the here and now than to eternity.
Our society, transformed by the magical square, seems to be the perfect context for the beginning of a new chapter in the relationship between art and fashion. The proliferation of collaborations and reciprocal incursions are very important signals: the demonstration that the potential of this fruitful dialogue has not yet been completely exhausted.
Francesca Giulia Tavanti
Art Tutor at Istituto Marangoni Firenze
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