[ecrea] Zonemoda conference - s, m, l, xl – sizing

*ZONEMODA CONFERENCE *

*S, M, L, XL – SIZING*

*May 2-3-4, 2017*

University of Bologna, Rimini Campus, Department for Life Quality Studies

International Research Group - Culture, Fashion, and Communication

ZoneModa Conference is a scientific event which aims to become an 
occasion for scholars to deal with fashion as an interdisciplinary 
research field, which encompasses dynamic and cross-cutting forces, 
hybrid forms of analysis and experimental research methodologies. With 
the goal of exploring groundbreaking research tracks in the world of 
Fashion Studies, each Conference will focus on a different topic 
starting in 2017 with /sizing/.

Throughout the 20^th Century fashion pursued systemization into precise 
forms and measures. Even /haute couture/, with its bespoke and unique 
pieces, was forced at a certain point to adopt standards which, as 
Gilles Lipovetski explained, represent an innovation in comparison with 
the sartorial anarchy of the previous decades. As a symbol of bourgeois 
industrial society, /haute couture/ is a prime example of the production 
and dissemination of fashion according to precise parameters. Parallel 
to this, the invention of sizes in America in 1949 gave rise to 
ready-to-wear garments. This production system was improved upon after 
World War II in Italy by Marzotto, Miroglio, Lubiam and by the Gruppo 
Finanziario Tessile, with its long tradition of standard /and/ beautiful 
outfits. Forged by ubiquitous mass media forces and the global market 
dynamics, contemporary fashion system needs to develop new paradigms 
capable of rendering the most of its multidisciplinary nature.

Between the late 19^th and early 20^th Century, the increasingly 
scientific organization of production processes gave rise to radical 
transformations that ultimately defined a new way of understanding time 
and space, science and art. The rise of mechanical reproduction 
technologies (such as photography and cinema) made it possible for the 
first time in history to reproduce the physical world and to measure it 
with more precision. On the one hand, these new opportunities provided 
political and social institutions an unrivaled tool for maintaining 
order while triggering on the other hand a radical transformation in 
performing habits and visual systems.

Within the same period, modern designers began to redefine forms and 
spaces, starting from the human body and its measures. Ernst Neufert and 
his encyclopaedic /Bauentwurfslehre/ (1936) represent an exemplary case 
within this process, aimed at the standardization of everyday objects, 
buildings and, in some cases, even cities. Only a couple of decades 
afterwards, at the First International Congress of Industrial Design, 
held at the Triennale in Milan in 1954, Giulio Carlo Argan identified 
precisely within this quest for standardization the origins of 
industrial design. The discipline, which gained ground in Italy after 
World War II, began to take its path to the present day in the newly 
formed consumer society, designing objects capable of meeting the 
increasingly exacting demands of consumers from both the aesthetic and 
the experiential point of view. The consecration of the Made in Italy 
label at the MoMA exhibition in 1972, permanently relegated any 
discussion of standardization to the backseat, placing emphasis on the 
recent radical experiments of Italian designers. Of particular interest 
were the environments which, designed under the banner of 
manoeuvrability and flexibility, staged inhabitable systems capable of 
adapting to any situation in space and time. Alongside and simultaneous 
to this, architects turned their attention to the city by expanding the 
discussion from the architectural scale to the urban one. Emblematic of 
this point of view is Aldo Rossi's /The Architecture of the City/, in 
which the author addressed issues related to the classification of urban 
artifacts; analyzed the structure of the city and discussed urban 
dynamics, underscoring the city's leading role within contemporary 
cultural debates.

More recently, the reduction of the city to a sum of parts interconnect 
with each other according to innovative communication strategies was one 
of the key themes of the mammoth work /S, M, L, XL/ by Rem Koolhaas. For 
the first time in its history, the discourse on architecture became 
interdisciplinary, thus anticipating in some ways the issues that were 
looming on the horizon of the 21^st Century.

