Notes on Phygitality (with Charlie Robin Jones, for NXS Magazine)

Published in Issue#6 of NXS Magazine
'Phygital Fashioning', 'Notes on Phygitality' documents an
asynchronous dialogue held in the spring of 2022 between:
Wassim Z. Alsindi ::: Website ::: Twitter
Charlie Robin Jones ::: Instagram

{#n7f7kau24bj}

Courtesy NXS Magazine, Issue#6 Phygital Fashioning

Download / view PDF version: https://assets.pubpub.org/lsrlot3h/31662722747779.pdf

Full text: Notes on Phygitality

Text = Charlie, Text = Wassim

I don't love the word 'phygital', for two reasons. Worst things first:
the word is inelegant. Secondly, it presumes a hybrid form of
physicality and digitality: a synthesis between the world online and the
world offline.

Yes Charlie, I couldn't agree more! The P-word is hard to write
and harder to say. It makes me think of fidget spinners. There are
echoes of that other doomed phrase 'metaverse', though I suppose
the greater etymological crime was committed in the later case:
being a portmanteau composed of both Latin and Greek constituents.
For this reason and others, some thinkers have proposed a return to
the 'para-real'.
- PARA-REAL!!! I love this.
I'd also like us to think up alternative framings for this
'transcendental materialism' that purports to bridge digital and
analogue worlds. I also see parallels to the phenomenon of
proof-of-work: the process of 'mining' in Bitcoin and Ethereum,
which connects the virtual inside to the material outside, through
the consumption of large amounts of energy.

Implicit here, is that there is the material world on the one hand, and
the immaterial world on the other - with new technologies such as
the metaverse, NFTs and AR as liminal domains mediating the two. I can't
speak to the notion's relevance elsewhere, but in fashion it is
particularly out-moded, because all fashion simultaneously occupies
both: a designer coat is both a physical object and an object that
represents a communicative value that transcends its materiality. The
form of this projection today is performed via digital, natürlich, but
the deep technē is the same, in my opinion: fashion is the medium
between communicative and material spheres, whether that sphere is 90's
Vogue, a European royal court, or Instagram.

In this sense, can we think of 'fashion' as a mode of art/craft ---
since we already said the N-word --- I discussed possible histories
and futures of immateriality in recent writings, where I trace a
line from the past to the future that echoes the trajectory of
conceptual art in its relationship to materiality. By way of a
well-known example: in the early 70s, Sol LeWitt numbered and signed
the instructions to execute his Wall Drawings works, rather than the
outputs themselves. We can ask ourselves, where does the conceptual
artist centre the value of their work?
- What's perhaps interesting to mention here is the prehistory of
  this in the fashion context: the distribution of designer
  clothes via patterns in magazines. The early 20th century
  designer Paul Poiret, who among many other things invented the
  catwalk, would both make fabulously expensive creations for
  European royalty, and distribute patterns for his dresses for
  midwestern housewives in US magazines. I always loved this fact
  -- that the most incredible designers would then sell their
  shapes to be made at home -- it feels like such a radical form
  of DIY re-materialisation. Delivering Fluxus via Woman's Home
  Companion!
  - Perhaps we can regard fashion as a pattern language, in a
    conceptual lineage alongside the early algorithmic crafts of
    knitting, sewing and weaving. Can we see algorithms
    themselves --- and other generative processes, in silico or
    otherwise --- rather than their products as the fonthead of
    desire?
Mitchell Chan has addressed the separation of the commodity form
from the artistic form in recent writings and works. The notions of
certification, authenticity, ownership and content are as muddy as
ever in the digital realm.
- YES! This rhymes with Virgil Abloh's idea that the process is
  the creative object -- the clothes are just the residue.
  - So many other echoes of this through history: 'the token is
    the artwork' (Looney), 'the medium is the message'
    (McLuhan), 'the Emperor's new (digital) clothes'
    (Andersen)...
To what extent is fashion conceptual, and to what extent is it
experiential, material or corporeal. Can these two factors of
libidinal production really be characterised as distinct, delineated
and independently analysed through a critical lens?
- I am deeply sceptical of any attempt to bridge materialities to
  their 'digital twins'. This is another rightly maligned piece of
  techno-jargon which implies that there is a possibility of a
  perfect copy, facsimile or reproduction inside the shitty,
  lossy, latency-saddled world of the metaverse. Despite lip
  service to the messy world outside the networked system, there
  is still a perpetual gap between formalism and reality.
I could do with a crisp definition of what we think fashion is,
was, and could be. It does indeed seem to be deeply connected to
desire in its myriad forms, material (I want cool stuff) and
immaterial (validate my physical charm). Weightings of the two
validation forms are different in material and immaterial forms of
media, as to be expected. Can the immaterial form ever carry the
gravitas of its libidinal semiotics beyond the digital enclosure?
Can IRL brands create the similar breeds of 'FOMO Economicus' with
coding 1's and 0's, or even worse....blockchains?
- I'm coming to think, via this dialogue we're having, that
  fashion is kind of the medium by which the two are defined and
  imbued: it's kind of the glittery mist between the sexy ideas
  and the sexy clothes, you know?
  - How about fashion as: tension, boundary, liminal horizon, a
    border between imaginary libidinal territories... which is
    there to be trespassed or transgressed. Are the arbiters and
    tastemakers of fashion the FRONTEX of this 'no menswear's
    land'?
- There's an old essay in the London Review of Books, reviewing
  two books on 'cool', using, of all things, Lady Chatterley's
  Lover as its main source, and I always think about it whenever
  these questions come up. In the article, which is a lot better
  than it sounds, the writer David Trotter argues that cool is
  always and actually the mediation between two opposites -- it's
  neither serious nor frivolous, it's the space between them, and
  the knowledge of how to walk these lines -- rather than existing
  anywhere itself. It is the exploitation of 'give' or 'slack' in
  any system. It is, as he puts it: "the information designed to
  resist information." Fashion is, I would say, the
  industrialisation of this.

