Fashion through the looking glass – The new circle of production of imaginaries within the Digital world (2025)

Digital Iconographies and Social Fictions: How Fashion and Technology Inform the Everyday

In a scene from the 1995 pop culture movie Clueless, Alicia Silverstone's character is doubtful of how to dress and picks her clothes using a computerised program that allows her to sort out and match various garments in a virtual dressing room. By exploring ways to combine them, Cher not only creates a style for her persona, but also commits herself to how technology and media shape fashion in the everyday. Some years earlier, in the 1989 sequel Back to the Future II, Michael J. Fox's character Marty travels to the future and arrives in 2015. The technological and socio-cultural changes that would occur today, as pictured in the movie, are defined by the ubiquity of cameras and TVs, unmanned drones and video chat systems, video game systems, head-mounted displays, 3D and wearable technology. Marty's shoes with automatic shoelaces, a similar version of which Nike would release in 2008 as Hyperdunk Supreme -is but an example of how technological fictions as presented in films infiltrate and redefine the everyday. Like the self-lacing shoes, clothes that can adjust to fit the body are a type of reactive clothing that describes our evolving interaction with technology in everyday life and the enhancement of the human body.

Virtual Fashion Design: Technoaesthetics and the new fashion semantics

Critical Fashion Studies Conference, University of Melbourne, 2020

What are the value propositions in the context of techno-aesthetics and immediate downloads? This digital ethnography analysis focuses on the use of technology to construct alternative fashion creation and consumption processes. It reviews new virtual fashion narratives ranging from waste-reducing virtual fashion to the creation of virtual archives, as well as new and inclusive virtual dialogues. While technological developments in the fashion domain have been largely driven by the priorities of international conglomerates, focused on commercial production and distribution logistics, this research reviews the use of technology to create alternative ways of designing, thinking, making, and wearing fashion, namely in virtual spaces. It aims to broaden the debate on new virtual narratives in fashion design practice, the need for integration of digital skills in fashion education, and the increasing shift towards digital fashion communication as “being fashion. Co-authored with Alexia Mathieu, Head of Master Media Design at HEAD – Genève

NO SHIRTS NO STORIES Kaarina Kaikkonen designating the centrality of fashion in relation to individual and collective experiences Doron Beuns 8-6-2015

CS 1/2017 - Fashionating Images. Audiovisual Media Studies Meet Fashion

2017

Over the past decades, fashion has acquired centrality in social and economic processes for its capacity to penetrate and influence both cultural production and identitarian practices. The proliferation of media objects such as fashion films, makeover TV shows, fashion blogs and vlogs has shown how prolific the encounter between fashion and audiovisual media can be. The aim of this special issue is to explore this intersection and, consequently, the cross fertilization between fashion studies and media studies, with particular regard to audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and digital video. The essays interrogate how the combination of fashion and the moving-image enables us to reflect upon the ubiquitous presence of fashion in our media-saturated landscape, and at the same time upon the ubiquitous presence of media in socio-cultural practices and industrial processes such as fashion. Questioning the encounter between audiovisual media and fashion brings an elective affinity to light. If fashion is central to cinema and television and gives rise to a wide range of new genres and formats, it also impacts on the forms of representation and expression of identity and the body via personal and social media, according to the prevailing customs and tastes of our place and time. This encounter is a terrain of experimentation with new trends in the media experience – ones that rely on performativity and the enhancement of the viewer/user’s agency. After all, audiovisual media are similarly about constructing a fictional (and entertaining) world and actively and creatively inhabiting it as an essential part of the actual world.

Imagining and Imaging Future Fashion

This project takes the researcher’s established fashion and textile design practice into a new space of the virtual and digital as a context for creative enquiry. Through discussion on two speculative experiments that use motion capture technology, this enquiry considers the transformational potential of a digital materiality as an environment in which to re-imagine and re-image the surfaces of future fashion. Specifically, it asks what influence the virtual/digital environment will have in shaping the aesthetics of the experiments. These acts of transformation, through morphing surfaces and shape-shifting material forms, question contemporary norms of using, consuming, engaging with and understanding fashion and textiles. Enfolded in this creative research is the recognition of how these shifts from matter to metaphor, from object to ephemeral, from dress to transformable interface could ignite alternatives to the current fashion manufacture and consumption process.

Fashionating Images. Audiovisual Media Studies Meet Fashion

Over the past decades, fashion has acquired centrality in social and economic processes in Western culture for its capacity to penetrate and influence both cultural production and identitarian practices. In the last few years, the proliferation of media objects, such as fashion films, makeover TV shows, fashion blogs and vlogs has shown how prolific the encounter between fashion and audiovisual media can be. The aim of this special issue is to explore this intersection and, consequently, the cross fertilization between fashion studies and media studies, with particular regard to audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and digital video. The fundamental idea behind all the contributions to the issue is that a strong mutual relationship binds the moving-image and fashion together, where by ‘fashion’ is not meant merely clothing, but rather a wide set of social performative practices characterized by a tension towards – or even an obsession with – the ‘new’. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, the elective affinities between the moving-image and fashion can be explored using a number of approaches, and in regard to a variety of formats and media environments, according to the extension of the moving-image/fashion relationship from cinema screens to TV screens, computer monitors and mobile devices displays. This Introduction traces a genealogy of the intersection between these two media, from cinema to YouTube, and highlights some of the main theoretical issues dealt with by the contributions.

