Speaker Biography
Patrizia Calefato is Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Università degli studi di Bari Aldo Moro (Italy) and was Affiliated Professor at the Centre for Fashion Studies of Stockholm University. Her main research areas include fashion theory, the clothed body, cultural and media studies, the social dimension of language, and gender studies. She serves on the advisory boards of several international journals, including Zone Moda Journal, Journal of Asia Pacific Pop Culture, Fashion Theory, and Semiotica.
Lecture Time & Venue
Lecture Time: December 19 (Friday), 16:00–17:30
Lecture Venue: Room 201, Villa No. 29, Songjiang Campus (Online Lecture)
Lecture Title
Roland Barthes, Fashion and the New Digital Media
Lecture Abstract
Roland Barthes (Cherbourg, 1915 – Paris, 1980), one of the major semiologists of the twentieth century, attentively studied fashion as a form of language and as a social phenomenon. In this lecture, I will introduce both aspects: the former was developed in his monumental book on “described” fashion, The Fashion System (1967, Engl. transl. 1990); the latter in various essays on “real” fashion, collected in the English book The Language of Fashion (2006). I will attempt to use Barthes’ sociosemiotics of fashion to understand the transformations of fashion in the current era of “deep mediatization” (Hepp, 2020). Can we still use, and how, his theories, his method, his style, to understand, for example, fashion influencers, fashion e-commerce, or the use of AI in fashion? In addition, what is still relevant in Barthes’ critical thinking of fashion as a contemporary myth?
