“Fashion is a language and a game” (Luigi Maramotti)

Luigi Maramotti gained his experience of the fashion industry from the inside, as a member of the family firm behind MaxMara,. In the chapter “Connecting Creativity” (in “Creative Industries” edited by John Hartley) he looks at what drives change in fashion, then at how important it is to connect the creativity involved at each stage in the process of producing and selling fashion goods.

Maramotti first tries to explain what drives change in fashion. He suggests that what people wear is related to their culture and societies, but that changes do not happen by accident. They need “human action, the work of creative people, of industry and the complicity of consumers”. He describes fashion first as a language, then as a game. As a language he says people are communicating through what they wear – they are saying things to each other about status, about the groups they belong to. As a game, he says fashion is not like a game with a winner, but a game of interaction between people that goes on forever with no end.

In the second part of this chapter, Maramotti argues that creativity is not just having a creative idea, but is the whole creative process leading to a product that people buy use. He uses his own company, MaxMara, to illustrate how a firm can tap into, and harness, creativity. He is not keen on buying creative input from outside the firm, but on having a company that brings out the creativity in the people that work on each stage of creating and selling fashion products. He describes the kind of creativity needed in each stage – the market research, the data processing, the technological and technical innovation, the design, the cost analysis, production opportunities, marketing, advertising and promotion. He attributes the success of MaxMara to having creativity is “embedded at the heart of its culture” and says the “results are tangible”.

I think there are some things in Maramotti’s views on connecting creativity that also apply to graphic design. If fashion is a language, so is the visual communication in graphic design. It is perhaps more than a language as it should become a conversation between those who are trying to get a message over and those whose behaviour they are trying to influence. Like changing fashion, the conversation continues, one group feeding back to the other.

One important thing for graphic design is to pick up on attitudes and how the target audience see themselves. As this is changing all the time, the graphic designer has to listen to that conversation, and use the right language to be listened to.

We also have to realise that it is not just the original idea. Creativity will develop and change the concept as teams work on it from idea to finished product and its uptake. I’ve seen this even in project work, where my ideas change as the concept develops and where people make comments that set me off on another line of thought to explore. As people and their ideas change with time, as Maramotti concludes “the game will last forever”.