Like most of my peers, I basically SURVIVED off of memes during the early days of the Covid-19 crisis (I also survived off of RuPaul’s Drag Race and building elaborate Sims 2 houses). As I remember remarking to my friend Lizzy a few times, we got so lucky that meme culture was primed, ready, perfectly ripe just in time for this experience: irreverent, nihilistic, increasingly surreal. One of my favorite memes from the time reads a lot like poetry:
“Wow after so many years of trying to opt out of my physical body I finally did it
To every other person on earth I’m just a temporary combination of text and data
This should feel like a win
But sometimes, late at night,
I miss being hot.”
I couldn’t get over how true that felt. I wouldn’t say “being hot” has ever been a big part of my identity. But here in France, we were in nationwide, permission-slip-to-leave-the-house lockdown, and it felt like my entire universe had been reduced very suddenly to a basement room in my best friend’s apartment, of which the glowing rectangle of my phone was the only escape. Suddenly, I had no real physical presence in the world. If anyone else on the planet existed, with the exception of my new quarantine-roommate, it was only to the extent that they manifested as a combination of 1’s and 0’s on my phone screen - temporary, ephemeral, endlessly mutable.
And, like everyone else suffering the effects of a global pandemic, I was also taken aback by the rapidity with which my clothing style shifted from “Very Interested in #Fashion” to “Domesticated Couch Slug.” Normally, I wear a lot of things that have buttons, zippers, and require dry-cleaning. In those dark, scary days of early quarantine, I wasn’t even wearing my “good” sweatpants. Why bother, when the outside world was just a distant concept?
But of course, “zero physical contact with the rest of the world” didn’t mean “no contact at all.”
Briefly, Lizzy and I had a running gag on Instagram that we called “Family Talent Showcase” where we’d do (what we thought were) ironically lame parlour tricks. When it was time for FTS, I’d make an effort to get dressed, but not in my normal clothes - I’d put on the “good” sweatpants, or a grandpa sweater instead of a torn hoodie. It wouldn’t have felt right to jump on Instagram in the old hoodie I was actually wearing, just as it would have felt ridiculous to put on jeans and a button down. Normal-me dressed formally, quarantine-me was a domesticated couch slug, but Instagram-me had a reputation to uphold.
And whether or not we were willing to admit it to ourselves, most of my friends made similarly adept, expert symbolic code-switches when they communicated online. The more image-conscious among us were quick to adapt our online personalities to the situation at hand, “dressing for the occasion” in a way that reflected the personalities we’d been carefully developing just for Instagram. If, pre-Corona, that manifested itself in carefully chosen vacation looks, or whatever, now it was about cashmere sweatshirt sleeves peeking out next to minimalist white plates of banana bread.
This is why I think that so much talk of “comfort dressing” and other new, post-Covid fashion phenomena tends to be a little bit disingenuous. It gives weight to this running narrative that because we’re all wearing blouses over bike shorts for our Zoom calls, comfortable, easy-to-wear garments are going to take over the fashion industry, maybe even change it forever. The sales data does back that up, and I think, to be fair, a lot of this intel is coming from the US, where most people are still fully remote and are likely to stay that way in the near future. Nevermind that in France, it feels like everyone I know is going all out with their vacation dressing, a sure sign that Domesticated Couch Slug Syndrome has a cure, after all.
We might be dressing more comfortably, sure, but I disagree with the weird undertone of that argument that seems to equate dressing comfortably with a revert to a focus on physicality at the expense of style, or a loss of interest in visual representation. It feels suspiciously like the age-old equation of adornment with superficiality, superfluousness, in favor of functionality. On the contrary, I think we’ll be dressing for adornment just as much as we ever did - it’s just that the significations will change, and so will the way we do it.
(I want to be clear that on an individual level, this makes absolute sense - we are in a global crisis, I am not at all suggesting that we should make conscious efforts to “look good for the Internet” or that putting on any clothes at all right now isn’t an accomplishment. Also, there have been really interesting discussions on Twitter lately about what “camera-ready” implies for feminine-presenting persons, which I think is an apt angle of discussion.)
When we “wear clothing online” - meaning when we share images of ourselves, dressed - garment and body alike undergo a transformative, translative process that flattens 3D, textural entities (that’s you and your clothes) into intangible, 2D images. The very material “stuff” that makes up your clothing transforms - those sweatpants you’re wearing aren’t made of cotton, they’re made of bits. During that transformation process, something interesting happens: you stop being yourself and you start being a version of you that’s specifically imagined to be legible through a digital medium, in a digital context.
So basically, our clothing still has a whole lot of presence and meaning, even “just” in its digital form. And most importantly, it still has materiality - so if “wool sweaters” can stand for “cozy” because wool keeps us warm, clothing that’s made of bits also has specific material properties that can stand for things and allow us to convey messages to the people looking at it. And because those messages are being read in a digital context, their meaning changes.
