Property:Reflection
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Quicho’s girl-stack is a speculative prototype models themany dimensions of the girl’s natural online habitat. To be clear: Quicho does not speak of actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl. So, the girl as a vehicle for selling product, the girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, the girl as living currency, and the girl as desiring machine. The model is imperative for understanding the environment that produces the ‘girl as condition’. +
Orit Gat’s essay “Scroll, Skim, Stare” in *The White Review* explores the evolving role of artists' websites in the contemporary digital landscape. Gat argues that while the internet has transformed art consumption, the design of artists' websites often remains static and uninspired. She suggests that these sites could be more dynamic, serving as online exhibition spaces that challenge the traditional gallery format. Gat emphasizes the potential for artists to leverage their websites to present and control their work uniquely and creatively, thus reshaping the visual culture of the internet. +
The essay's concept of "Endarkenment" connects to how we experience fashion online by highlighting emerging digital aesthetics and trends that embrace chaos, complexity, and non-traditional beauty. Online fashion communities reflect this through styles like "indiesleaze" and "ratgirlsummer," which celebrate raw, unpolished looks, and "technomysticism" that merges spirituality with cybernetics. Platforms like Instagram curate these trends, showcasing designs that fuse nature with technology or embrace hyper-femininity and grotesque, anti-minimalist aesthetics. These digital movements redefine fashion by rejecting conventional norms and finding beauty in unconventional, dark, and chaotic expressions. +
While lookbook offers an examination of the intersection of fashion and digital culture as it immerses the viewer in a hyper-stylised digital environment, utilising motion sensors and abstract imagery to transform familiar, lived experiences into something eerily distant when played out on screen. This dissonance challenges our perceptions of reality, suggesting that the digital mediation of fashion can distance us from the authenticity of human experience, making the familiar strangely unsettling. +
The essay's discussion of the internet's fragmentation can be linked to online fashion cultures, where digital spaces have become increasingly niche and isolated. Just as the internet splinters into distinct communities with their own languages and norms, fashion subcultures online—like streetwear, high fashion, or vintage—develop their own unique styles, terminologies, and identities. This fragmentation can both foster strong in-group connections and create barriers to broader communication and understanding between different fashion communities, mirroring the challenges of "Babelification." +
The concept of "swarms" can be connected to the online fashion landscape by considering how decentralized, collective behaviors emerge in digital spaces. In fashion, swarms can be seen in how trends develop, spread, and evolve without a centralized authority. Social media platforms, influencer culture, and digital communities act as nodes in a network where fashion trends are collectively shaped, shared, and adopted. These swarms enable rapid shifts in consumer preferences, allowing niche styles to become mainstream almost overnight, reflecting the fluid and adaptive nature of digital fashion ecosystems. +
Whole Earth published a number of singular publications throughout its run focused on topical themes, or containing content from aligned organizations. Often these volumes reprinted articles from prior Whole Earth perodical journals, supplemented with new content. And, while the entire archive is insightful and lives up to its “access to tools, ideas, and practices” byline, side projects like 'The Whole Earth <I>Software</I> Catalog' deserve special attention. Originally proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which “would do for computing what the original had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emerged”, it seems to have been to ahead of its time. The first issue was released in the Fall of 1984. The Whole Earth Software Catalog was a business failure, however, and was only published twice, with only three of the Whole Earth Software Review supplements published. If we were to position this publication in the here and now, it would most likely belong to the niche digital networks that are sprouting from spaces such as are.na and the handmade web. +
GP is founded by Lejla Vala Verheus and is part of an ongoing research on open-source methodologies in textile craft and the digital realm, drawing upon her background as a critical fashion practitioner and graphic designer. By rediscovering overlooked codes and relationships, questioning traditional publishing methods, and blending fashion with printed media, Lejla aims to create new narratives in the fashion realm. +
In this conversation, Amisola explores the agency inherent in 'embodying' technology, where her poetic, chaotic and calming performances reveal how online spaces can become canvases for self-creation, transformation and sharing. Her work in Internet art performance highlights the potential of digital spaces as extensions of (cultural) identity.
Amisola's approach to digital embodiment can critically inform how we view fashion as a social system in online spaces. By 'authoring' identity - through online fashion, words or images - the digital self can become both publisher and platform, forever shifting, growing, shrinking as an evolving interface. +
While acclaimed for its radical rethinking of narrative structures, challenging traditional linear storytelling and instead presenting fiction as a collection of diverse, interconnected experiences, Le Guin's perspective is primarily driven by the importance of inclusivity and multiplicity of voices. It considers how narratives can be used to facilitate understanding of complex human experiences, rather than merely serving as vehicles for plot-driven heroics. It takes special note on the act of 'gathering' and is therefore often referred to by collectives and practitioners that focus on gathering tools, people, experiences and non-conformist ways of doing. By advocating this more holistic, and more inclusive approach to storytelling, Le Guin critiques dominant cultural narratives and opens up space for alternative forms of expression. +
The Angel Mode Issue explores the intersection of online aesthetics and identities, focusing on the "angel" as a symbol for transcendent, hyper-feminine personas. This ties into ongoing online discourse of femininity, vulnerability, and performance, often communicated through ethereal-esque aesthetics, cyberpunk references, and soft romanticism style write-ups. The "angel" metaphor also critiques our roles in cybernetic systems, where humans act as conduits for larger external forces. Embracing this mode reflects a shift from individuality toward alignment with overarching digital and 'transcendental' patterns. +
In his opening remarks, Dr. Daniel Felstead highlights the growing influence of fashion and gaming in today's cultural landscape, particularly in the context of societal shifts and the decline of traditional art forms. Both industries excel in world-building, blending economic, social, and aesthetic elements into immersive narratives. The convergence of gaming's interactive environments and fashion's diverse media outputs reflects and momentarily escapes today's chaotic realities. Fashion is increasingly being viewed as a form of "world-building technology," as evidenced by collaborations such as Balenciaga's forays into gaming. This cultural shift and growing relationship between these sectors raises questions about how such immersive worlds influence our identities, bodies and societal roles in this period of transformation. +
MythMagazine is a digital-first editorial journal, created with digital affordances at its core, rather than as a print adaptation. The magazine takes a screen-first approach to its fashion editorials, incorporating a variety of visual elements such as still, moving, looping, glitching and collaged imagery, as well as sound. This approach differs from the post-human aesthetics commonly seen in digital-first fashion practices.. , +
The concept of Memestrilism offers a critical lens on the current online zeitgeist, particularly in fashion, by highlighting how cultural appropriation and racial stereotyping continue to manifest in digital spaces. In fashion, the commodification of black culture often intersects with the 'meme economy' of social media, where trends are amplified, decontextualised and stripped of their origins for mass consumption.
The digital landscape thrives on 'hypervisibility', where cultural markers are presented as bold statements, but often lack the necessary cultural nuance. Often Black cultural expressions - hairstyles, clothing styles, linguistic expressions and aesthetics - are showcased through influencers or memes that gain widespread appeal, often without reference to their roots. This parallels historical minstrelsy, where black identity was caricatured and exploited for entertainment. The digital age exacerbates this by enabling the rapid dissemination and monetisation of these trends, further blurring the line between homage and exploitation.
Ogwo's exploration of memestrilism not only critiques, but also reflects the larger conversations taking place in digital fashion spaces about authenticity, representation and the ethics of appropriation in a globalised, meme-driven culture. +