Information Technology: a new approach on Fashion Studies through virtual learning communities
Kathia Castilho
Universidade Anhembi Morumbi
kathia@anhembi.br
Carol Garcia
Universidade Anhembi Morumbi
carol@anhembi.br
(Texto original com imagens: clique aqui)
Abstract
Fashion education can be lived and experienced outside the classroom involving the community as a whole when digital technologies are at its service. The objective of this work is to broaden the understanding of the new role universities are assuming in the field of fashion online learning. The phenomenon of global fashion research using the Internet is analyzed through the initiative of Anhembi Morumbi University, whose fashion faculty is located in São Paulo, Brazil, but extended its activities to the whole country using the WWW as a tool. Online extension courses in fashion and communication, as well as the production of digital magazine Moda Brasil (Fashion Brazil), led to the creation of a virtual community focused on fashion issues and its relations with society, consumption, industry and academic research.
Fashion online initiatives at Anhembi Morumbi University actually produce and analyze up to date information on style and fashion issues since 1996, mostly relating fashion to behavior, technology, society and the arts. This is possible through collaborative works done in a virtual community which was generated through the integration of interdisciplinary researches made by students, professors, professional journalists and other specialists from many fields, such as marketing, anthropology, sociology, semiotics and psychology. The case study of fashion online department at Anhembi Morumbi University shares the potential still little explored of creating virtual environments in a global scale for fashion specialists to share their experience with apprentices all around the world, so that they can ensure better quality standards to the fashion industry in their local market. The collaborative work made by people from various places results in an enlargement of research application, as well as it provides job opportunities in the field of study.
Key words
Fashion – Internet – education – virtual communities – digital technology – consumption
Archeology of the Future
“Some people believe fashion is futile and frivolous. I tell them that fashion is communication”.
Zuzu Angel, Brazilian Designer
Radical technological changes are tuned with emerging needs of a global society. Scientific and technological transformations produced by visual culture tacit on new media resources are attributes which should qualify and originate better performance of universities in their educative mission. “Visual culture ought not to site comfortably in already existing university structures” (Mirzoeff, 1999:11). This thought is valid specially if a frolicsome character is implicit in the display of theoretic and reflexive subjects of study, including interactive activities in the process of learning. Such practice is able to integrate, socialize and propose new interfaces for learning by joining traditional educational criteria and new methods of observing the universe as a whole: the university community shares and discusses knowledge not only with its local society, but also in a global scale. The globalization phenomena, however, is oriented towards local action and co-production of solutions assembled in collaborative activities. In this sense, the cyberspace serves as a compass to rethink and organize education on behalf of professional progress of individuals and welfare of society.
Individuals committed to lifelong learning foresee, project and recycle data presented by the world they live in. They propose, based on this cultural digestion, new habits, uses and behaviors. Moreover, they demand a dynamic attitude of educational institutions, in order to manage products and services that add quality to life. Consequently, educational institutions should offer tools to capture fragmented knowledge and offer such information to be mingled on behalf of individual and collective learning. This is especially true if we think of the vastness of Brazilian territory not only as a geographic matter. Its people expresses, in everyday habits, diversities and affinities that make the country an effervescent cultural cauldron.
The strength of Brazilian fashion lives in its diversities. Various immigrant waves led to a melting pot of ethnic influences, resulting in the fact that every single Brazilian takes along, printed in his dressing, a unique story of style, both in attitude and clothing. When forming a multicultural society, these individuals reveal a still obscure side of fashion history, built in the swing of tropical heat, vibrant rhythms and contrasting colors. In this style lab, hand-crafted laces made of natural raw materials in the Northeastern shores are as precious as the newest fibers that come straight from São Paulo high tech industrial laboratories, specially when renovated by a wave of restless designers that value this legacy with humor as well as respect. How to erase distances and share common goals though? Baitello (1998) states that the communication apparatus which resides in new technologies bring together the memories of life, for the transmission of moving images in planetary distances evoke the expansion of man’s perceptive frontiers. Therefore, a reasonable answer is WWW – not only an abbreviation for “what a wonderful world”, but also for “world wide web”.
