The text of the conference is available in Italian.
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Olivier Zahm reconstructs the ambivalent relationship between art and fashion in the last decades of the twentieth century, after the rapprochement that took place in the seventies with Pop Art. This coexistence was born under the sign of protest. If in fact, in the years of performance and body art, art was understood “as a critical space of the present,” fashion was on the contrary “mimetic space of the present.” In the nineties, however, the expansion of the fashion system redistributed the balance of this relationship: the two universes coexisted and influenced each other. Zahm argues that in order to understand this evolution we must analyze the strategies adopted by artists and stylists, strategies “gripped in the whirlwind of trends which are much faster at self-renewal than aesthetics, generalizations, and ideas.”

Olivier Zahm is an art critic, art director, curator, writer and photographer. He has written for magazines such as Art Forum, Art Flash, Texte zur Kunst and
Art presse. He is the co-founder, owner and current editor-in-chief of the art and fashion magazine Purple. He is considered one of the pioneers of the digital age