Eco

Umberto Eco (1932). Scholar, writer and essayist. His interests range from medieval aesthetics (he received a degree in philosophy in Turin in 1954, with a thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas), to avant-guard art, including the formulation of a coherent theory of semiotics (he wrote a Treatise on General Semiotics) and the themes and phenomena of mass culture. A professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, he has since the early 1960s been one of the great interpreters of “low” culture, criticizing any apriori condemnations and intellectual devaluations of it. Starting with his “phenomenological” study of the “typical” Mike Bongiorno, Eco has never scorned any “sign” that appeared within the articulated framework of a cultural system. His approach to fashion, which covers its communicative aspect as well as its aesthetics, from the problem of costume to that of increased communication, is wide-ranging and not narrowly focused. Since his early study of aesthetics, in fact, he has set out to understand art as a concrete, empirical act, something done in a material and technical context. From this perspective, every subject can be analyzed according to its signifier, and every form can be understood as the emanation of a function, and the whirling spiral according to which our time fills forms with meaning and then empties them, rediscovering how to decipher a code and then forgetting it, is nothing more, after all, than a continuous operation of design. An operation, in other words, which considers fashion as an exemplary model.