Fashion Films and Net-aesthetics

DavidPublishing, 2016

Fashion Film is the last communication tool in fashion market, that was born for the Web about 20 years ago, but in these last 10 years it has increased its diffusion and its expressive potentiality definitely and we think that it is designed to influence the communication in other markets. Nowadays Fashion Films are reinforcing the power of fashion images, building up new brand experiences for net-consumers: they are painting new worlds for fashion brands thanks to the old cinematographic language mixed to recent Internet logics. Starting from this observation, our main question was: Can we talk about a new fashion net-aesthetics for these new fashion tales? Using a semiotics approach, this study investigates how Fashion, Cinema and the Net come together, producing new aesthetics, with new languages and new imaginary in fashion. The result can be really visionary. Fashion Advertising and Fashion Tales  In last years Fashion Brands have matured a great ability and awareness in creating new kinds of Fashion Tales: indeed these stories picture imaginary worlds, that look very different in form and content compared to those of the past, beginning with their protagonists, the women models and ending to new communication format. In the 1990s, top super models were gifted with a strong personality, which was further enhanced on the runaway and showed off on the advertising campaigns. Their exclusive look, classical beauty and lifestyle conveyed a shimmering luxury, which was a symbol of perfection. In contrast, current models are often anonymous, hardly ever recognisable and very pale, with short professional careers and they do not represent classical beauty. Obviously, the exceptions are those top models who have been able to embody fashion. In the past Veruska and Twiggy were successful in this, whereas today Eddie Campbell and Georgia May Jagger or Kristen Steward and Cara Delevigne appear to have this quality. But the extraordinary phenomenon of top super models in the 1990s consisted of a solid block of divas who symbolised women who were successful in their public and private lives, and constituted an aspirational model of perfection and luxury. It may be a paradox, but current models do not aim to be liked as women, rather only as models. Often such women seem to have a talent for appearing like ghosts, or they represent strong and pugnacious women. Such a huge difference in the choice of fashion's protagonists is closely linked to the background values attributed to fashion production, which also differ in the two periods being compared. Indeed, in the 1990s, the

Digital Fashion Bodies: Posthuman Perspectives

Nauka televideniâ, 2022

The paper analyzes the concept of digital corporeality and identity and their representation in virtual images of digital fashion. Digital fashion is a new field of fashion that develops in the interdisciplinary space made of information technology, gaming industry and digital art. The article assumes that the digital fashion body depends neither on the human nor the human body. The digital body is non-human and it explicitly represents a posthumanist corporeality as a cyborg formation (D. Haraway). It assembles through machinery and becomes randomly fixed assemblages (G. Deleuze, F. Guattari; M. Delande). The author draws on concepts of new materialism, including the concept of the plane of immanence by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari's, J. Bennett's vibrant matter and K. Barad's agential realism. New materialism shows radical change of the digital corporeality discourse. The author analyzes digital fashion projects posted on digital fashion retail platforms, such as The Fabricant, Dematerialised, DressX, Artisant, and works of digital designers who have gained fame through participation in digital shows.

Redressing Perspectives: Mediation, Embodiment and Materiality in Digital Fashion and Textiles

Necsus. European Journal of Media Studies, 2017

Digital Research and Costume Design: The Digital and Interactive Process of Media Visuality

Communities and Artistic Participation in Hybrid Environment (CAPHE) HORIZON-MSCA-2021-SE-01, 2024

The article proposal is based on the researchers' experience in academic production and as performing arts professionals, conjuring up the practice of costume design with their doctoral research, where the same digital media and technological resources are used to analyse and create the image. The sketches for a costume project developed in partnership will be used as case studies to guide the writing and thinking process (the original material cannot be used due to a confidentiality clause with the HBO production). In addition, material produced to illustrate the process will be used to demonstrate the method of understanding research through it. We intend to present the strategies for developing the construction and analysis of costumes for television and cinematographic media productions based on the following steps: first, exposing the processes of creation and analysis of costume images shaped by "manual" forms of digital experience construction as an essential tool for conceptual understanding of media visuality through the use of technological resources, from the elaboration of database resources, using digital collections and digitisation, for the construction of illustrations and sketches that are sensorially tangible to the design. The second stage is dedicated to the practice of scene design, concept development and costume design with practical cases. The elaboration of projects is based on inspirations and collections as a starting point for new creations using costume design and digital tools. Semiological analysis is used as a resource, a knowledge element and a conceptual elaboration of costume design and its research. In the third part, we will present the development of costumes as a concept for understanding the construction of media and cinematic atmospheres. We will use costume design and digital tools as a resource for semiological analysis to understand the costume designer's creative process, starting from the final result, i.e. the scenes and the framing. Therefore, we intend to demonstrate the possibilities and the artistic quality that can be achieved through technological applications without compromising the traditional and already known ways of constructing costume projects for the performing arts, such as freehand drawing and collage, but still ensuring agility and a greater connection between new visual languages and image quality, both television and cinema and the creation process for such. In this way, we will continue to emphasise the relationship between academic production and practical production as two sides of the same coin, in symbiosis and necessary for the artistic and cognitive expansion of creative processes.