Screening Fashion and the Virtual Commons, Part 2
Illustration by Mike Thompson
The pandemic has shown just how responsive and ready the various influencers, along with their various technologically savvy avatars and proxies, have been. Continuing from the first part of “Screening Fashion,” I’d like to spend some time reflecting on the lasting impact of fashion going virtual, how screening fashion can both break down barriers (while also building new ones), and the virtual commons that a fashion gone virtual can constitute.
In the first part of “Screening Fashion” I looked at the different references of screening fashion. The references had something in common: a policing mentality determining who and what was welcome, what could be seen, shown, said, and done. Screening, like at an airport or for an actor, referred to determining and regulating the fashion available. The difficulties of certain high fashion houses to go virtual in a successful, or even appropriate, manner reveal a number of possibilities, of alternative opportunities, for those involved, or interested in becoming involved, in fashion. During such times, the failure of high fashion to provide results that resonate with others — even of an escapist mentality — reveal possibilities for others to do and make, if not succeed. This possibility of participation — more than the logic of success — is virtually embodied in another meaning of screening fashion and contributes to the formation of a virtual commons. Before articulating how we should re-imagine screening fashion in order to fashion a virtual commons of clothing, I will address the limitations of simply transplanting high fashion onto a virtual template.
“During such times, the failure of high fashion to provide results that resonate with others — even of an escapist mentality — reveal possibilities for others to do and make, if not succeed.”
How does one make sense of a world when their cognitive mapping, their ability to relate to and find social meaning and belonging, no longer corresponds and the world reveals a perpetual senselessness? Can fashion mean anything during such times? Does high fashion reveal, for all to see, exclusionary practices that were always there, or does it allow change to come from and to the catwalk? What does leisure, if indeed high fashion is related to leisure, have to say in response to these times? The answers to those questions remain, and will remain, open for the near future, eschewing any easy or single response. Responses require more than one person or a team of people. Answers can only be effective when they are site-specific — there is no one-size fits all response available — yet they must also be adaptable and in conversation with other spaces.
We can imagine a number of scenarios. One possible answer could be: high fashion teaming with AI, with robot models donning the clothes and rolling down the runway to be greeted by a crowd of other robots, with tablets for faces, zooming and Skyping in viewers, and sounds from previous shows edited to give the air of an alive live show (as various sports leagues have done recently). One can even image the fashion models zooming in from home, their faces appearing clear upon the ai robot models. Or perhaps, clothes will be mailed to the models’ home, along with an at-home studio, like radio programs these days, with camera to send digitally the picture to a screen where the fashion show commences. The models tune-in from their home, switching in and out of clothes, and audiences log in to the fashion houses digital platform to view the show, paying the requisite subscription fee. Or perhaps, another possibility: a digital smart-bodysuit sent to each model that they need only put on and various outfits are digitally programmed and fitted onto them: a clothing green screen. The models need not change the clothes, the clothing need not be actually made and mailed, and all can watch the show in their favorite pajamas or black-tie, while at home with a Bellini or martini in hand.
What all of those possibilities have in common is keeping what was already in place the same; that is, how to make the same actors all participate in their same roles without undermining the functioning of the machinery or expanding this space to others. The show, this argument claims, must go on.
I used the above thought-experiment to emphasize one kind of a response to these times. This one does not consider it necessary to alter the structure of the events and indeed probably thinks once things settle down all can return to how they were. This model superimposes on the future the way things were done in the past. The future becomes calculated and determined, a carbon copy with appropriate half-life simply placed in the future. Adaptability, according to this style of response — and it is a style — does not expand horizons but updates physical gatekeeping to digital gatekeeping.
