[ecrea] CfP: Zonamoda conference 2019: “Be cool! Aesthetic Imperatives and Social Practices”

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ZONEMODA CONFERENCE 2019:
“Be cool! Aesthetic Imperatives and Social Practices”.

University of Bologna, Rimini Campus.
Department for Life Quality Studies.
International Research Centre “Culture Fashion 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.
The topic of the 2019 conference will be: “Be cool! Aesthetic 
Imperatives and Social Practices”.

It is almost trivial to underline how our current reality has undergone 
a process of widespread aestheticization.
On the one hand, this fact proves that the aesthetic has fundamentally 
become an “imperative” while playing a relevant role in social 
practices, and on the other hand it reminds us that what is required 
today is a better understanding of what is actually at stake when we 
talk about the aesthetic in terms of “imperatives”, and we inextricably 
link it to social dynamics.
The dimension of appearances and the expression of taste preferences 
cannot but be considered as determining factors in this framework.
All this makes emerge fashion’s paradigmatic role for dealing with the 
pressing theme ZMC 2019 aims to inquire into: not only fashion is 
intrinsically connoted by the priority of appearances and taste over 
other features of our experience, but it does so while intertwining the 
aesthetic and the social implications it has.
And this is presumably why the imperative “be cool!” is supposed to work 
on both levels and has such a deep impact on our reality. In this 
framework, the conference will focus on both considering fashion as an 
exemplary case of aesthetic practice, especially in the current context, 
and emphasizing the need for social-human sciences to understand the 
widely aestheticized character that reality itself has assumed today.

Oriented by a multidisciplinary approach – the only one which can do 
justice to fashion’s multiform and complex character – the 2019 
conference will investigate such implications by welcoming proposals 
addressing (but not limited to) the following questions/aspects:
- What does it mean and imply determining social relationships on the 
basis of values and criteria that are also, if not especially, aesthetic?
- How does fashion influence other domains of life and culture (art, 
design, mass media, music, lifestyle etc.), and actually lead them to 
focus or even centre their attention on aesthetic aspects in order to 
improve their impact on society?
- What is the exact role played by fashion with regard to such relevant 
phenomena as the increasing digitalization of our experience, the 
reorganization of economic processes of production, and finally 
globalization?
- To what extent is it possible to conceive of the aesthetic mediation 
carried out by fashion as an essential factor to achieve a fruitful and, 
so to speak, peaceful or non-colliding “fusion” of Western and Eastern 
cultural paradigms?
- Is it desirable today to have a conflict of aesthetic and ethic 
values, or at least some kind of difference and friction between the 
aesthetic and the ethic dimensions, or does the ongoing development of 
aestheticization progressively nullify any autonomous rest of “the ethical”?
- What does the socio-aesthetic relevance of fashion consist of?
- What’s the phenomenological, ontological, or social status of appearances?
- What are the prospects of the so-called “social fashion” (whether 
fashion can be socially engaged/beneficial; whether fashion helps define 
a new genre of fashion replacing the old cliché of elitism and class, etc.)?
- What is the relationship between fashion and body practices (tattoos, 
plastic surgery, scarification) seen as phenomena of aestheticization 
and also of constitution/expression of one’s identity?
- How is the concept of aestheticization, in general, related to 
questions concerning “cultural legitimacy” in such realms as mass media, 
film, television, gaming and web aesthetics?

The Conference will take place in Rimini on May 16-18, 2019.
Location: Department for Life Quality Studies, Palazzo Ruffi-Briolini, 
C.so d'Augusto 237, 47921 – Rimini, Italy.

Keynote speakers will be Prof. Joanne Entwistle (King's College London) 
and Prof. Elizabeth Wilson (London Metropolitan University).
Concluding remarks with Prof. Emanuele Arielli (IUAV University Venezia) 
and Prof. Elena Esposito (University Bielefeld and University of 
Modena-Reggio Emilia).
Special plenary session “Not just glossy words: The language of fashion 
in the digital media era”, organized by the research group supervised by 
Prof. Emanuela Mora (Cattolica University of Milano): an excursus on the 
recent transformation of the Fashion Media System aiming at stressing 
the performative role played by the fashion media in providing an 
aesthetic and practical imaginary for the aestheticization of reality 
and human experience.

The conference organizers welcome individual papers and panel proposals 
to: (becool.zmc2019 /at/ gmail.com)
Website of the event: https://eventi.unibo.it/becool

Deadline for submission: January 15, 2019.
Authors will be notified by February 28, 2019.
Proposals should not exceed 800 words in length.
Please make sure to also attach a short CV (max. 150 words).
Language: English.
After the conference, speakers are expected to send a full paper of 
their speech for publication of the official proceedings, by August 31, 
2019.




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