Customizing

Habit of personalizing clothes and accessories. In origin it is purely Anglo-Saxon, that is, English and American. A “customized car” is a car modified with accessories according to the owner’s preferences. “Custom clothes” and “custom shoes” are made-to-measure clothes and shoes. Customizing belongs, in equal parts, to the atelier tradition as well as to street culture: it ranges from tailor-made suits and high-fashion outfits to punk jackets full of pins, the hand-decorated T-shirts of the Japanese “Ka-gu-ru girls”, and the torn jeans of urban youth. Anywhere, in other words, that there is a more or less conscious demand for authenticity and individuality, either aesthetic, cultural, or political. It is not by accident that even mass-produced prêt-à-porter has begun to offer several custom-made lines. These are Collections in which personality becomes something that is expected in advance, in a system that today more and more promotes and sells desire rather than tangible products.