Website
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⤢ a directory that gathers, stacks and links practices that work with, through and beyond (digital) fashion […]
LATEST UPDATE 04.04.2025
[027]
Fashion Paratext Dataset
Collaboration
critical
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.
“This website explores the unique poetic character of fashion captions, and text in general of its media systems.”
10.04.25
[031]
A Website is a Room
Individual
autonomous
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.
10.04.25
[083]
DAISYWORLD CAL
Individual
experimental
An anatomical diagram of the flower of Magnolia biondii, by Zazie Stevens
DaisyWold MAG has reinvented itself as DAISYWORLD CAL, an ongoing anthology that follows the ancient Japanese calendar of 72 micro-seasons, a system that intricately maps time by recording subtle changes in nature. In this rhythm of fleeting moments, the micro-seasonal online calendar becomes a poetic bridge between the digital and the organic, celebrating the ephemeral permanence of life. It is a tribute to the capricious beauty of nature, an ode to all that blooms, withers and returns to the earth - an eternal cycle of impermanence and renewal.
By adopting a publishing format that follows seasonal shifts and metamorphoses every 5 days, this micro-seasonal online calendar poetically fuses the digital with the natural and the ephemeral with the ephemeral.
Although 'hidden' behind a paywall, Daisyworld Cal is a refreshing break from conventional media cycles, acting as a shared notebook of sorts, housing quotes, audio, recipes and other snippets worth 'standing still' for. In a world driven by speed and instant gratification, this rhythm encourages bite-sized engagement, attentive to incremental change. While maintaining a mailbox-first approach, Subtack's publication does not fall into the trap of explicitly centering the authors' lived experience as a prompt for reflection on wider contexts. The publication format, while online, decentres the digital-only affliction of promoting a false sense of urgency and shifts the focus to (digital) storytelling in form and content as an ode to the cyclical, evolving process in which storytelling and observation naturally unfold.
“Eulogizing the capriciousness of nature and all that blooms and is destined to die.”
10.04.25
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As the online realm often feels infinite, this directory highlights non-commercial, critical, and experimental online content related (but not limited) to fashion and creative practices. It features projects, essays, visuals, and events, offering tools to navigate this dynamic landscape.
In gathering a wide variety of practitioners and collectives, we are always expanding, and looking to add to this growing bibliography of ‘being online’.
If you've encountered or created something that fits within this scope, feel free to share and submit!
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