Fashion is a complex and layered phenomenon that connects traditional material culture with contemporary social, cultural, and productive organization. The fashion system is embodied in a highly competitive ecosystem, rooted in small business dimensions, territorial anchoring, the construction of relational networks between businesses and productive subsystems, and the design capability to integrate codifiable and transferable knowledge with tacit and contextual knowledge.

Yet, fashion also configures itself as an autonomous source of culture: it represents what allows us to grasp the characteristics of the current world, contains the demands of the present, but is also a space for imagining the future and an expression of the social and manufacturing history it constantly preserves and narrates. Fashion is thus a mediation ground between the individual and the environment, reflecting cultural and productive models or designing new ones.