Imaginaries in a (Not So) Imaginary Land: the Representation of the Body in the Virtual Environment

The role of fashion in the formation of imaginaries, the co-production of self-awareness, and the formation and construction of bodies has long been studied (for a comprehensive analysis, see the recent work by D’Aloia and Pedroni (2022)). With the advent of new technologies and digitalization, these dynamics have become increasingly pronounced, as evidenced by the success and explosive growth of social media of a visual nature, in particular Instagram and TikTok. At the same time, fashion has expanded the ways of producing, distributing, consuming, creating, and communicating. For instance, the possibility of personalized advertising, made possible by algorithmic mediation and user data-fication, and the proliferation of online shopping and sharing platforms. Throughout its history, fashion has played a significant role in defining physical stereotypes and gender imaginaries (Soloaga and Muriel 2008; Kulkarni 2023). The opportunities created by the Internet and digital communication and representation processes are also multiplying. These new possibilities allow fashion to dialogue with new fields and establish new interactions with consumers. In recent years, virtual game platforms have also increasingly manifested this process of growing interaction between mundane and digital worlds/worlds. Digital fashion, although a subject of growing interest, is still an underresearched field (Nobile et al. 2021). Moreover, the representations of the body and gender that take place in this field are even less studied. The aim of this chapter is therefore to examine, from a comparative perspective, representations of the body and gender in virtual games and traditional fashion communication. Specifically, the chapter focuses on visual products that are produced in a top-down manner. Therefore, two corpora of material will be discussed. The first corpus consists of images from the Vogue Italia Digital Archive, identified through a keyword search. The second corpus is made up of the official images of the game platforms. These were selected, among other criteria, for the possibility of choosing a personal avatar, with certain pre-made peculiarities, and for the presence of a multiplayer option. Indeed, it is crucial to understand what kind of representation of the body and gender is proposed, incorporated, and discussed by the consumers: both in the physical social world and in the virtual social worlds, fashion, and the body become communicative tools.