Another fashion month passes by. Discourse about quiet luxury and flashing spectacle succumb to bedbug outbreaks and late-to-the-game luxury fast fashion. Four cities of celebrity, influence, expended wealth, and countless garments bought, sold, and teased. It was halfway through this month of glamour during London Fashion Week, right before Daniel Lee’s Burberry show that my computer died and I flew across the country for a new city and a new home.
For two weeks I was a wreck, doing all I could to appreciate the Prada and analyze the Gucci behind my still un-upgraded iPhone. A friend lent me a computer for higher definition study, but scrolling through Vogue Runway attempting to catch up with fashion’s cruel pace, something was still missing. Usually, I maintain an almost 70 thousand image mood board which I add to daily. Adding the looks of a show I admire or am otherwise struck by is a curious safety blanket - a method of processing the comparative impact the show has on my psyche and collage of cultural references. This was impossible to do without a computer.
My ability to totally view the fashion show felt stilted by this practice which once gave me a sense of ownership and personal stake in a sometimes distant seeming world. While entertaining, this is a deeply dysfunctional system of processing art - one that reduces artistic experience to cataloging and bulldozes complexity for the sake of uniformity. It’s the same reason I’ve done away with Letterboxd ratings and shied away from the grand challenge of RateyourMusic. The mood board is the last vestige of this impulse, and as I flipped through the runways of the day, despondent that I could not organize them and distressed that I had to, I recognized its true warping of my ability to process.
Ultimately, I found a degree of dissatisfaction processing with access to the moodbaord without it. With it I was trapped by a machine of my own making, but without it I was subject to a more chaotic sense of endless, meaningless noise. Vogue runway is not a more engaging tool without an open google photos tab beside it. These tools were just as impersonal, just as homogenizing, and just as depressing.
Mckenzie Wark, in a recent piece for Document Journal, wonders “What counts, these days, as an aesthetic experience worth having?” She continues, “There’s just so much “content” everywhere, such a total saturation, that it gets hard to orient oneself toward any particular instance that might enliven the senses. All of it happens as some sort of business.” Wark’s criticism seems leveled at both the scope of artistic production and consumption - art is created as content and consumed in a sanitized, businesslike fashion.
One could certainly define much of last month’s fashion week hoopla as businesslike. The fervor about new creative directors in major houses yielded the parading of new brand colors, new Frankenstein garments of archives past, and applause for transactional customer satisfaction. In other words, no landscape for surprise, danger, or deviation. As Wark puts it, “Today’s information business picks over the corpse of culture. Scavenging for scraps of value to extract.”
It goes beyond the houses and designers themselves. Beauty, experimentation, and risk emerge in this landscape in the same tidy boxes of the internet archive or video player. An 8-hour rave by Diesel, Prada’s tunnel of slime, and a shadowy runway receive the same photography, formatting, and aesthetic. When outside photographers are used to shoot these collections with direction and stylistic experimentation, as was the case with Peter Do’s Helmut Lang and Rick Owens, these shows come alive in a digital space that tends to homogenize. Perhaps this is why publications like the aforementioned Document Journal have taken to covering shows alongside illustrations of the models rather than runway pictures - they ignite the imagination and articulate the garment in a way their bland representation does not.
With my archive returned to me, I wondered just how different it was from those that I culled from that I deemed so restrictive, and whether this practice actually improved my way of experiencing a fashion show. Was I creating a meaningful way to experience the digital fashion world, or fooling myself into growing even more separated from its emotional breadth?
Within the digital Vogue archives sits a 2020 piece by Liam Hess entitled, “The Prada Menswear Show I Didn’t Attend, But Will Never Forget“. It’s the articulation of a rarely described space for the modern fashion fan: the pristine white and advertisement-addled walls of the Vogue Runway website. Hess describes being a high schooler hiding a love of glamour happening upon the ostentatiousness of Prada’s velvety and grand FW12 menswear spectacle - an ode to the costume of the Cold War spy thriller with Gary Oldman and Adrien Brody on the runway in coats and furs. Hess sees it online and checks YouTube to see the coats swing and the round glasses twinkle.
The power of this digital space and experience, and the arc of Hess’ piece, is that it transforms him from one who sees ownership of these garments as unimportant to one combing eBay for the show’s pieces, famed and forgotten. He settles on a pair of glistening brogues with floral appliqués which he cleans and covets. Their eventual scuffing convinces Hess of the evolution of the shoes from abstract fantasy to individual artifact, more his than Prada’s.
Hess speaks to a generation for whom digital collections still weigh heavy. Collections like Raf Simons’ Calvin Klein debut or Virgil Abloh’s Louis Vuitton still hold power beyond the screen - proof that digital does not flatten all. The aesthetic impact of these collections and the strength of their presentations is powerful enough to stand out in the homogenous archive space. However, the next step in these legendary collections, just like for Hess, is to translate the collection into the physical world. This begs the question: what happens to that initial desire without a store to visit, brogues to hold or any inkling of physical experience?
I never got the opportunity to touch the garments I studied for my thesis project, a yearlong dive into the work of four designers’ experiments with text. Some of these works existed on the internet in inconsistent and slippery forms. one was by a well known designer: Jean Paul Gaultier. Surprisingly to me, Gaultier’s SS97 womenswear show is documented sporadically on video and his menswear iteration in varying quality in obscure corners. Comparatively less mainstream designers like Undercover’s Jun Takahashi have shows with almost no digital footprint despite their recency. I learned a pair of “neoboy” trousers I was studying were from Undercover’s SS09 show “Neoboys & Poptonez”, a show with little to no documentation that is actually three separate mini collections (I wrote about this more at length here). Every three months I find a new garment sold from SS09, and that’s only thanks to stalking Grailed and eBay. My only other option was to pore randomly through Japanese fashion magazines or personal archives I did not have access to.
The digital space can titillate with the breadth it can display, and all that it hides and forgets.
In a world of noise, the pursuit of access to art does not protect artistic experience. Everyone’s ability to see a Jackson Pollock painting doesn’t equate to the experience of seeing the drips in person, just as access to the previously lost Soviet-Cuban masterpiece Soy Cuba doesn’t guarantee the ability to see it on a large screen in high definition.
The boundaries of the digital fashion world are large. Large enough to allow masterful work to stand apart from mediocrity and sameness, yet small enough to inspire obsessive probing beyond its capacities and expand into the physical world. The time and dedication required to become ones own digital archivist grows more and more daunting by the day as I settle into my new home and rhythm, leaving fewer options for how to “properly“ engage with the medium I so dearly love.
I suppose all I want is a voice as bored as I am. I want to know that designers, writers, and audiences are open to new formats and ways of expressing and seeing clothing that can challenge and ultimately expand the digital spaces they are trafficked. I am not one to solely bemoan fashion week mediocrity, commerciality, and excess. Those making powerful work will be available to those who look. What I do care about, is that those designers have a medium of presenting their work that does it justice. The digital runway does not deserve anything less than a structure that engages, experiments, and reflects. I fear it settles for far less.