“I don’t think fashion is really prepared for computation, mechanics, hybrid designs. You know it’s coming like a tsunami of nowhere,” (1) Nancy Tilbury, the co-founder and creative director of Studio Xo answered in the documentary The Next Black.
Studio XO Staff Working Scene From the Documentary The Next Black
Why cannot fashion be technological? After watching the documentary The Next Black, this became my main puzzle in pursuing a new definition for fashion. When I think of luxury fashion business, it’s hard to inhabit the impression of it being an overpriced, unethical and irrational industry. The root to this stressed preconception is out of the ghosted commercial values that has been allocated to luxury products. Almost all luxury products can’t match up its actual value with its merchandised price. Brand obsession largely based on conspicuous consumption, which further aggregates the minds of rivalry and class solidification. Instead of blaming it as an outcome of industrialization which causes a huge gap between the rich and the poor, the fashion industry, especially luxury fashion, should find ways to rationalize its incompatible commercial value. Technology will be the savior for the future of fashion business. A great comparable example will be Apple corporation, which is also considered as a luxury business, however, it receives much less moral criticism than fashion luxury out of its large investment on technology study and upgrade. Although Apple products for sure have a large profitable zone between its selling price and actual cost, its patent softwares, databases, and services rationalizes its exclusivity to only a certain affordable group. It has its bargaining counters to make its customer believe this is an exchange at equal values. Fashion businesses have the potential to make themselves persuasive also, and this is where the new definition of fashion will come from.
When I was asked a definition at the beginning of this semester for fashion, I simply defined it as wearable that put people under disguise in order to present themselves as more preferable figures. However, after a semester of study, I realized fashion’s potential doesn’t just stop on that. In my imagination, till 2050, fashion will evolve into an embellished computed wearable media that can provide assisting functions or services to supplement its users in different aspects of daily life.
(1)The Next Black. Directed by David Dworsky, Victor Kohler. IMDb, 2014.
