Fashion and luxury fashion in the third millennium

The book explores the field of fashion and its development in time through five main dichotomies: body fashion or dressing the body; fashion as class distinction or democratization; ordinary or luxury fashion; nudity as a sexual attractor and symbol of physical power or dressing as an anti-Malthusian device and body protector; fashion as visual language or functional instrument. In the early stages of fashion prevailed on luxury fashion because of the scarcity of materials. The symbolic language of body fashion acted as surrogate of articulated languages while body nudity as a sexual attractor favored population growth. Then, thanks to economic development, the second horns of the five dichotomies gradually prevailed on the first ones. In the new millennium, swiftness, globalization, the visual language of the global village, online trade, the search of luxury, anti-Malthusian sexuality and body protection became limitless. Uncertainty and fluidity reign, spurring creativity and post-pandemic resilience.