The importance of seeing was never more obvious than in the 20^th 
Century. In the context of cinema, in fact, the construction of a 
cinematic space has changed collective psychology and social 
consciousness by means of representation on the big screen. The emphasis 
on the size of the big screen, a recurring topic in the theoretical 
production of the first half of the past century, was justified by the 
fact that much of the impression made collectively by the cinema 
depended on the size of the image - and the close-up of the human face 
may be considered its main symbol. Modern and contemporary culture have 
redefined the image sizes and formats, movie lengths, and even the 
symbolic models. Nevertheless, and with more and more new features, the 
cinema interacts effectively with fashions, creating styles and social 
practices and dealing with sizing and clothing, linking the charismatic 
apparatus to the era of transmedia.

Within mass media the idea of “size” can refer to different level of 
analysis, especially if we consider the methods of production and modes 
of consumption.

The size of media products depend on the adopted language and the medium 
used. With paper, for example, the size corresponds to the number of 
pages occupied by the product (space). With audio-video products or 
music, the size is measured according to duration (time). With websites 
it becomes quite difficult to define a size: in addition to the internal 
hypertexts in fact, there are multiple connections to external links, 
and thus to the expanded worldwide network.

Since the 1980s, with the rise of postmodernism, authors such as Lyotard 
and Vattimo have shown how the boundaries between different media 
products are increasingly blurred and merged into a single, endless 
stream. That stream not only characterizes the presentation of media 
products on television or radio channels, but it also concerns the 
fruition, which nowadays is being increasingly organized by the audience 
autonomously. Current production in fact no longer focuses solely on the 
single medium, but rather defines transmedia content through a 
multimedia-building strategy. Consequently, fruition is increasingly 
being managed by the audience that is now capable of independently 
determining which format fits its needs.

Size thus appears as an elusive concept, determined both by supply and 
demand. Moreover, it is being constantly renegotiated according to the 
textual forms available and the desires of the audience using it. These 
reasons make it important for researchers to focus on the local (while 
taking into account also the global) dynamics. In fact, traces of 
tensions between national cultures and international productions might 
be found in the sizes of the most popular products and in the devices 
used to perform them.

All topics related to “sizing” in fashion, media, architecture, design, 
photography, creative industries and interactions are welcome:


-           How technological innovations in production, distribution, 
consumption are revolutionizing the sizes in fashion system, time, space 
and the media

-           How is the human body changing in relation to the 
possibilities offered by wearable technologies

-           How are the acceleration of time and the globalization of 
space affecting the built environment

-           Which is the role of design and architecture in a world in 
which time is extra-small and space extra-large

-           How are cities resizing in order to accomodate the 
multi-cultural and multi-identity society of tomorrow

-           Which is the contribution of cinema in the definition of 
sizes and how is its current symbolic power setting new standards for 
media, design and fashion

-           How do media formats (cinema, television, cross-media 
products) change once they are exported in different social and identity 
contexts

-           Which is the role of celebrity culture in defining new 
models within media, fashion and design

-           How has the practice of binge-watching affected product sizes

-           Which is the relationship between binge-watching, product 
placement and size of the product placement in tv series

The conference organizers welcome individual papers and panel proposals 
to (quvi.zonemodaconference /at/ unibo.it)

Language: English

Deadline for submission: December 15, 2016

Authors will be notified by January 31, 2017

Proposals should not exceed 400 words in length.

Please make sure to attach a short CV (no more than 150 words)

If accepted, speakers will have to send a brief paper (1000 words) by 
April 15, 2017.

After the conference, speakers are expected to send a full paper of 
their speech for publication of the official proceedings, by August 31, 
2017.

Keynote speakers for 2017 will be announced soon.

Fee:

Conference participants are required to pay a fee of EUR 100, or EUR 80 
if they register before March 15 at: 
https://events.unibo.it/zonemoda-conference2017. The conference fee is 
EUR 50 for students enrolled in degree or doctoral programmes at the 
University of Bologna (and free for students enrolled in the three-year 
CLAM degree or enrolled in the two-year Fashion, Culture and Management 
second cycle programme).

Location: Dipartimento di Scienze per la Qualità della Vita, Palazzo 
Ruffi – Briolini, C.so d'Augusto, 237, 47921 – RIMINI and other venues 
to be communicated

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