Off to a good start
In the mid nineties, an event sponsored by a Brazilian cosmetic company – Phytoervas Fashion – decided to discover where exactly national fashion identity was hidden and latent. Revealing talents in eruption – people like Eduardo Ferreira, Jum Nakao, Marcelo Sommer, Carla Fincato and Ronaldo Fraga, just to name a few designers – Phytoervas Fashion showed the local industry that it was time to put the natural originality seen in these works to reverse any lack of fashion legitimacy. Fashion culture came to life: newspapers emphasized this enthusiasm and even the government assumed the importance of fashion in Brazilian economic growth. But this ideal was still too much attached to the elite, for information was spread only in determined circles of power.
Simultaneously, a group of professors of the fashion design undergraduate course at Anhembi Morumbi University noticed that teaching based in oral tradition was becoming incompatible with such social transformations and the new rhythm of Brazilian fashion movement. It was a system in which users were simply “swallowing” the rare information exposed by printed press on what was going on, instead of reflecting over the recent facts. The group started to look for unusual procedures in which information could be researched and better assembled little by little in new forms of knowledge. “In today’s world meanings circulate visually, in addition to orally and textually”. (Rogoff in Mirzoeff, 1999:15).
Inexpensive, democratic and flexible, it was the Internet that offered a way for students’ researches to be transformed into interactive discussions, moving around themes chosen by themselves. Due to this new technological possibility, concepts of teaching and learning were drastically reviewed and a non-linear net of information about the Brazilian fashion scenery was born: digital magazine Moda Brasil, which relates fashion to behavior, technology, society and the arts. This virtual community is generated through the integration of interdisciplinary studies and includes distance learning courses, job opportunities, forums and debates which provide not only useful data to the market in general, but also a rich exchange of information among the participants.
“The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.” (Haraway in Mirzoeff 1999:192)
The start was incredibly simple: fashion students and professors brought to light their own researches that were dusting in drawers to the real light of visibility. The motto was to dig for originals that could be traced in Brazilian fashion history: stories overtook by time and a past somewhat erased by years of military governments, when avant-garde nationalist ideas were not only despised, but also feared. For instance, one of the first virtual museum research targets, designer Zuzu Angel, was at that time almost only a memory, even though the very idea of a national fashion movement had, notwithstanding, started with her collections. By the democratic interference of the web, her concept was back in business thirty years after: virtually, but effectively present.
Zuzu Angel was not the only one to be ransomed. Moda Brasil compiled biographies of the most important designers and their production, the start for a virtual museum, encouraging students to go deeper in their researches and bring forgotten fashion pioneers to the surface again: Dener Pamplona de Abreu, Ney Galvão, Alceu Penna, among others, now have their stories permanently online. Afterwards, scholars were joined by fashion journalists and professionals from related fields (sociologists, anthropologists, costume designers, semanticists, historians, textile experts, marketing advisors...) whose collaboration activated fresh information on up-to-date subjects: an emerging generation of young designers.
Virtual meetings
As Phytoervas Fashion got eroded through the years it led to some fashion orphans – brands whose marketing budget didn’t allow advertisement investments and that were still considered too fresh to participate in São Paulo Fashion Week (named Morumbi Fashion Brasil at that time). Some of them, due to the incredible distances between their hometowns and major consumer cities, got stuck. At that time, their general public, mostly composed by intellectuals and artists, could buy their creations at Mercado Mundo Mix or in their own ateliers. Everything was almost unique and customized. Nevertheless, it wasn’t enough to survive in a tough market, competing in terms of design with established brands and fighting in terms of price with low quality imports.
Exactly at the turning point during which Brazil rediscovered its fashion roots that the Internet started to make a global difference. It was also in the mid nineties, on behalf of democracy, that Austrian designer Helmut Lang astonished the fashion world when he decided to cancel his (live) show in order to perform a virtual catwalk through his website. This is not, whatsoever, a provocative way of substituting store windows or fashion shows by computer screens. It is, instead, a way of fully using the most advanced tools of communication technology to emphasize concept in the eyes of the consumer, jumping the “press step” of fashion diffusion, like a private chat with customers. Following the same strategy, Moda Brasil made a (real) difference, not only encouraging, but also shortening distances between fashion creators and their prospective customers: young people who shared their codes of life style and could reach their preferred brands through the web. This led to better quality and diffusion of information on young talents, which actually made Moda Brasil a source of research for companies in need of bright brains to renew their identity. Publications on Brazilian fashion became another field being plowed, for schools such as Anhembi Morumbi encouraged their professors to write about the Brazilian experience. Research took an even more important role in the process. Where to publish these essays? In the Internet, of course.
