These days, even fashion is becoming a meme
“New is the nightmare of every single designer,” lamented Miuccia Prada in a recent interview. And in the fashion world’s Covid lockdown year, the new nightmare meant converting runways usually organized in Paris, Milan or New York to an almost entirely online format for the rest of us, at home, scrolling through bite-sized content on pocket-sized screens.
Lookbook photos, which used to be the fashion week budget option, are now par for the course, while some brands opted for videos to stir up the excitement for clothes no one has any reason to wear. For this month’s fashion week, JW Anderson and Stefano Pilati did walkthroughs of their collections on video. Prada and Raf Simons hosted a livestreamed Q&A with a green-screened backdrop. We got a Balenciaga video game that everybody cared about and a Ralph Lauren video game nobody cared about. Celine and Dior staged runway videos in interchangeable European palaces. If this surplus of theatricality suggests an overcompensation for the looks themselves, it’s because the experience of Covid fashion has expanded into something weirder beyond the actual clothes.
The digitization of fashion has been a trend a decade in the making, which Covid relentlessly accelerated. Nobody’s happy about this. Centuriesold traditions in craftsmanship have been devalued by the screen in favor of oversaturated colors, bold sans-serif text and ridiculous silhouettes. Nobody cares about Savile Row any more. You just can’t see it on your phone. This has led luxury brands – such as Louis Vuitton, Balenciaga and Moncler – to pivot towards streetwear, which has always demonstrated a localized genius for repurposing mass-produced sportswear and technical uniforms for cultural expression.
As a middle-class kid from the suburbs, excluded by luxury, I don’t have a nostalgia for craftsmanship. It protects regimes of taste of a monied class. My interests in fashion lie primarily at the iconographic level – how it emerges from and signals to creative networks and communities. This is also an extremely online way of looking at it. I discovered style by scanning through fashion week shows on YouTube, and then rifling for imitation looks at second-hand shops. When Gosha Rubchinskiy walked the Vetements runway in a yellow DHL shirt, I bought a fake one on eBay. The blazer I wore to my sister’s wedding was from Goodwill.
When I became a fashion editor, I discovered that fashion criticism is like music criticism – nobody thinks they need to read it. This makes fashion simultaneously stupid and avantgarde. Because fashion design can reflect the emerging aesthetics of networked technologies without having to ostensibly be “about the internet”, it is at once more relevant, useful and
contemporary than even contemporary art.
Today, people use fashion like emoticons: ready-made avatars that perform emotions so you don’t have to. Even when you try clothes on in the dressing room, you might not remember exactly how you looked but you remember how it felt. In a technological age where intensity of affect has a higher currency than quality of ideas, fashion is most viral at the emotional level. Brands design their whole identity around affect. Prada: intellectual and romantic. Rick Owens: glamor alien.
In a condition where all content is flattened to the single column of the feed, fashion images are created to compete with reaction gifs and memes. Brands like Balenciaga and Off-White, which are consistently among the most profitable brands year after year, have demonstrated a viral ability to circulate clothes-as-meme by trolling their way down to the lowest common denominator of what’s lol or cringe.
Fashion critic Taylore Scarabelli has a word for this: “cringecore”, defined as “memetic, near-satirical styling that simultaneously repels and draws in viewers”. This is how you get a Balenciaga cat-montage T-shirt, a Louis Vuitton jacket that looks like a 3D puzzle of Notre Dame, Birkenstocks made out of cut-up Birkin bags, or Burberry’s “unintentional” noose hoodie.
Who’s even driving this aesthetic? This gestures to a wider identity crisis in fashion, where taste-making (and gatekeeping for that matter) has moved from elitist fashion editors at legacy glossy magazines to amateur influencers, bloggers or anonymous accounts on Discord servers. The center of gravity has shifted toward people who might not even buy this fashion but are liking and following aesthetics that reinforce algorithms to promote the most outrageous and emotionally arousing styles. And that’s the thing – despite what you might see on TikTok, nobody these days is really wearing these clothes. Fashion isn’t being lived out in the streets, but in the public imaginary of popular entertainment, with the ghost in the machine driving algorithms to endorse certain styles over others.
As in politics, the discourse against populism needs to be done away with: the people are not the problem. The issue is the memification of the public sphere, where fashion trends compete side by side with political hot takes. The more extreme the better. It’s just a hop, skip and implosion towards our brave new world. Except we’re already here.
Geoffrey Mak is a writer based in Berlin
As in politics, the discourse against populism needs to be done away with: the people are not the problem