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In recent years, a number of fashion and beauty brands have developed promotional content that circulates an aspirational quality imbued with unstudied “cool” around their product. Despite the appeal of this conceit to tropes of the everyday, authenticity, and belonging, it presents a superficially relatable ideal whilst exploiting digital media’s capacities to foster intimacy and promote a postfeminist subjectivity based on consumption.
This article examines three brands that circulate “aspirational realness” around their product: Glossier, Reformation, and Maryam Nassir Zadeh. All remediate the conventions of prior fashion media to communicate discourses of neoliberal femininity to a media-savvy consumer. Aspirational realness is thus read as a means by which consumption is both encouraged and situated as a means of self-realization in the likeness of other aspirational “cool girls.” +
The FASHION PARATEXT DATASET focuses on the collection and analysis of fashion captions within contemporary fashion media. Although often overseen and rendered subordinate, these paratextual snippets of text-such as titles, introductions and captions-work as strategic value producers within fashion media and shape our fashion narratives and vocabulary. Accordingly, these textual elements play an important role in our relation to fashion and clothes as readers, wearers, makers and consumers. Through its dominance and vast networks, industrial market-based fashion language is becoming our fashion mother tongue. And as professor of applied linguistics Robert B. Kaplan writes, our first language, or mother tongue has a powerful influence on the way we shape our thoughts and organise our ideas.
Using data science methods, this project collaboratively produces a large-scale dataset of fashion captions that can be mapped and analysed using Natural Language Processing. The dataset takes the captions out of the saturated pages of fashion media (both print and online), offering the opportunity to read them attentively, isolated from their original context. As such, it can open up space to think about an alternative vocabulary. +
A Guide To Softer Ware is a collaborative exploration of contemporary and not-so-contemporary languages of instruction in the context of “womanhood”, calling out their binary notions of gender designation as a social construct. Through analysing their own behavior as socialised women, and simultaneously analysing guides by women addressing other women about how to be a woman, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp expose the idea of the manual as a (self-)imposed directive, trapped between the imperative to be unconditionally affirmed and the need to be in charge of one’s own narrative.
The format of the manual is used here as a rhetorical construct that explores how the social roles of women have been impacted by the rise of new technologies from the second half of the 20th century until now. With their shared background ranging from (type-)design to creative coding, Charlotte Rohde and Vera van de Seyp (quite literally) deconstruct and reprogramme these languages of instruction: From the wording used in 1960s technical manuals for sewing machines, knitting machines and various domestic appliances addressing women as a new target group to Memes and YouTube tutorials as a phenomenon representing the contemporary internet culture of self-optimization.
With their Guide To Softer Ware the two artists reflect on the supposed need for guidance and the forms this guidance has historically taken and still takes. The exhibition at soft power presents new works by the two artists that may function as a manual for the spectators and simultaneously as type specimens. The use of tools and typography, soap and metal, software and code (and ultimately, the use of the body itself), invites us to question the „softness“ historically/conventionally/subconsciously assigned to certain materials and spaces, to gender and its construction. +
What happens when a woman goes online? She becomes a girl.
The unwritten contract of the internet, that a user is what is used, extends from the well-examined issue of data privacy and consent to the very selves women are encouraged to create in order to appear. Invited to self-construct as 'girls online', vloggers, bloggers and influencers sign a devil's bargain: a platform on the condition they commodify themselves, eternally youthful, cute and responsibility-free, hiding offline domestic, professional and emotional labour while paying for their online presence with ‘accounts’ of personal ‘experience’. Can a Girl Online use these platforms not only to escape meatspace oppressions, but as spaces for survival, creativity and resistance?
Told via the arresting personal narrative of one woman negotiating the (cyber)space between her identities as girl, mother, writer, and commodified online persona, Girl Online is written in a plethora of the online styles, from programming language to the blog/diary, from tweets to lyric prose, taking in selfies, social media, celebrity and Cyberfeminism. +
"With the emergence of the Metaverse, we can reinvent ourselves in ways in which we’ve always dreamt. Modem teamed up with The Fabricant, SHOWstudio and Anastasiia Fedorova to imagine how our virtual alter-egos could change the ways we think about ourselves. Expanding on the work of The Fabricant, which explores the malleable future of human identity through non-physical garments, Our Digital Selves studies the ambiguous relationship between the real and the virtual self" +
A-website-is-a-room.net is a little handmade web space that features a live feed of urls of a similar sentiment, anonymously contributed by fellow internet travelers. This site is the distillation of extensive research, conversations, and experiments around alternative web practices, decentralized networks, and online gathering.
The goal was to make something communal, romantic, introspective, raw, and beautiful. I also really wanted to dive deep into the research, and in that process, discovered a whole world of like-minded people, learned about new and old tools, and drew unexpected connections between different artists, designers, and their works. +
A new manifesto in cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender and technology.
The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists: we are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are within this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together and create solidarity?