In 1999, Internet global scale projection induced cost reductions of computers and other equipment, allowing growing access to new information technology. In Brazil, 9% of urban population already uses some means of accessing the web. In São Paulo, actually, 53% of the computers are connected and the users profile reveals that 68% are between 15 and 29 years old. This economic and social evolution produces new manners of learning, due to the dissemination of multimedia systems and visual culture. They also inspire the crescent option of lifelong learning on behalf of new work challenges in Brazilian textile chain.
Around 25 thousand people interact with Moda Brasil each month, most of them involved in research projects.
Timidly at first, fashion schools discovered the same power that instigated Lang’s daring marketing decision a few years back. In search of a way to appropriate new communication tools, Anhembi Morumbi University ignited the process by installing a new department focused on technological development for educational purposes. Innovations such as interaction and the visualization of course contents combined with freedom from fixed schedules, teaching time and location approached the goal of a learning path customized to each student.
According to Galbelnick et al.(1990), in an online learning community the student role as a relatively passive observer and information consumer changes to a co-builder of knowledge. With the advance of researches sponsored by this department (one of them the development of digital magazine Moda Brasil), in the end of 1995 a new methodology was traced using only the web as a support for distance learning, where contents could be easily updated. Moved by the quick development of new information technologies, in 1996 a first experience of an online course totally through the web was launched focused on basic notions of fashion for first-year students. The course, entitled “Fashion Universe”, offered primitive forms of interaction mediated by a teacher. Interaction was constituted mainly by discussion lists and exercises sent to the tutor through the web. It was offered free of charge for one year so that it could be used as research material for new courses and the reworking of methodology. Through these efforts the efficiency of such experience was largely adapted and new tools emerged, all of them able to be converged into a thematic network structure that students put together themselves in accordance with their own individual requirements. Anhembi Morumbi University launched, in August 1999, its first graduate online course on “Fashion and Communication”(annex 1).
Fashion studies in Brazil, due to enormous territorial distances and recent introduction as an undergraduate option, could extensively profit from this pioneer idea in various levels. New ways of organizing work, the increasing demand for lifelong learning, a growing service sector (including the preparation of teachers in faraway places) and the emergence of a global market are some of the consequences of such new learning methodologies. From mere 32 paid enrollments to the graduate specialization course in August 1999 numbers jumped to 173 registered students in August 2001 (annexes 2 and 3). Nowadays, due to the refinement of such technological affairs, one might notice that Anhembi Morumbi University has actually three units, instead of just Vila Olímpia Campus and Brás Campus. The first pair defines regions where the campi are physically located and the last one is in fact a new universe that lies in the cyberspace: a learning community. In order to succeed, the teacher role as a tutor of this process is to be an agent of stimulus and constant incentive for the student to go further in his questions, always customizing his attention to each participant. Coordination reinforces such attitude, creating an interface for
virtual meetings with professionals, other researchers and institutions that promote common knowledge, so that students are in touch with the real world full time. Support team helps solve technical doubts as soon as they appear, organizing the student agenda and online registry offers help on academic bureaucratic matters.
Two words were definitely settled as basic pillars of this virtual foundation: friendly and interactive. The relationship among teachers, students and new technologies is still a taboo and offers resistance on behalf of technical difficulties that can challenge new users. That is why both design and contents should look friendly to navigate, simply organized to provide easy access in various levels of competence, which certainly guides to the exploration of new forms of study and discussion. Interactive because distance learning infers discipline and time organization, as well as motivation. The student’s fascination is awaken at the moment when he becomes subject either than object of this communication. When a student physically enters the classroom, he will meet colleagues with the same goals and a teacher to discuss his doubts. However, in the online learning community he must interact with people from different places, whose only links are the language – Portuguese – and the subject of study – Fashion. That is why each course should be customized, from contents presentation to design and navigation system. Professors must feel virtual environments as their own classroom so that students might assimilate the growing disappearance of time and space gaps as a plus, not at all an inconvenience. “Tomorrow, with the aesthetics and logic behind the disappearance of the architectonic, we will live everywhere, that is a promise”. (Virilio in Kamper and Wulf, 1989:115).