For the interest of this piece, a solid understanding of 'fashion'
is very hard to model: both capital and computers require things to
be defined, and if fashion is always neither one nor the other,
always a bit too cool to be pinned down, because it's exactly the
process of not being able to be pinned down. That's what makes it so
enticing: capital always needs something it can't have. You can't
tell why a pair of shoes is sick, they just are.
- I'm thinking about Suzanne Ngai's work on cuteness as an
  aesthetic category, trying to make onto-epistemic inroads into
  crystallising the ineffable. It's a tough job, but someone's
  gotta do it.
- This also reminds of Slavoj Žižek's review of the latest Matrix
  movie in The Spectator, which by all accounts, he did not even
  watch. There was a rather anti-accelerationist conception of
  capital, not as an object or an unstoppable force, but rather as
  a virtual Other of a society -- its animus, its shadow, an
  egregore. Et tu, fashion?
But am I being too basic in this thinking on 'computers', Wassim?
Are there ways for the 1's and 0's you describe, to work around
indeterminacy? How does modelling tie into this?
- Hehe, I would rather spend my days with the other kind of
  models :) System-models are in essence toy representations of
  the real. The thing with contingency and indeterminacy is that
  they are hard --- maybe impossible --- to faithfully represent
  with lossy computational methods. Simulations necessarily leave
  behind much of the richness of the world that they try to
  recreate in silico, in other words we must once again 'mind the
  epistemic gap' between the real and the virtual in all cases...
  but particularly when considering the squishy, utmost human
  domains of desire, art, and subjectivity that fashion appears to
  inhabit.
The notion of equilibrium in fashion is always and invariably bendy,
I think, in terms of matter vs information -- as I ramble on about
above, it's an industry of the Interzone. But perhaps more
interesting to think about is how power relations change the
construction of the image and its desirability. The tension between
participation and exclusion, most particularly, and who gets to
decide, and how.
- Who decides which aesthetics are propagated, and how did they
  get there? Perhaps this is just the old human problems of
  societies, hierarchies, pyramids, insiders, privilege that seem
  to dog us everywhere we choose to look and notice...
Here, I'm thinking less of 'Das Digital' as computers and screens,
and more as the world of communication and liquidity; and fashion
less as 'cool clothes', and more of a complex of relations, images
and seductions. I'm super curious about what and where this
beautiful glamorous sprawl will go, and how it will change and
rebuild the experience and material underpinning of the
technological nexus.
- Ah, the trusty 'network of relations'! Of course, everything is
  a network if you stare at it long enough :) Liquidity is a nice
  lens to approach these concepts through - I wonder if we can
  think about aesthetic liquidity, as Hamza Walker does? Is
  fashion a process of immaterial alchemy, lubricating, and
  assetising --- or ascetising --- immaterial forms, vibes, looks?
  Or is it simply another mode of application of capital. Might
  fashion be the virtual other of desire?
- On communication and liquidity, I've been digging through
  Baudrillard's 'Symbolic Exchange & Death' again recently, and
  there are some absolute banger insights on the interplay between
  different value forms:
- "We now live in a world dominated by the free play of the
  'monetary sign' that is beyond reference to any 'real' of
  production or even a monetary referent in the form of a gold
  standard. In this world, the idea of a 'real' value (of
  equities, of commodities, of houses, of anything) is meaningless
  as what matters instead is not value per se, but 'infinite
  speculation'."
If we are indeed to think of fashion as a network and a set of
relations, is it also an adversarial environment for zero-sum
voguing? Are tight-fitting weird clothes and fresh-faced youths with
eating disorders a dark forest of abstract and mutating forms of
desire?
Here's one for you Charlie: why are opinions on fashion, trends
etc so polarising? Where is the canonical 'voice of fashion', an
objectivity of idealised aesthetics, to be found? Or is it
another-virtual-other, an epistemic red herring?
- I recently had dinner with a designer that I've been a fan of
  since I was a teenager. He told me a story about when he met a
  stylist in the 80's, who informed him that a certain look was
  good, but not 'fashion'. "What is, or was fashion," I asked.
  "It's as simple as this," he said. "It's the difference between
  a red dress and une robe rouge." I hope that doesn't answer
  your question. :)

