Resolution

Pixels by pixels we hope peace will come.

Resolution is a slide designed as part of a presentation to underpin the Adobe Certified Professional InDesign Course that I teach at London College of Fashion for BA students in Fashion Marketing and Fashion Merchandising.

The slide positioned below soon after this text depicts a Jew and a Muslim boy holding a globe and was retrieved from an old Benetton advertising campaign curated by the controversial Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani in 1985 (Fig. 1). Oliviero Toscani was a maverick and a disruptor insofar to paraphrase what he asserted in a recent interview, he utilises the forecasts and the anticipating trends envisioned by the marketing department of the Italian fashion brand Benetton to utterly revolutionize them through the ad campaigns he has been creating in his long career at Benetton (2023).

The word ‘resolution’ refers to the definition of an image, and this slide is the medium that illustrates the quality of the same picture determined by a different amount of pixels. Hence, the image on the left-hand side contains 72 pixels per inch (ppi), that one in the middle 250 ppi and the third one 300 ppi.

“Art can never escape politics” a student asserts in an academic article written by 2 colleagues from Central Saint Martins, Jully Willcoicks and Kieran Mahon. It was around 2009 when my interest towards political art started growing and precisely when in the basement of a magazine shop I came across a book called ‘From Chaos to Order and Back” published by Fabrica, the Benetton research communication centre. In this visual voyage, Fabrica illustrates ten years of ideas, events, projects, and people in fields ranging from photography to graphic design industrial design and movie art. Famine, modern slavery, consumerism, racism, HIV, wars, suicide, the death penalty and drug addiction, are the main themes that all the artists from Fabrica explore and examine with satire and humour (Fig. 2).

Needless to say, all these encounters have marked the exact moment when ART came to rescue ART and also my naivety by decoding, deconstructing and disassembling the world I am surrounded by.

Through this slide, we examine the ligaments among arts, politics, and the fashion marketing industry within the educational field by critically looking at reality with imagination and creativity when designing a new marketing and merchandising strategy.

REFERENCES

Appetite For Disruption (2023). Interview Oliviero Toscani (Photographer / Benetton). [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nju_tgzenaA [Accessed 3 Jan. 2025].

Renzo, R.D., Elisabetta Prando and Valpinari, O. (2004). Fabrica 10. Mondadori Electa.

Toscani, O. (2002). United colors: The Benetton campaigns. Scriptum Editions.

Willcocks, J. and Mahon, K. (2023). The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education. Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education, 22(2), pp.187–207. doi:https://doi.org/10.1386/adch_00074_1.

www.adobe.com. (2025). What Does Resolution Mean? Image Resolution Guide | Adobe. [online] Available at: https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/photography/discover/image-resolution.html.