Thus, the social significations of “a cashmere sweater” and “a cashmere sweater, peaking out next to a loaf of banana bread in a quarantine Instagram” aren’t the same. The actual, physical object is unchanged. But the placement of its digitized-clone in an online platform context changes the meaning of both garments. They become signifiers not of luxury, but of safety and finding comfort and satisfaction in the home.
The placement of a garment in digital context can even go so far as to affect the social positioning of a given garment. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of mid-market workwear brands (like LOFT) pushing comfort fabrics, like Tencel, which were once more-or-less acceptable in a business casual context. Generally speaking, the softer and more flexible a textile, the less associated it is with masculine-dominated conceptualizations of business authority and formality - which means that they are only recently becoming acceptable workwear garments.
But digitized Tencel has different affordances in digital context - because you can’t really tell, over the best webcam in the world, whether a garment is made of Tencel or some other fabric. In that sense, the fabric has properties of chamelionization and adaptability in a specifically digital context. In other words, this new materiality opens the door to a new social position of acceptable formality in business-wear contexts. I think we’re all crossing our fingers for the same thing to happen with sweatpants. Hah hah.
Generally speaking, I think what we will see is a rise in clothing that works in a digital context. It really and truly would not shock me to see a lot less black in coming seasons, or at least textural black garments, given that the color is notoriously famous for showing little detail in digital context and requiring a significant degree of retouching. It’s not that clothing will become less important, or that pure adornment will no longer be one of the significant use-values of fashion, but rather the specific garments and pathways through which we will convey meaning are prone to change.
If a lot of this implies a certain degree of intentionality on the part of those wearing the clothing, that’s not quite my intention. The significations of clothing are always subject to change given any shift in context, in socialization, in the ways in which we perceive and interact with the material world - pandemic end-of-days or otherwise - and those changes are notoriously dependent and difficult to predict. Further, dressing specifically for Instagram videos in quarantine or whatever seems to harken back to a relatively quaint time when, for two minutes of our lives, there was literally nothing better to do - evidently, that is very much no longer the case.
But I think it’s interesting to consider the ramifications of our new digitized-selves and the brave new world of digital materialities that’s opened before us. People have been expressing versions of themselves online for nearly 50 years, so this isn’t a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. Yet quarantine was an interesting exercise in a polar shift - from the devaluation of our physical selves to becoming, completely, “a temporary combination of text and data.” I’ll let others weigh in on the psycho-social effects of that shift - I’m excited about discovering what happens to the world of material things that’s come with us, on the other side of the veil.
Like most of my peers, I basically SURVIVED off of memes during the early days of the Covid-19 crisis (I also survived off of RuPaul’s Drag Race and building elaborate Sims 2 houses). As I remember remarking to my friend Lizzy a few times, we got so lucky that meme culture was primed, ready, perfectly ripe just in time for this experience: irreverent, nihilistic, increasingly surreal. One of my favorite memes from the time reads a lot like poetry:
“Wow after so many years of trying to opt out of my physical body I finally did it
To every other person on earth I’m just a temporary combination of text and data
This should feel like a win
But sometimes, late at night,
I miss being hot.”
I couldn’t get over how true that felt. I wouldn’t say “being hot” has ever been a big part of my identity. But here in France, we were in nationwide, permission-slip-to-leave-the-house lockdown, and it felt like my entire universe had been reduced very suddenly to a basement room in my best friend’s apartment, of which the glowing rectangle of my phone was the only escape. Suddenly, I had no real physical presence in the world. If anyone else on the planet existed, with the exception of my new quarantine-roommate, it was only to the extent that they manifested as a combination of 1’s and 0’s on my phone screen - temporary, ephemeral, endlessly mutable.
And, like everyone else suffering the effects of a global pandemic, I was also taken aback by the rapidity with which my clothing style shifted from “Very Interested in #Fashion” to “Domesticated Couch Slug.” Normally, I wear a lot of things that have buttons, zippers, and require dry-cleaning. In those dark, scary days of early quarantine, I wasn’t even wearing my “good” sweatpants. Why bother, when the outside world was just a distant concept?
But of course, “zero physical contact with the rest of the world” didn’t mean “no contact at all.”
Briefly, Lizzy and I had a running gag on Instagram that we called “Family Talent Showcase” where we’d do (what we thought were) ironically lame parlour tricks. When it was time for FTS, I’d make an effort to get dressed, but not in my normal clothes - I’d put on the “good” sweatpants, or a grandpa sweater instead of a torn hoodie. It wouldn’t have felt right to jump on Instagram in the old hoodie I was actually wearing, just as it would have felt ridiculous to put on jeans and a button down. Normal-me dressed formally, quarantine-me was a domesticated couch slug, but Instagram-me had a reputation to uphold.
