ONTOBRANDING AS A DESTINY FOR FASHION: SOCIAL POLARIZATION, GRASSROOTS CREATIVITY, AND THE AUTOMATION OF EVERYTHING

This essay aims to demonstrate how contemporary innovations in artificial intelligence applied to fashion is implementing and exacerbating ideas that had been already developed during the evolution of the fashion system: here, creative inspira- tion comes not from the celebrated figure of the fashion designer, but mostly derives from an external context—especially from consumers recently reimagined as data sets. The transformation of the whole system can be considered a direct con- sequence of the modification of the social structure that has evolved from the straight contraposition between higher and lower classes during the so-called Golden Age of the Haute Couture to the expansion of middle classes across the second half of the twentieth century, to a new polarization between the classes determined by globalization and by the latest financial crisis. Both are involved in what has been called the new war declared by the rich against the poor (Reich 2008, Gallino 2012) and in the creation of a highly entropic system of consumption.