Kategorie: IMAGE 42/2025

By Esmay Wagemans | In the late 20th century, Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985) introduced the »cyborg« as a hybrid figure of disruption, blurring boundaries between human and machine, nature and culture, body and code. Today, ›cyborg fashion‹, characterized by prosthetics, coded materials, and speculative aes­the­­tics, is more visible than ever, largely due to its circulation within digital media ecosystems and the rise of AI-driven design. Yet this visibility is shaped by a new kind of control: the technological gaze of algorithmic moderation, platform standards, and commercial optimization.

This paper explores how this platform culture has affected the identity and creation of the cyborg. Drawing from my own artistic practice and theoretical frameworks rooted in feminist and posthumanist thought, I examine how digital infrastructures reshape not only the aesthetics of cyborg fashion, but also the very conditions under which it is conceived, made, and shared.

Rather than offering a single definition or solution, this text explores alternative spaces of creation and thinking. It proposes that cyborg fashion’s relevance today lies in reimagining how we make, relate, and remain critically attuned to the systems in which we work. By expanding its possibilities through interrogating the conditions of its creation and circulation, the cy­borg identity becomes not a static icon, but a living methodology.

By Swantje Martach, Verónica Madueño | Dress has already been denoted as active by diverse disciplinal strands, especially material culture studies (e.g. Woodward 2005, Miller 2010), affect theory (Ruggerone 2016), and new materialism (Smelik 2018). Yet, how living could dress truly be? This question leads us into the realm of biomaterials, a term that in fashion describes garments made out of biological matter (cotton or animal/plant leather), but that in the work of Peruvian dress artist Verónica Madueño is pushed further towards keeping matters alive while they are acting as dress: gelatinous creations encompassing in an amber-like manner herbal/flower seeds, sand, and seawater, as well as accessories fabricated from corn and spirulina.

As conceptual clothes, Madueños’s works celebrate the contingencies in creating (making-with instead of making-of) and wearing (mold and ice) living agents. In a world that is becoming increasingly pictorial, these environment-as-garments loosen our visual grip of the world, but enable us to experience it differently and most immediately when wearing it. Bringing our senses to life, Madueño’s living dresses shock and shove their wearers towards the image’s exit.