The digital screen and fashion form the cornerstones of modern day consumer culture. Now the two are increasingly fused, but back in 2009, Alexander McQueen was one of the first designers to capitalise on this. The designer brought his creations into the digital sphere by live-streaming the apocalyptic, sea creature-inspired spring/summer 2010 vision, ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, on SHOWstudio.com.
The much-appropriated Bryanboy gesture – one hand at waist, hip cocked with the other hand is held high, proudly clutching a designer handbag – has become a powerful symbol in the digital era. More broadly, the ‘blogger pose’, as it has come to be known in the digital landscape, has given the everyday fashion follower the opportunity to adopt a centre-of-attention status in a culture of fashion commerce.
In 2011, a ‘Birkin’ bag, the iconic Hermès made-to-measure travelgood, sold for a record price of $US203,000 at Heritage, an auction house that specialises in luxury accessories. Taking advantage of this burgeoning market, Christies began selling luxury accessories, listing Birkin bags and other similar brands for hefty prices.
A quick Google search on ‘socialite’ will inevitably come up with any number of recognisable faces from twenty-first century celebrity culture. Touted by gossip magazines and tabloids like The Daily Mail, Hello and Who, the term is rarely used with flattering connotations. Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, Tara Reid, Blake Lively and Kim Kardashian, among many other women, are just some of the wayward celebrities that nowadays are deemed as ‘socialites’.
NASA sought public engagement by inviting audiences to vote on the design of their new generation of spacesuit, and as a result the designs incorporate elements of contemporary fashion in an effort to gain popularity. To reinstate their position, NASA has recently sought public engagement to counteract competition from emerging corporations including Virgin Galactic and SpaceX.
Thorstein Veblen’s Theory and Tweed in the Twenty-first Century
The American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class remains an influential work in sartorial studies, although it is typically invoked as an Aunt Sally, and a popular subject of criticism and contention. Veblen’s thesis, which is probably better known for enunciating the concept of ‘conspicuous consumption’, identified a burgeoning social elite within nineteenth-century America: the Leisure Class.
Released in 1874, the same year of its demise, Mallarmé’s La Dernière Mode, is a magazine/art project/journal on fashion that has come to be regarded as one of the most important publications in fashion academia and literature, and indeed our critical understanding of fashion today.
Fashion’s love affair with architecture is, at least at face value, an aspirational one, the academic tendencies of architectural discourse lend authenticity to fashion, which is traditionally perceived as trivial, and changeable in contrast to the sheer solidity of an architectural structure.
For most of us, our closets are home to sentimental garments with a story to tell alongside clothes we tend to forget. Wardrobes reveal the complex and often contradicting perceptions that dictate how we emotionally prioritise our clothing.
The concrete stage of a street-scape is where fashion becomes visible, meaningful, and most importantly, embodied. From the mundane surrounds of down-and-out urban areas, to the poised, style-conscious images from a street photographer, the power of the street-scape and its importance to the fashioned body is often overlooked.
In October 2012, Prada announced the winners of its Prada Journal contest, an initiative, in partnership with Italian publishers Giangiacomo Fettrinelli Editore, soliciting short stories from emerging writers for publication in a new print and online magazine ‘in keeping with the brand’s innovative spirit and constant search for new creative voices.’
The creative marriage between James Dyson and Issey Miyake Design Studio has given birth to a series of projects between the two companies which began when Fujiwara invited Dyson to work on the Issey Miyake spring/summer 2006 collection.