Fashion shows and urban transformations

The fashion show system and its impact on creating new urban and territorial trajectories

Abstract

The fashion system needs the city and uses it in all its facets and dimensional scales, from public to private. Existing places are chosen, or new ones are created: spaces capable of best conveying the thought behind fashion, how it is produced and sold but also, above all, experienced, desired, exhibited and, ultimately, purchased. Cities are no longer understood as a "mosaic of episodes, each with its particular lifespan" but as a system of interactions between different functions and scales of design. The city and the architectural project (whether short-term or long-term) become a 'tool' of self-assertion for one brand rather than another. Fashion becomes an urban and territorial development engine capable of constructing different trajectories and design experiences. It creates unprecedented synergies between the ephemeral (inherent in the constant changes of fashion) and architecture's long-time (both design and permanence). Fashion is increasingly understood as a "social fact" that can redesign and define the development of some urban regions of entire geographical areas, thanks to the expansion of productive, commercial, cultural, educational, and creative settlements, and not least linked to the communication system of fashion shows. In this sense, creating spaces serving the staging of fashion also contributes to the development of areas, territories and cities, peripheral and otherwise. Through the presentation of some case studies, the article intends to investigate how the temporary system of fashion shows has contributed to urban and territorial development and is capable of defining new paths and new creative, economic, communicative, architectural and even social connections.