DISASSEMBLING FASHION DECODING VISUAL AND STYLISTIC CODES AS LEARNING BY DOING TOOL FOR COURSES IN FASHION COMMUNICATION

Historically, especially in the field of art, in order to learn to draw and paint, they used the practice of putting oneself in front of a work of art and copying it, to understand its details, drawing methods, techniques and use of colour as well as material. Even in contemporary training related to visual communication for fashion (but not only), but the processes of copying, decomposition and recomposition also become important steps for the understanding of the creative process, of the fundamental elements that constitute a fashion collection (colours, shapes, materials, graphic patterns) and that defines its stylistic identity as well as its visual and communicative identity. Learning by doing actions that have been at the basis of the training process undertaken within the fashion visual communication courses. Courses born not only to provide the graphic and technical tools (Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign) for the design of the communication project but also and above all, to provide the conceptual basis to understand the design processes underlying the creation of a fashion collection.

The process of decomposition of formal, material, chromatic and graphic elements and their recomposition into new communication artefacts thus become design phases capable of defining educational experiences that hybridize different ILOs from the practical ones related to the knowledge and use of software to the methodological ones related to the training of critical analysis of the fashion product and its declinations within a collection.

The article aims to present the didactic experience carried out within the fashion visual Communication Courses of the first year of the fashion design bachelor's degree at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano. The learning objectives of the course focus on understanding visual communication tools and their use as a design resource. The applied methodology involved four phases: analysis, disassembly of the elements, definition of the compositional rules and recomposition in a new graphic form of the creative process. Through this approach we wanted to apply the concept of learning by doing, expanding it by defining a training path that operates both on the side of technological instrumentation and on the side of the students' methodological growth.