Premises like that are changing the role of fashion websites, which have been gradually evolving from simple information senders to research conductors, cooperating and facilitating the building of knowledge. The virtualization of contents is actually doing what has always been an educational goal. Contents spread in the web are being recreated, reformatted, rewritten. In Moda Brasil, this happens through the Fashion Journalism Lab Web. Lab Web project started when students from other areas (such as photography, journalism etc) - some of them even enrolled in different schools in faraway places - started to look for an opportunity to show their talents that was more than a curriculum posted on a website. Concurrently, graduate students of the online fashion course also wanted to participate in the site. Then, collaborative works done entirely on a web basis started to be settled, always accompanied by a tutor. Posted on the web, they attract headhunters and were able to absorb students as professionals in the real world market. In this sense, with intense interaction among professors (real-time and online), journalists and students, all pupils are able to participate and build the contents of Moda Brasil magazine. Publishing their work from their geographic point of view, they keep thinking locally, but extend their action globally. Lab Web offers the chance of interacting with real customers that not only read, but also comment and react on the students’ writings.
The national fashion industry noted the power and synergy among technology, communication and style. Brazil presents itself as an economic force in Latin America, responsible for 45% of the region Internal Gross Product. The country has a market of 150 million consumers, 50% of them with an acquisition power of 8 thousand dollars per capita. Textile sector is responsible for 20% of Brazilian industrial Internal Gross Product and, in 1999, evolved 5,6%. This sector seeks the solidification of its activities, what justifies equal expansion of fashion cultural products that are legitimately Brazilian, but keep an eye on the global effect. Brazilian Textile Industry Association (ABIT) estimates in 2001 a growth of 5% over the year before – which means around 23 billion dollars. In the same period, the sector originated 40.643 new jobs, according to the Ministry of Labor. If statistics keep their speed, workers will have distance learning as an option to enlarge professional horizons. Until 2008, 12,3 billion dollars will still be invested in machinery, development and acquisition of technology, as well as professional competence, according to the Competitivity Forum of the Textile Production Chain.
On and off (line)
After obtaining the recognition of a public service on job offering and the recovery of lost data on Brazilian designers, new challenges were about to be integrated in Anhembi Morumbi online projects targeting lifelong learning. Researches done by students in the online graduation course, as well as off line initiatives, led to the expansion of Moda Brasil database with the creation of an online dictionary of fashion terms, an online textile dictionary, an online library (with a search mechanism which locates titles available off line in the University own library), as well as home pages of the best Brazilian young fashion designers, recovering their careers. This rich exchange of information evolved to a garment industry virtual museum, which counts on free participation of the community. That means the users are invited to send fashion pictures on various subjects which integrate the museum "galleries": the formation of women work in Brazil, the history of Brazilian fashion magazines through their covers, the exhibition of wedding dresses from different periods etc. They are also welcomed to send fashion stories and produce articles, helped by professional journalists and always using the web as means of communication.
This intense exchange made possible the insertion of correspondents in many Brazilian cities, as well as Brazilian correspondents in different countries who look at fashion news from a South American background. These correspondents recreate fashion news in singular points of view and provide new perspectives. Their experience in looking for information even in tiny towns led to a new project, this time in paper: a series of books describing Brazilian fashion through different angles. The first one, “Moda Brasil: Fragmentos de um Vestir Tropical – Fashion Brasil: Fragments of a Tropical Dressing” (Anhembi Morumbi
Publishers, 2001) was launched in February 6th, 2001, in São Paulo, by Anhembi Morumbi University Press. It composes a portrait of the diversity that distinguishes Brazilian dressing in a collection of texts signed by journalists specialized in fashion from ten Brazilian states and the Federal District, all of them regular contributors to the virtual magazine. The idea of publishing a book that could give readers an overlook of fashion in the country came from the experience at the site: the texts organized in the book bring historical, cultural and even economical information about Brazilian fashion, which were previously spread in the digital magazine different sections. The production of books does not conflict with the ascension of digital learning environments. On the contrary. According to Schayan (2001:48), experience shows that “most institutions involved with distance learning are working on programs intended to complement traditional classroom teaching – rather than take its place”. The concurrent management of new technologies merged with traditional methods of teaching and learning invigorates bonds and does not allow educational institutions to deviate of their primary mission: inform and, above all, educate.
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