New frontiers of the fashion imaginary

The expression ‘fashion imaginary’ customarily refers to ‘the stock of images, values, practices and rules that dominate the western fashion industry and that its participants take for granted in their relationship with fashion’ (Mora, Rocamora and Volonté 2016a: 177). The notion of imaginary is challenging to handle because it has been the subject of reflection, use, and definition by many scholars in the humanities and social sciences: Freud, Jung, Bachelard, Durand, Castoriadis, to name some of the best known of them, and whose works generated diverse hypotheses and theories about the nature of a phenomenon difficult to specify. It is not our intention here to discuss the merits of the many different theories on the imaginary produced within the various disciplines. More simply we adopt and adapt the notion of social imaginary put forward by Charles Taylor. the social imaginary of which Taylor speaks is ‘that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (Taylor 2004: 23). It is therefore simultaneously static and dynamic in character. On the one hand, it is a repository of images, values and meanings that people reproduce with their actions; on the other, it is a device that makes it possible to design and implement ways of being, practices, and routines surrounded by a halo of legitimacy that derives from the shared meanings that constitute it. In the specific case of the fashion imaginary, the role of specialists, be they designers, marketing experts, professionals of the production chain, or professionals working in the media system—journalists, editors, advertising agents, social media creatives—cannot be underestimated.