And whether or not we were willing to admit it to ourselves, most of my friends made similarly adept, expert symbolic code-switches when they communicated online. The more image-conscious among us were quick to adapt our online personalities to the situation at hand, “dressing for the occasion” in a way that reflected the personalities we’d been carefully developing just for Instagram. If, pre-Corona, that manifested itself in carefully chosen vacation looks, or whatever, now it was about cashmere sweatshirt sleeves peeking out next to minimalist white plates of banana bread.
This is why I think that so much talk of “comfort dressing” and other new, post-Covid fashion phenomena tends to be a little bit disingenuous. It gives weight to this running narrative that because we’re all wearing blouses over bike shorts for our Zoom calls, comfortable, easy-to-wear garments are going to take over the fashion industry, maybe even change it forever. The sales data does back that up, and I think, to be fair, a lot of this intel is coming from the US, where most people are still fully remote and are likely to stay that way in the near future. Nevermind that in France, it feels like everyone I know is going all out with their vacation dressing, a sure sign that Domesticated Couch Slug Syndrome has a cure, after all.
We might be dressing more comfortably, sure, but I disagree with the weird undertone of that argument that seems to equate dressing comfortably with a revert to a focus on physicality at the expense of style, or a loss of interest in visual representation. It feels suspiciously like the age-old equation of adornment with superficiality, superfluousness, in favor of functionality. On the contrary, I think we’ll be dressing for adornment just as much as we ever did - it’s just that the significations will change, and so will the way we do it.
(I want to be clear that on an individual level, this makes absolute sense - we are in a global crisis, I am not at all suggesting that we should make conscious efforts to “look good for the Internet” or that putting on any clothes at all right now isn’t an accomplishment. Also, there have been really interesting discussions on Twitter lately about what “camera-ready” implies for feminine-presenting persons, which I think is an apt angle of discussion.)
When we “wear clothing online” - meaning when we share images of ourselves, dressed - garment and body alike undergo a transformative, translative process that flattens 3D, textural entities (that’s you and your clothes) into intangible, 2D images. The very material “stuff” that makes up your clothing transforms - those sweatpants you’re wearing aren’t made of cotton, they’re made of bits. During that transformation process, something interesting happens: you stop being yourself and you start being a version of you that’s specifically imagined to be legible through a digital medium, in a digital context.
So basically, our clothing still has a whole lot of presence and meaning, even “just” in its digital form. And most importantly, it still has materiality - so if “wool sweaters” can stand for “cozy” because wool keeps us warm, clothing that’s made of bits also has specific material properties that can stand for things and allow us to convey messages to the people looking at it. And because those messages are being read in a digital context, their meaning changes.
Thus, the social significations of “a cashmere sweater” and “a cashmere sweater, peaking out next to a loaf of banana bread in a quarantine Instagram” aren’t the same. The actual, physical object is unchanged. But the placement of its digitized-clone in an online platform context changes the meaning of both garments. They become signifiers not of luxury, but of safety and finding comfort and satisfaction in the home.
The placement of a garment in digital context can even go so far as to affect the social positioning of a given garment. Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of mid-market workwear brands (like LOFT) pushing comfort fabrics, like Tencel, which were once more-or-less acceptable in a business casual context. Generally speaking, the softer and more flexible a textile, the less associated it is with masculine-dominated conceptualizations of business authority and formality - which means that they are only recently becoming acceptable workwear garments.
But digitized Tencel has different affordances in digital context - because you can’t really tell, over the best webcam in the world, whether a garment is made of Tencel or some other fabric. In that sense, the fabric has properties of chamelionization and adaptability in a specifically digital context. In other words, this new materiality opens the door to a new social position of acceptable formality in business-wear contexts. I think we’re all crossing our fingers for the same thing to happen with sweatpants. Hah hah.
Generally speaking, I think what we will see is a rise in clothing that works in a digital context. It really and truly would not shock me to see a lot less black in coming seasons, or at least textural black garments, given that the color is notoriously famous for showing little detail in digital context and requiring a significant degree of retouching. It’s not that clothing will become less important, or that pure adornment will no longer be one of the significant use-values of fashion, but rather the specific garments and pathways through which we will convey meaning are prone to change.
If a lot of this implies a certain degree of intentionality on the part of those wearing the clothing, that’s not quite my intention. The significations of clothing are always subject to change given any shift in context, in socialization, in the ways in which we perceive and interact with the material world - pandemic end-of-days or otherwise - and those changes are notoriously dependent and difficult to predict. Further, dressing specifically for Instagram videos in quarantine or whatever seems to harken back to a relatively quaint time when, for two minutes of our lives, there was literally nothing better to do - evidently, that is very much no longer the case.
But I think it’s interesting to consider the ramifications of our new digitized-selves and the brave new world of digital materialities that’s opened before us. People have been expressing versions of themselves online for nearly 50 years, so this isn’t a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. Yet quarantine was an interesting exercise in a polar shift - from the devaluation of our physical selves to becoming, completely, “a temporary combination of text and data.” I’ll let others weigh in on the psycho-social effects of that shift - I’m excited about discovering what happens to the world of material things that’s come with us, on the other side of the veil.