WHO WORE IT BEST? UNDERSTANDING MEDIATED

How interdisciplinary design practices intersect as a powerful communicational core in fashion is given little attention in design studies. Even as fashion design is a design domain in its own right, this paper argues that our conceptions of power in fashion need to more fully include fashion as a matter of communication design. This paper argues that power is enacted via combinations of material and immaterial articulations of design practices in fashion. Design practices are essential in shaping the tastes, styles, and desires at the heart of fashion, thus rendering fashion design as an expanded field that reaches far beyond material garments. This discussion paper proposes an expanded conception of fashion design, one that includes a mesh of networked media and design practices central to fashion. Via analysis of the fashion collective Vetements, these intersections are regarded as a locus of both economic and aesthetic power. INTRODUCTION This paper inquires into the role of design in the shifting cultural and communicational landscape of fashion, digital mediation and branding, and how it relates to fashion design, and power. Issues of power in fashion is often discussed with a focus on manufacturing and materials, relating to environmental and ethical aspects of production and labour (e.g. Annamma et.al. 2012), as fast fashion plays a significant role in pressing global problems. However, the power inherent in transdisciplinary design in fashion tend to be over shadowed by the long list of problems connected to fashion. These include issues of biased representations of race and ethnicity (e.g. Sharma & Sharma 2003, Sircar 2014, Cheang 2013), biased conceptions of beauty and the female body (e.g. Grimstad Klepp & Rysst 2017, McCracken 2014, Craik 1993) just to mention a few. As fashion is part of an aesthetic economy (Gaugele 2014), aesthetic and economic power is enacted via design practices that connect the mediated and the worn, as fashion increasingly is weaved into our mediated daily lives and digital cultures. As part of an increasingly mediatized field (Roccamora 2016, Muriale 2014), fashion design needs to more fully take on a fine-tuned understanding of the persuasive power enacted via the interconnections between fashion and its mediations. Here, thinking of mediation of fashion in terms of design, as opposed to as in terms of media, may aid us in expanding our understanding of fashion as an expanded design domain. Fashion ties together a range of competencies and professional design practices. Written from an interdisciplinary humanist perspective, this paper places the complex couplings between interdisciplinary design practices at the heart of fashion. It inquires into how contemporary fashion is performed and enacted in a blend of material and digital design practices in contemporary networked media, such as the image-sharing platform, Instagram. The ways in which these digital networks are enmeshed in the design of fashion may inform our understanding of fashion design as situated and performed in digital cultures. In connecting perspectives from critical cultural studies, fashion studies, and studies of advertising and branding, a focus on interdisciplinary design allows us to more fully unpack matters of symbolic and aesthetic power in fashion and its mediation, circulation and distinction. Connecting fashion design and fashion mediation to contemporary digital networked media culture and design, the paper draws on perspectives from the media/journalismand creative industry scholar Mark Deuze. It relates and discusses Deuze’s (2007, 2011, 2016) notion of pervasive media in contemporary advertising work and media use to fashion. He frames media as a significant component in our lives. Four main loci of power in the connections between fashion design and digital media culture is devised by drawing on Deuze (2016). In his article, Living in media and the future of advertising, he proposes three concepts relating to contemporary media practices. These are 1) media as life, 2) media as activities, 3) media as artefacts, and 4) media as arrangements. In modifying and relating these concepts to a discussion of the linkages between communication design and fashion design, as these collapse into one another, fashion design might be rendered as an expanded design discipline. In such an expanded discipline, power might be understood as enacted via interdisciplinary design across the digital and the material. By way of critical textual analysis of selected examples of mediated articulations relating to the fashion brand Vetements, selected articulations of how the garments and their mediations intersect as part of contemporary digital media and design cultures and practices are analysed. As a result, the paper suggests that we expand our notions of fashion design to also incorporate meditational design practices in our conceptualisation of fashion as a design domain. First it briefly presents the methods applied, followed by a presentation of the fashion brand Vetements, the relations between fashion and media, followed by a discussion of fashion and communication design, persuasion and fashion, and fashion and cultural studies. Deuzes’s concepts are then related to fashion and to Vetements in the analysis, followed by a discussion and concluding remarks. METHODS The main methods applied in this study are what Karlsen (2017) refers to as online ethnography, where online activities and communities are observed and interacted with over time. A large network of more than two hundred international fashion media actors, such as stylists, online fashion magazines, look into the Instagram account of Vetements for themselves (@vetements_official). Drawing on Mörtberg et al. (2010), these digital fashion photographers, artists, photographers, bloggers, commentators and fashion critics have been observed over a period of more than six months, as has the brand’s Instagram account. Vetements’s online (and offline) activities were also observed. Readers are encouraged to articulations are temporally and geographically distributed. With reference to the author’s practicebased and critical engagement and research in digital communication design, spanning two decades, the selected examples serve as what Sean Cubitt (2013) refers to as anecdotal evidence, that is particular textual articulations that allow us to root a larger discussion of a phenomenon in particular cases. This is combined with critical textual analysis of selected web/Instagram mediations of Vetements’s activities and on-going digital campaigns. VIRAL FASHION: VETEMENTS The Georgian-French, Zürich-based fashion design collective labelled “Vetements”, (French, meaning “clothes”), has from its’ inception developed into a successful, yet contested brand with a cult-like following. Vetements has attracted the fashion-world’s attention and generated heated discussion as well as massive hype. As stated by Vogue “The label launched in 2014 based on the idea of urban cultures, the internet, everyday life on the streets and a modern wardrobe without seasonal themes”. What makes Vetements an interesting case for inquiring into the relationships between fashion design, communication design and power is the brand’s ability to tap into and harness prominent features in digital culture and design, and to treat the design and mediation as mutually dependent on one another. That being said, this paper does not have a normative approach to design, and does not see Vetements as doing design work better or more holistic than other fashion designers or brands. However, this brand provides an interesting case when inquiring into how fashion design might be embedded in contemporary mediational cultures. The brand’s mediation and overall presentation of its identity forms an integrated communication design in and across ecologies of genres and formats, where design across fields is a unifying feature binding together the artefacts and their mediations. An example of the blur between garment and medium in Vetements is a hooded sweater seen in figure 1. In showing the garment as part of their The quote has its origin in the television series Beverly Hills 90210, where the character Dylan McKay says: “May the bridges I burn light the way”. Designed as to generate engagement with possible sources of the quote, steering its audience straight in to mediated popular culture, this anti-intellectualism paired with luxury fashion caters to the tastes of generations of digital natives, casting themselves into accomplices in a nostalgic media journey into the lives of its audiences and actual and potential customers. 1 Available at: http://www.esquire. com/style/news/a49095/vetementsluke-perry-bridges-i-burn/[accessed 31 May 2017].