Digital Writings of Fashion Cultures: New Formats of Publication of Creative Know-How in the Mediterranean Basin

The research Digital Writings of Fashion Cultures: New Formats of Publication of Creative Know-How in the Mediterranean Basin within the larger initiative of the Network Incursive Fashion Heritage seeks to address the renegotiating nature of socio-digital networks in the understanding of fashion, clothing, and textile cultures from Southern and Eastern Mediterranean overlooked communities. Drawing on Castell’s theory of interactive creation of meaning, the research aims to reveal how participatory digital networks’ innovations—both creative and technical—can empower artisans, producers, and mediators in the Mediterranean region to reclaim and revalue local experience of craft heritage and fashion cultures. The ongoing research highlights how in the dynamic context of participatory socio-digital networks, Mediterranean traditional know-how renovates itself and renegotiates its position in fashion knowledge production by presenting local practices from a contemporary fashion perspective. Content produced by these fashion digital communities from Mediterranean islands and peninsulas, Middle Eastern countries, and North Africa makes extremely porous the border between fashion as modernity and fashion traditional practices, working toward the creative development of new formats for a de-globalized and de-centered fashion mediation.