The glitch is often dismissed as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology and the body that it creates. The glitch offers the opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art and critical theory, and the work of contemporary artists who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Glitch Feminism shows how the error can be a revolution. +
A Collective Booklet for Computational Women is an open document project on google sheets to share stories of women with their machines. Any woman can create their own sheet to share their photos and the stories they hold about their computers. It is created to protest against the stereotype and to empower our passion towards technology. +
Sadie Plant argues that cyberspace is a potentially radical space which uses modes of thinking and operating that have traditionally been seen as female. She also considers the relationship between cyberspace and immaterial space and speculates on what this could mean for the future. Christine Tamblyn and Pat Cadigan contribute to the discussion/Q&A, which makes for a lively discourse on the females positioning in technoculture. +
Fashion Knowledge is a podcast about inclusive, sustainable, and digital fashion futures. Beata Wilczek, founder and director at Unfolding Strategies, a fashion consultancy and edu lab for fashion in Web3, hosts new and brave voices in fashion innovation, design, research, and education, to learn more about digital fashion and sustainability. +
Building on the ideas of Tiqqun’s 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chu’s Females and Bogna Konior’s work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the “Girlstack,” which, to borrow her words, models the “ultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girl’s natural habitat.” Quicho articulates how the ‘girl’ inhabits no one person, body, or gender. She is a technology of subjectivity composed of symbolic, consumer, and inhuman elements and might be our only way out of the platform trap. Quicho's reformulation of 'the stack' was first published as an essay on Wired and expanded at BODYSTACK and Creamcake 3HD. +
Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine ‘Phygital Fashioning’, ‘Notes on Phygitality’ documents an asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022.
The conversation delves into the concept of "phygitality," blending physical and digital realms. They explore its implications, noting, "It’s about how you can interface between the physical and the digital." Discussions encompass the fusion's impact on human interaction voicing that we have more freedom to express ourselves. Ethical dimensions are scrutinized: "We need to be careful about what that [digital footprint] means." The dialogue reflects on art, privacy concerns, and the intricate interplay shaping future socio-technological landscapes. +
In "the ssense of authenticity" writer Nabi Williams explores the concept of authenticity in the digital age, particularly through analyzing the canadian fashion e-tailer ssense and its popular Instagram account. posting daily on the social media platform, ssense draws from contemporary culture through its use of language, image layout, and cultural references to create promotional content that exists on the thin line between “authentic meme” and marketing material. by investigating this account and social media’s impact on how authenticity is manufactured, communicated, and perceived, this thesis traces how the concept of authenticity has evolved and argues that we now live in a “post-authentic” world, where storytelling and the “authentically inauthentic” reign supreme in place of sincerity and reality. +
This essay critiques the static nature of artists' websites, proposing that they could be more dynamic and innovative. Gat argues for these sites to function as online exhibition spaces, offering unique and creative ways to present and control art, enhancing the digital art experience. +
A literary and ethnographic analysis of the Tumblr platform, supplemented by personal experiences, to explore the site's potency as a pedagogical tool. Ester Freider explains.. "I'm Like a Pdf but a Girl originates from my usage of tumblr as a social learning platform during high school, when AFK I had little educational resources surrounding feminist studies, philosophy, and potential leftisms in my high school and so, turned to a network of peers online to educate myself." +
This thesis looks at how fashion design is affected by new technology. It contributes to fashion studies and design research. It uses ideas from authorship theory, sociology of professions and posthumanism. The research looks at four fashion design practices where creation takes place in virtual spaces and is shared with non-professionals, networks or machines. The case studies are The Fabricant, Atacac, Self-Assembly and Minuju. +
The article "A Reparative Approach to Publishing" discusses Constant, a collective focusing on open-source, community-driven publications. Their projects include various forms of "executable texts" like manuals and codes, emphasizing collaborative creation and iterative processes. Platforms like Books With An Attitude and Constant Verlag host these works under open licenses. The piece highlights the importance of trust, collective authorship, and dynamic, editable content, advocating for a publishing practice that embraces change, diversity, and community involvement over individual genius and static texts.
It is part of MARCH's long term inquiry, "Publishing As Protocol", which aims to explore the relationship between self-organizational models and technological sovereignty. It gathers existing and speculative examples from both institutional (cultural) and technological (hacktivist) practices to reflect on how we publish, gather and organize under (and around) platform capitalism. +
da Falck Øien explores the emotional relationships humans have with their garments and how acquisition methods influence these relationships. The research, conducted from 2017 to 2021, involves ethnographic studies, collaboration with a fashion label, public engagement through a physical space, and the creation of publications and products. Øien aims to address the environmental impact of the fashion industry by rethinking resource use and consumer behavior, emphasizing fashion as a cultural and social phenomenon beyond mere clothing items. +
This essay explores the concept of "Endarkenment," an aesthetic response to current global crises. Instead of apocalyptic destruction, Endarkenment finds beauty in chaos and decay. It contrasts traditional enlightenment, emphasizing engagement with darkness and complexity. Four aesthetic "guilds"—NovusHex, Netmesh, Candyblade360, and Hyper-ogre—illustrate different aspects of this concept, embracing both technological and primitive elements to find new forms of meaning and enchantment amid widespread despair and systemic failures. +
This text discusses the concept of the "Sad Girl" and its evolution in the digital age. It explores how the internet, particularly platforms like Tumblr, became a space for young women to express their emotions, often through romanticized depictions of sadness and melancholy. The text examines the authenticity and commodification of these emotional performances, as well as the broader societal expectations and pressures placed on women's emotional expression. It also touches on the concept of the "Influencer" and how the pursuit of authenticity has become a tool for capitalist exploitation. The document ultimately suggests that embracing the "Cyborg" and the performative nature of online identity may be a way to resist the commodification of emotion and reclaim digital spaces. +