Italy in the age of mixed reality. An expanded experience of fashion

The contribution aims to investigate the interactions between technology and fashion design of the 21st century in the mixed reality. Within the Italian context, identified as a place of experimentation and interaction between digital innovation and manufacturing tradition, four case studies are examined. During the months of social distancing imposed by Covid-19, they have developed projects based on mixed reality with consequences on creative processes, production, distribution, communications, and consumption of fashion. In this scenario of hybridization between physical and digital dimensions, the contribution questions the expansion of fashion experience, the ongoing transformation of the digital object, the conception and perception of time, and the idea of intimacy. This contribution intends to consider the screen of technological devices as an element of intersection between physical and digital dimensions, overcoming the opposition between reality and the dream world of fashion, and transforming the subject from spectator to protagonist - private or public - of the experience. Computer and smartphone screens have gone beyond the two-dimensionality of images produced by mirrors and magazines, on which the history of fashion has built the idea of modern subjectivity. The research activity was developed through desk analysis and qualitative interviews, which allowed us to identify and analyse four case studies, chosen as recent examples of mixed reality experimentation belonging to the creative, production, communication, and retail system of fashion in Italy. The aim of this contribution is to demonstrate how fashion in the 21st century needs interpretative models that go beyond an opposing vision between material and immaterial, between physical and virtual. In mixed reality, the subject is no longer just a spectator in front of the mirror, beyond which he can observe the magic of fashion, but is transformed into an actor, the protagonist of this expanded experience made possible by the screen.