Kategorie: Ausgaben

By Swantje Martach

By Adil Boughlala, Vera van Nuenen and Anneke Smelik | This paper presents an intergenerational dialogue between a senior fashion theorist and two early-career researchers, exploring emerging perspectives on digital fashion and theory. In addition to their academic work, the two early-career researchers also edit WETWARE Magazine, an experimental publication dedicated to digital fashion. The authors examine how digital fashion functions primarily as a pictorial practice—rooted in image-making, screen cultures, and visual aesthetics—while simultaneously challenging traditional definitions of fashion as material, tactile, and body-bound. This dialogue positions digital fashion within a broader shift toward fashion’s increasing visuality, shaped by platforms such as social media, immersive VR/AR, gaming environments, NFTs, and virtual archives. The authors explore how digital garments are created to be circulated, seen, and experienced visually rather than worn physically. Drawing on posthumanism, new materialism, and visual culture, the authors highlight how digital fashion blurs boundaries between object and image, presence and simulation, fashion and media.

Key themes include the nature of digital garments; the evolution of fashion as a screen-based, image-driven practice; the role of visual tactility in simulating material qualities; and the emotional attachments formed around intangible yet culturally potent fashion objects. The dialogue addresses the paradox of digital fashion’s ephemerality within a hyper-material consumer society and its entanglement with infrastructures of display and mediation. The authors underscore the current trends and changes in fashion by linking digital fashion to pictorial and medial practices, both screen-based and printed, while interrogating the position of digital fashion within the broader scope of fashion studies and contemporary fashion discourse.

By Tyla Stevenson | Digital fashion, a burgeoning intersection of digital media and the fashion industry, consists of 3D-modeled garments and accessories that are represented through digital environments such as metaverses, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and sold or authenticated using non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Unlike physical fashion, these digital items do not exist in conventional material form and are not designed for physical wear, shifting the pictorial representation of fashion from digital photography to computer-generated imagery (CGI). This paper critically examines discourses surrounding digital fashion and the perceptions of immateriality as well as common associations between technological advancement and political and social progress. These discourses are often framed by technological determinism, which positions the rise of digital worlds as inevitable, and presents innovation as a natural response to historical developments.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the materiality of digital fashion which arises from the engagement between physical bodies and digital spaces. Furthermore, this process relies on physical infrastructures, from technological hardware and servers to the environmental impacts tied to its circulation and storage, and is further shaped by the software and platforms that enable its production and use. This study provides a framework to engage critically with digital fashion’s conceptual and material dimensions, offering insight into its evolving role in the larger discourse on technology and culture as virtual spaces continue to expand.

By Charlotte Brachtendorf | With the rise of multimodal AI tools, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, it has never been easier and faster to produce compelling fashion images. While the proliferation of AI-generated fashion images can be seen as the ultimate triumph of the fashion image over both fashion text and fashionable garments, this paper critically examines how these images are produced, what exactly they show, and ultimately, how this impacts our understanding of fashion. Building on current research on multimodal AI, specifically text-to-image models, I argue that AI-generated fashion images are produced through textual means, that is, through »operative ekphrasis« (Bajohr 2024: 83). This means that the generation of fashion images created via multimodal AI is based on textual prompts that extract statistically probable images from a latent space, which, in turn, is the result of previously indexed and labeled image-text pairs. Because the indexing of images requires a reduction of complexity, images generated through multimodal AI are often generic. In the case of fashion images, this is reflected in the lack of texture and the reproduction of fashion photography’s conventions. As fashion photography is not necessarily a representation of ›the world‹ or even fashionable garments, it resembles AI-generated images more than other photographic genres. AI-generated fashion images are then not images of fashionable garments, but images about fashion images—a statistically probable permutation of fashion photographs from the past (cf. Meyer 2023: 108). As such, AI-generated fashion images are not only the product of a mediated collective imaginary but also feed back into it. The view on fashion shaped by AI-generated fashion images is then based on reduction and stylized normativity.

By Gerlind Hector | Im Zeitalter von Fast Fashion und schnelllebigen Mikrotrends erlebt Mode eine zunehmende Banalisierung. Interesse weckt heute die Inszenierung von Mode und weniger das It-Piece an sich (vgl. Wittich 2006). Während digitale Mode die physische Dimension von Kleidung infrage stellt, rücken Materialität und Naturbezug — in Form von Obst, Muscheln oder Blattwerk — in einen neuen Fokus. Die künstlerischen Experimente, die vorrangig auf Social Media stattfinden, spiegeln einen gesellschaftlichen Wandel wider: weg von der Konsum- und hin zur Erlebniskultur, und regen zu einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit modernen Modepraktiken an.

By Ruth Eaton | The pocket, often the subject of gendered discourse and production, is both celebrated and maligned, particularly in relation to disparities in the size and functionality of pockets in men’s and women’s clothing. Prompted by a personal experience of newfound mobility after childbirth, this paper interrogates the gendered dimensions of pocket design and explores how such everyday features reflect broader norms around autonomy, access, and embodiment. Focusing on pocket memes posted by Twitter users between 2019 and 2021, the study employs a social listening approach (cf. Stewart and Arnold 2018) to analyse both the memes and their related commentary. Drawing on Partington’s interpretation of intertextuality, which posits that meaning is generated through the viewer’s relationship with images/objects rather than the inherent properties of the images or objects themselves (cf. Partington 2013: 15). These digital artefacts are understood not as isolated images, but as part of a complex interplay of intertextual references that reflect and shape user experience.

