Mobile Phones and Fashion and in Post-Modernity

The aim of this article is to explore the relation between mobile phones and fashion and how this has developed in the course of the last decade. It is important to reconstruct this path not only on the historical but also on the sociological plane, as it will enable us to ask certain questions and also reflect on modernity. After a careful reconstruction of the works that have appeared on this topic, we will dedicate the second part of this article to discussing the role and meaning of fashion and the mobile phone. We will deal with the relation that the mobile phone has at present with clothing and appearance (Floch, 1995; Tambini, 1997) and above all the human body (Fortunati, Katz, Riccini, 2003), by examining how this device is at the center of a vast spectrum of social processes, much vaster than any other technology. It is a fact that people tend to always carry a mobile phone on them that makes the difference in respect to other technologies. In the second section, we shall see how in the interaction between the mobile phone and fashion it is fashion that is the stronger element. It is fashion that domesticates technology, and especially the mobile phone, and not vice versa. In the third part of the article we will analyze the basic reasons for buying and using mobiles in order to see if these correspond to those of any other object of fashion. In the fourth section we will analyze the most important theories on fashion and try to see if the advent of the mobile phone as an object of fashion can be interpreted as being part of them or if it is necessary to produce a specific theory to explain its widespread use. Finally, in the fifth and last part of the article, the relation between mobile phones and fashion is seen as a lens through which to explore the concept of fashion itself, and the motivations that lie at the base of fashion as reflecting certain processes of modernity. This exploration will be guided by the idea that the mobile phone is the ICT that best represents and incarnates post-modernity (Lipovesky, 1987), an idea that will be verified here (Fortunati, 2005c). In the course of the article I will support the analysis with results that have emerged in two Italian research projects that explored how the new generations perceive and experience the encroachment of fashion on the world of the mobile phone.1)