Fashion and the Metropolis: an inseparable link in the Introduction still relevant today

The city, youth and fashion are not simply three dimensions or realities that cross each other; they intertwine and involve each other, always producing new forms of culture and spaces of interaction. A more careful analysis reveals a parallelism between the ways in which modern life is structured and organized in the city: the forms of diffusion and extinction of fashion processes and the characteristic attributes with which youth presents itself, develops and expires on the social scenario (Besozzi, 1997, p.60). The city is the place where social life can be fully experienced and the subject can “fully and freely” express him or herself (Tomasi, 1997, pp. 54–62); it is considered by young people as a fundamental space of social interaction. Fashion corresponds to the image that young people offer of themselves in the city and that they adapt according to where they go and what the city has to offer in a precise moment, adding further elements to the process of diffusion and innovation described by the “trickle-down” theory (Simmel, 1911), and presenting itself as pluralistic and polycentric, as a process of objectification and subjectification at the same time (Davis, 1993, p. 101). This paper aims to analyze the link between the city and the fashion as collective behavior. It draws inspiration from the Park and Burgess theoretical approach, which is built around the idea of social change, and argues that, through the study of collective behavior in the metropolis (Coulon, 1992), sociology should be used to identify the construction and “functioning” processes of society. The final goal is to examine how the metropolis interacts with fashion as a form of collective behavior in contemporary times and youth groups.