Fashion houses — skilled as they are at picking up trends — have quickly embraced the metaverse. In recent years, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Balenciaga and others have created virtual outfits that are only available in video games. In most cases, these efforts were gimmicks rather than thoughtful explorations of our digital future.
But then came Jonathan Anderson, creative director of the Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe. His stunning Paris Fashion Week show – one of my favorites this season – made it clear that he is not interested in designing in pixels. Instead, he chose to create real garments that only look fake, warped and grainy. By doing so, he challenged us to consider what it really means for people to leave the real world as we migrate into digital spaces – and the disturbing hybrid truth and illusion that follows.
The show was a particularly bright moment in 37-year-old Anderson’s young career. But even in the dark days of COVID-19, when fashion weeks were canceled, Anderson found ways to channel his creativity into headline-grabbing art that was particularly suited to lockdown. In 2020, he created a “fashion show in a box,” sending the fashion press paper dolls for them to dress up with outfits from his collection. In 2021, he created downloadable knit patterns so people could sew their own sweaters using their new pandemic crafting skills.
While Anderson focused on these quirky, domestic projects, other luxury brands made forays into the metaverse to take advantage of the massive spike in gaming around the world. Gucci created a town in Roblox where users could buy clothes for avatars. Balenciaga built Fortnite skins. Prada made outfits for the game Riders Republic.
With this new show, Anderson seemed to be criticizing the impulse of his peers to jump into the digital world with such devotion. At first glance, the collection seemed optimistic – with a red flower as the main motif – but had a dystopian undertone.
For starters, the show took place in a stark white box with a 10-foot-tall anthurium emerging from the floor, whose wide petals took up most of the stage. The proportions were skewed in a way so common in virtual worlds. In addition to the huge flower on the podium, the models looked puny. They wore anthurium-shaped buds, with bits of their shoulders exposed, as if the flower hadn’t completely filled in. A-line dresses were a bit too short. Sweater dresses and jackets had arms that reached to the ankle. I had a deep desire to go into graphic design software to lengthen and shorten these garments at the click of a mouse. But these were of course real models, with real clothes on.
The outfits that impressed the most were the ones that looked grainy – as if they were Minecraft characters coming to life. A model walked across the stage in a knit hoodie and khaki pants covered in tiny squares that looked blurry when she moved. Another wore a white T-shirt with black trims that looked like lo-fi graphics. It was a brilliant turn. While many of Anderson’s counterparts like to create digital clothing that looks realistic, he has painstakingly created physical garments that look unreal in the very specific way that appears on the Internet.
And what was the point of all this? For Anderson, creating a collection isn’t necessarily about designing garments that customers want to buy, although these pixelated knits looked cozy and wearable. “Sometimes fashion isn’t about selling,” he told Cathy Horyn, the… snowfashion critic. “It’s about introducing ideas.”
Here he gave us a taste of what it’s like to actually live in the metaverse. The creepy thing about the metaverse is that we won’t fully exist in a video game. Technology is already adding an artificial layer to the world we live in. This phenomenon isn’t just about the augmented reality headsets that promise to add artificial objects to our field of view, which actually aren’t there. Today, AI-powered image generators like DALL-E can draw photo-realistic clothing, objects, and even people from nothing but code, and Apple’s FaceTime will effortlessly redraw your students in real-time, making it look like you’re making eye contact on a bubble, even if you are not.
The show immersed us in this future through its garments. Anderson portrayed a world that looks authentic, but is a bit off. It filled me with unease because I fear the day when we suspect that our eyes are somehow deceiving us, but we can no longer tell fact from fiction.
0 Comments