Leopardi e il capitalismo: la moda e la morte del pensiero critico

Abstract

Leopardi wrote Dialogue Between Fashion and Death in 1824 when the Industrial Revolution had already shown signs of strengthening. This dialogue is resonating work that deals with the powerful connection between dress and mortality. Fashion and Death, as Leopardi proposes in the poem, are of the same breed, both the executing decay and destruction on the body's and the mental identity. The piece presents Fashion as a fictional character in conversation with Death, that is, like Death, actively responsible for human suffering and Fashion depends from Death. Before Leopardi, Fashion was a Goodess with pathetic mood, while for him Fashion isn't a modern phenomenon camouflaged with classical apparatus, an artificial Goodess, but a trascendental and inherent entity like a Death. Usually, philosophers, semiotics and sociologists have made use of the poem putting it in connection, only, with body, because it is rendered particularly profound and lasting in the context of contemporary fashion, or moreover, contemporary fashion writing. Aesthetics and trends in fashion, more so than ever before, constantly toy with symbolism and representations of death and human frailty. This dialogue has since been adopted into the context of fashion discourse as a powerful rendering of fashion's capacity to engage with our own transience. On the other hand, this paper is making a strong point that the Leopardi's poem focuses on the habitual fashion instructs people in the way they think, on the relationship between fashion and democratization of society, and on the habit in the way society thinks.