What of the relation of fashion to glamour? Is fashion a specific
and/or formalisation; an objectification (if not materialisation) of
the aesthetics? Does glamour enjoy 'epistemic category' status, as
cuteness does according to the aforementioned Susan Ngai? Are
primary epistemic categories such as cuteness and glamour --- should
we afford them such a status --- the raw materials from which
fashion is made, as with sugar beets and crystalline sucrose?
- Fashion is to glamour as sugar is to deliciousness, not beets.
- So -- I wouldn't say that glamour stands as one of Ngai's
  epistemic categories, any more than desire is an emotion. It's
  somehow more of a sensation, an urgency, a position: more effect
  than affect.
  - Second Order "(phe)noumena" -- glamour as the emergent,
    ineffable 'product' of fashion crystallising desire?
- This is why it is so hard to bottle, and why countless coins,
  fiat and otherwise, will be spent trying to replicate it online.
  It's something else.
  - Just as "money can't buy you love", it also can't buy you
    cool, hot, vibe or cuteness. I suppose capital can feed
    into, mediate, foster, create baselines or jumping off
    points, but never simply buy you the ineffable.
  - But it is also about cool clothes, because what fashion
    performs and stages is desire itself. It's about libidinal
    economics, essentially: whether that's the barely contained
    urge to buy something before it sells out, or the deeply
    human need to look hot.
    - Here's an interesting thought: direct monetisation of
      hotness seems to be becoming easier and more focused
      (attentional or intentional) as time passes and
      technology develops. From perfume and movie tickets up
      to page X pinups, porn magazines and OnlyFans. Mixing
      the need to belong --- and its virtual other, the fear
      of missing out --- with the disintermediation of digital
      horny (RIP horncierges like Playboy) we end up with a
      hybrid vigour fusing FOMO Economicus with Onlyfans. 'The
      Simponomics of Desire'.
Okay, lets 'talk about exclusivity. Fashion is most certainly a
domain of exclusion. Is it more about the scarcity than the hotness?
Or both? It's hard for me to judge, but when I see high fashion on
the catwalk, through the eyes of others, what would a quantum
physicist be doing in such a place? A lot of it seems to be 'arch'.
It's trying very hard to be provocative in some novel way; to seek
out aesthetic voids in possibility space, and optimising for novelty
rather than practicality, or a naive sense of the beautiful. Haute
couture seems to have left behind the notions of romance and
romanticism long long ago (RIP hot couture).
- Yes, LET'S! I'm going to think a bit here about the fashion show
  as an object.
- It's the paradigmatic exclusive event, right? Which is
  interesting, because its exclusivity comes in large part because
  it's essentially a trade show: only buyers and press would
  traditionally be invited, and if you are a buyer, stylist or
  editor, you get an invite. It's not a launch party (it's the
  dinners that are the real exclusives, after all), it's a
  presentation of wares. An incredibly chic one, of course, but
  it's an aspect of an industry, not a public concern
  (Balenciaga's recent couture show is a great homage to this). So
  here we can think of the ways that industry and logistics also
  contain their own allure. I'm thinking here of 'utopian
  conspiracy worker collective' Trust's day-trip to an Amazon
  fulfilment centre. We all want to see behind the curtain. Helmut
  Lang's deployment of Juergen Teller springs to mind here. There
  is the event, and the projection outward of the event, and then
  the glamour of the space around the event.
  - 'Insider trading show', :) the VIP ticket, the 'real
    opening' (not the one you were 'invited' to), the backstage
    pass; humans want to be wanted, and since we are talking
    about fashion as encoded desire, it makes total sense that
    the fashion show itself is the must-have experience,
    embodied by its exclusivity.
  - On the glamour of the space around the event: recently,
    I've become interested in the notion of 'metaphysical
    arbitrage'. Two recent examples: when a Banksy piece was
    bought and destroyed whilst being tokenised, and Damien
    Hirst's 'The Currency', which requires owners to destroy
    either the physical or digital component of the work. What
    remains after the physical has evaporated? An aura of
    aestheticisation, a cryptographic vibe...
- But then of course, the show has always had its other side: the
  one projected out beyond the runway. Even before photography
  could catch clothes in motion, illustrators were documenting
  looks at the first fashion shows and salons. There was a
  projection, carried through media, of these moments, right up to
  watching shows on IG stories, as an iteration of these first
  pictures.
- Why is this so important? I think because fashion has always had
  these two sides: the technologically mediated projection, and
  the material moment. The industry has grown up with industrial
  image-making, and is a piece of it.
- What's so interesting is that it depends upon these events to
  generate its allure -- it's the very physical impossibility of
  replicating the experience of attending that drives the
  attention.
  - As a Lacanian might say: desire is driven by lack, a void,
    a need to be made whole. We look for things (objects,
    experiences, people) that we hope can fill that gap.
    Projecting our needs and wants onto unsuspecting animals,
    vegetables, minerals, metaphysical objects and so on.
- This is all very obvious to say, but what I'm getting at is that
  there is something integral to the growth of fashion as a driver
  of culture and commerce over the last decade -- that it has been
  digitised for over a century whilst impossible to download.
  - Fashion as paradox, as reified contradiction. A barometer
    for libidinal tension.
- To put my simple point even more simply: the digital requires
  fashion, which requires digital, which requires fashion, which
  requires a space beyond the digital, which also requires a space
  beyond the digital.
  - A binary star system? Or a black hole sucking matter into
    its horizon? A 'Turning-Incomplete' hotnet?
What is also interesting to pick up is this notion of romance, which
is, for the record, a more "fashion" way of saying glamour. The
death of the romantic age of fashion has been touted for decades,
eternally recursing back to some bygone era of true glamour. For me,
naive as it may sound, the fashion show is still the ultimate
industrialised performance of romance. Or, to put it more nuanced:
the successful fashion show is a time period in which elements of
the world are decided as worthy of romanticisation. And just as
capital will always seek new markets, fashion will always seek new
areas to romanticise -- which is what I think we mean when we talk
about the sort of aesthetic brinkmanship of, say, putting a model in
an extreme cut-off skirt, or in ultra-square toe loafers.
- Romance, capital, time. Digitisation has collapsed the temporal
  gap between the crystallisation of desire and its fulfilment,
  even if it is being sated by a cheap facsimile such as an
  Instagram reel.
  - Of course, romanticisation is the point, and why fashion is
    the ultimate late capitalist art form; it allows viewers, as
    much as consumers, a way to become an Other: a fantasy and a
    way of becoming part of it. Shopping is a way into a world:
    anyone can belong, for money. The Roman agora --- the centre
    of society --- was also the market place.
    - So...fashion is available to purveyors of capital and
      can be bought wholesale, but glamour is the je ne sais
      quoi which everyone wants, but not all can access?