This paper explores how participatory practices of sharing and consuming memes can facilitate online co-creation. Specifically, it investigates the role of memes featuring pockets, in communicating wearer experience of clothing pieces. The aim here is to highlight the potential of meme culture as a form of participatory commentary that reshapes perceptions of such everyday objects like the pocket. By combining insights from dress history, digital media, and feminist critique, this research demonstrates the value of social listening in understanding the intertextuality of memes from the perspective and experience of the consumer.

By Andreas Osterroth | Digital fashions, especially ›skins‹, have developed into a central means of communication within virtual environments, especially in video games. In games, users not only design their avatars, but also convey their identities, status, and belonging via their selections. Based on examples extracted from video games, the historical development and significance of skins as a digital clothing practice will be analyzed. Additionally, economic aspects will be examined, such as the role of microtransactions, that lastingly shape the market for digital fashion. The paper further discusses theoretical concepts such as speech act theory, which are necessary to adequately analyze digital fashion as an extended semiotic resource.

By Eva Balayan and Lutz Hengst | The outside is chaos. The inside is order. Both chaos and order are systems. Order is a system where a third party is able to detect a structure; while chaos is a system that cannot be comprehended. Chaos and order can be described as inside and outside: While the inside is the known area one is able to keep under control; the outside is the unknown as well as the unexpected. Relating this idea to the human body, the latter serves as a shield that protects us from the outside, and which we are convinced to control.

This idea is taken up in the work of Eva Balayan, who engages with the body as a shield or an armour that protects us while being soft, fluid, and unstable. The vulnerability behind the hard rigid shell shows the softness behind the brute defence. The internal substance that the conscious mind is so eager to understand is like a plexus—it grows on its own, spirals out of control, and breaks down the boundaries between systems. These armor-like pieces turn the body that wears them into armor itself. The content starts to grow on the surface in order to hide, to protect and to assimilate. The protection becomes no longer the aim to save what is on the inside, but takes over the main purpose. Defending is existing.

By Petja Ivanova and Stefanie Mallon | In her artistic practice, Petja Ivanova explores sensual and intimate casts of the human body, working at the intersection of material alchemy and digital speculation. Her ›emo/exo-bodies‹, textile sculptures made from bandages soaked in fermented chitosan, are both externalized emotional skins (exo) and embodied emotional states (emo). These porous exoskeletons function as somatic archives, holding the imprint of affective experience. Instrumentalizing the chitosan’s healing of the skin surface, Ivanova turns toward internal, emotional wounds, which are often neglected, feminized, or privatized, and treats them through what she frames as poetic futures and speculative ecologies on the spectrum of data healing.

In this interview with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Mallon, Ivanova reflects on the transfer of her emo/exo-bodies into digital space, the affective implications of this transition, and her search for a ›somatic literacy‹ attuned to the scars we are still in the process of making. Through 3D scanning, the textile forms are digitized, gaining a new kind of presence, which Ivanova calls ›digital flesh‹. In this process, the material reopens and becomes manipulable: stretched, reshaped, and written on. The wound is not closed but kept wide open, visible, evolving, and re-coded. This interview situates Ivanova’s practice within broader discussions of textile-based image practices in the digital age, and considers how her artistic work can act as a method of emotional processing, knowledge production, and structural critique.

By Gwyneth Holland | This paper considers how theories of the posthuman can help to understand the connection between physically and virtually dressed bodies. Virtual fashion is a layered image: pixels of a 3D garment are placed over pixels of a photographed or digitally rendered body. Within those layers are experiences of body image, identity and experimentation, interleaved with technical restrictions and exclusionary fashion practices. The paper underlines the need for representation and expression across worlds, which can create challenges for existing body norms. Situated within fashion and fat studies, I particularly focus on the nascent areas of fat and fashion futures, which enable a greater consideration of the impacts of current practices on aspiration and opportunity. Virtual worlds can represent different identities and representations, but they are not free from the structures that affect bodies in physical realms (Ma 2024), meaning that the exclusion of fat bodies in physical fashion is replicated in virtual fashion. However, Braidotti’s (2013) and Haraway’s (2016) discussions of technical-human hybridity suggest potential for this sector to destabilise body hierarchies by blurring the lines between physical, digital, real and fantasy.

For the present analysis, it is useful to distinguish between ›digital‹ and ›virtual‹ fashion, though the terms are often used interchangeably (Boughlala and Smelik 2024). Digital fashion (DF) combines a wide range of technologies which enable the visualisation, experience and commerce of physical garments. Virtual fashion (VF), on the other hand, refers to three-dimensional graphic renderings of garments which may be superimposed on photos or videos of bodies, or as cosmetic effects for online avatars, such as gaming and metaverse characters (ibid.). This paper focuses on the latter phenomenon as it is applied especially to fashion images and digital avatars.