For the rest of this piece, I’d like to consider another style of response to the pandemic. One that extends beyond the bounds of high fashion, though it could also participate in fashion, is open-minded and open source. It is a response where the future maintains its indeterminacy and unexpectedness. The future no longer as something one can calculate for and approach according to a set plan, but where certain elements are left as floating variables. Rather than simply repeating and reproducing an existing style for future times, it sees the current pandemic as a cause for change to the very mode of conducting high fashion. The pandemic necessarily alters the very fabric of fashion so that screening fashion becomes less gatekeeping and more possibility projecting. Rather than covering over, the screen assumes the guise of canvas for any and all. And they need not even consider fashion as spurring the change, but as the change coming from innumerable places — so it is a non-hierarchical or acephalous organization with no central authority — comprising of even more actors and participants.
This is where another meaning for screening fashion arrives: it involves the multiple projections that people have of fashion, the limitless possibilities for different people to come together and work on a project — one of many — where they project and screen their doings, sayings, and makings. Fashion, from the Latin facere, implies a doing, a making. The English verb of “fashion,” as in to fashion something, bears the trace of this sedimented historical-linguistic meaning. This is what I propose to keep in mind for the other meaning of screening fashion. It involves a projecting of one’s doings. Where ossified forms of thinking no longer work or fail entirely, new ways of doing and making are required. This is precisely where screening fashion — understood as the doings and makings of those excluded from, or not usually participating in high fashion — starts to, and the, party.
“One need not be socially distant just because they are physically distant. This is where the virtual commons comes in.”
The virtual commons that screening fashion produces and forms are the ad hoc projects. People coming together for an afternoon, a weekend, a week to work with one another in order to produce their own fashion show. The show can be filmed on a digital camera, smart phone, computer camera etc., and edited later on. This fashion show can take place in a kitchen, the backyard, an empty street after hours, where a local business forms the backdrop to the catwalk. People in the neighborhood can participate, strangers coming in and out of the frame, friends are invited. Fashion the kinds of masks you and others wear. There can even be a potluck aspect to it, where friends who cook share dishes and recipes, later to be included online. If you cannot, due to physical distancing, get together with others, you and they can record one another in different spaces and then splice and edit the recordings together. Record and post later on, as a post-production feature, a virtual meeting with the participants, discussing the highs and lows of the show. Anyone can participate and everyone is welcome, to share, dress, make, and do. This is the virtual commons of clothing, a virtual display of community that shows others different ways of fashioning community. One need not be socially distant just because they are physically distant. This is where the virtual commons comes in.
To conclude with a bit of inspiration from an unlikely source, given what this overall piece was about. The last entry in Christian Dior’s Little Dictionary of Fashion is zest, and his account does a good job capturing the potential of virtual fashion shows put on by individuals at home and along with their friends. As a conclusion to the dictionary, and also this piece, it deserves to be quoted in full:
“This is a happy word with which to end my dictionary of fashion. Anything you do, work or pleasure, you have to do it with zest. You have to live with zest … and that is the secret of beauty and fashion, too. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest. There is no fashion which is good without care, enthusiasm and zest behind it. Zest in designing … zest in making … and zest in wearing your clothes.” [1]
In response to the truth revealed during these exceptional circumstances, independent designers must work together to achieve this ideal of zest: to create the work, to film their virtual show, to share links with one another, and provide viewers to see the fashion show such a virtual commons can achieve. That would achieve the kind of zest Dior had written about, a zest befitting independent fashion, displayed virtually for all the world to see. The failures of a hegemonic order, or the stumbling of power, reveal as much the ossified forms of ‘business as usual’ as they also provide space and opportunities for those who have been marginalized to participate in, and constitute, a different world. This logic is not one of substitution, where something takes the place of another; rather, it is additive, excessive, open to others and inclusive. Rather than the limited capacity of a physical space and exclusivity of economic caste, it is the openness of an unbounded set, the inclusivity of the virtual social space, and has the differential capacity befitting fashion’s own eclectic and diverse fabric. Against the failures of a monolithic fashion system, we see the possibilities for a virtual commons accepting of difference in all of its myriad forms.
The material condition for the possibility of a virtual commons is to be located in the public sphere. In a future piece I will address just what the public sphere is, how it reveals itself today, and in what ways fashion constitutes a public sphere.
Notes
[1] Christian Dior, The Little Dictionary of Fashion. New York: Abrams books, 2007, p. 126.
