Out of the bubble
From sustainability to metaverse and inclusivity:
How fashion expresses social interests and feelings by getting out of its bubble
““Fashion plays a strategic role within a society, as it proposes patterns and ideals.” .”
As reflected in theAgenda 2030, sustainability is taking on an increasingly broader meaning: it is no longer understood only in the environmental and ecological sense but also as social sustainability(inclusiveness, gender equality etc.). It was therefore decided to investigate whether the goals of Agenda 2030 are present within the debate around the last two Milan Fashion Weeks and Metaverse Fashion Week.
The Technologies Used
The data analyzed (tweets and web articles) were obtained through KPI6 technology starting from a keyword search.
Thanks to Deep Learning, particularly the use of Tranformers (deep neural networks that represent the state of the art in Natural Language Processing), we extracted emerging topics and related sentiment.
Using the BERT-type neural network, the documents were coded according to their semantics and subsequently clustered by similarity.
We then identified and re-aggregated the topics related to sustainability and other topics of interest and analyzed their content.
MILAN FASHION WEEK 21
The graphs show that there were strands of conversations regarding sustainability and inclusivity regarding MFW 2021, and the theme of digital and post-pandemic recovery also emerged from the web articles.
The multimedia materials (photos and videos shown below) also support that there have been promotional events with respect to environmental and inclusiveness issues.
However, these initiatives seem to have met with little success in the conversations of private MFW users on twitter, both in terms of topic variety and with respect to the volume of conversations. In addition, when analyzing who the users are who have published posts on the subject, it appears that they are mainly directors, digital strategists, and journalists. Therefore, it means that those who talk about it are doing it for a living: they are topics that make news but have not entered the conversations of the event’s users.
MILAN FASHION WEEK 22
This year, for MFW 2022, there is even less presence of debate about sustainability.
The theme of inclusivity emerges, only minimally, from some web articles while the theme of the Russian-Ukrainian war prevails overwhelmingly, which seems to have attracted most of the attention and public debate, perhaps taking light away from other socially relevant issues.
KEYWORDS AND SENTIMENT BY TOPIC
Fashion
Covid
Sustainability
Inclusiveness
Digital
Russia-Ukraine War
As can be seen from the sentiment graph below, the topic of war triggered predominantly negative sentiment, emerging in the form of heavy criticism of the fashion world, which is considered distant from real-world issues with its runways and fashion shows.
On the other hand, a theme that has been positively discussed is that of digital which, from being a tool to overcome the limitations related to the pandemic during MFW 2021, has become a real opportunity so much so that this year, in March 2022, there was the first MetaVerse Fashion Week, a high fashion event held entirely on a digital universe.
METAVERSE FASHION WEEK
So successful has the metaverse been for the world of high fashion that the first Metaverse Fashion Week debuted March 24-27, 2022, where participating brands showed new collections or new interpretations of existing pieces.
“Between augmented reality and metaverse, the collections can’t help but bring us new inspirations about aesthetics pushed to the extreme by technology,” is what one twitter user interested in Metaverse Fashion Week aspires.
It is quite evident from the images and videos presented that there has not been much experimentation related to different aesthetic canons by taking advantage of the potential that a digital universe can offer.
Instead, it emerges clearly how gender stereotypes have been reproduced just as in the real world, with the image of costumed and super shapely women next to cars, a classic example of female sexual objectification, being particularly prominent.
Thus, this opportunity to convey different messages in line with the times and sustainability goals of this decade has not been taken.
A missed opportunity, in short.