‘Digital
Revolution’, the words have been passed back and forth from mouth to mouth in
many different formats. It seems as though technology is on the brink of promise,
especially when it comes to integrating it with fashion. Brands such as Apple
have enlisted figures from the fashion industry to make the technology seem
even more needed. But it seems like technological fashion is going backwards
instead of forwards.
Ashish X Topshop
Ashish
X Topshop, another collaboration for the popular clothing brand, now an empire
of clothing, accessories and make up, reduced to a gimmick with one fell swoop
of the Ashish collection. Led lights lined shoes and nestled themselves within
the seams of PVC backpacks, dragging me back kicking and screaming to the days
when see-through rucksacks had pockets of vibrantly coloured liquid and my
trainers lit up when I ran, pressing down with extra force to make sure they
definitely did work. I’m all for a 90s revival, don’t get me wrong, but when
something is hailed as revolutionary, I expect something a little more up to
date.
iWatch
Trying
to compete with the Google Glass, Apple is retracing their footsteps and
poaching yet another fashion executive, enlisted to make sure we reach for the
plastic come release. Less than a year after it announced the appointment of
former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts, Apple got greedy and lured LVMH executive
Patrick Pruniaux (Vice President of sales at Tag Heuer) into their lair lined
with convergence boards and floating pixels. Strapping a phone to your arm is
hardly high fashion though (gym fanatics have been doing that since the
noughties, purely functional). Can we expect an Apple Resort collection anytime
soon? Perhaps not, but that would be an idea if anyone is going to take this
digital uprising seriously, it’s hardly comparable to any historical
revolution, unless the Queen gets a bit over-zealous with iPad accessories and
pulls a Marie Antoinette.
"Digital Revolution" @ the Barbican
The
future of tech fashion has to go beyond LED lights, transcending the
desirability of catwalks and couture, and coalesce with our ever-evolving need
to be so current that the fashions of
yesterday are already ancient. A jejune representation of this could be taking
pictures or screen grabbing an image from a catwalk and hooking it up to fibre
thin screens woven into fabrics. But with this loss of texture, the designs
would seem flat and lifeless – much like a sad fake handbag. With this element
of literally lifting from the runway and copying designs, snobbery could be
taken to the extreme. The real garment, hand crafted, versus the cyberspace
equivalent.
This
flat electronic fashion, much like the Paper Op Art dresses of the 60s would be
an elementary way of customising, the elitist equivalent of iron on diamante or
patches of appliqué. Contemporary fashion has surpassed plain textures and
silhouettes, so how could this digital structure really contend with today’s
treadmill of maturing designs? A malleable material perhaps? This is what’s
holding the revolution back. Photoshop creations will never be as good as
impasto art, just as a digital representation of intricate embroidery and
heavily structured silhouette could never contend with the textures and
negative space of the real thing. We may just be too impatient to find the
golden combination of wearable tech.
the Twitter dress
With
no sign of wearable tech found in the collections at Central Saint Martins, the
students at one of the most forward thinking universities around have ditched
modernism in favour of referencing historical movements and hand crafting
couture collections, regressing back to the days of intricate textiles. Why
this incessant need to electrify one of the most luxurious analogue art forms
we have left?
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