As a final note, I'm very keen for us to avoid sharp prognoses about
digital and fashion. I think it's v i t a l for us to keep a mind
of possibilities and potential avenues, rather than making a simple
big prediction, because that's how you get nonsense like a million
articles about digital trainers.
- Agreed! Let's keep our horizons as open as possible. There's
  no way of knowing what follows from trends surfacing and market
  logics that emerge from the swamp of capitalist possibility, in
  fashion or anywhere else. I am constantly reminded of the need
  for the various kinds of reflexive humility (epistemic,
  ontological and all the rest) with one pertinent example being
  the current mania surrounding cryptographic tokens in the
  context of digital art. Very very few of the 'old guard' in
  the crypto space expected or anticipated anything on the scale
  we are experiencing to happen, ever. Indeed, few of the creators
  of early token-art projects held onto much of the supply of
  their works, nor encoded royalty logics into secondary market
  sales. Just as NFTs were simultaneously the dumbest and greatest
  immaterial investment craze of the past few years, what is not
  to say that metaversal fashion - be it phygital, or pure
  digital - might be next regardless of whether anyone we know
  wants it, needs it, can afford it or is technically /
  economically competent enough to use it?
- Perhaps we could speculate on what forms 'phygital fashionhood'
  could take? We already skewered 'sneakers on the blockchain',
  so what more can there be?
  - As a concluding thought,perhaps the most important one:
    someone I know who worked in fashion once called ASICS the
    ultimate "hot-guy" shoes. That feels somehow like a
    conclusion.
    - You make me sick, I wear ASICS. ;)

Acknowledgements

Above all, thanks to NXS Magazine for the invitation
to contribute to their beautiful publication, available in print online
and at many good bookstores worldwide. Thanks again to them for allowing
us to put the article online!