The opening line to this article on Business of Fashion about the coming of a “new aesthetic” made me chuckle.  “Instagram, Barbour, vinyl records, artisanal butchers, moustaches, and the biography of your potatoes lovingly detailed on chalkboard signs at Whole Foods. What is wrong with this picture?”, going on to quote London-based writer and entrepreneur Russell M Davies, who says “most of Shoreditch (London) would be wandering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets.” Yes, the renaissance of yesteryear nostalgia is still very much happening in every hipster hole across the world.  It’s not even decade/period specific in most cases where the yearning for a hybrid of dandified Victoriana, country living in Edwardian times, whisky-glass clinking machoisms of the 1950s and other retro delights comes together in a mish mash of an invented past. 

I’m not really one to besmerch any of this as I’ve frequently been charmed by this ritual of retrogazing.  That said, it’s worth taking a bit of distance to stand back and look upon what’s happening and ask why it is that we want our JPGs sepia tinted and blurred, our menus written in chalk, not digitally printed or our furniture creased and worn in. 

Japanese label ASEEDONCLOUD takes this timewarp mindset to a new level.  I spoke of The Good Life aesthetic that the label and other style and food movements in Japan contribute towards.  It’s this fantasy of fresh bread coming out of Aga’s, blue and white checkered aprons, bouquet garnis in Le Creuset pots, broderie anglaise pretty clothes hanging on string (not nylon!) washing lines and so on and so forth.  That’s all fair enough but ASEEDONCLOUD for A/W 12–3 looks to an even more far-reaching extreme, one that perhaps isn’t in our minds when we think of “the good old days”.  This entirely unisex collection is themed around “BOKUDOUGI” which means young shepherd’s wear.  The story is about a young shepherd who leaves his village to travels alone and quickly grows up along the jouney,  He/she goes through stages of dishevelled attire, so that in the end when he/she returns, he has a cleaner and neatened up appearance. 

Designer Kentaro Tamai wanted to focus on the comfort of clothing, using soft fabrics like light weight melton and cashmere.  It’s a shame that I didn’t get to see this collection in person in Tokyo as ever, with quiet clothing that treads as softly as ASEEDONCLOUD’s, it’s much better to go and touch and feel the stuff.  Still, this set of lookbook images struck me as a extreme point of view of the sort of nostalgia-seeking as described in the beginning of this post.  Tamai of course isn’t proposing a shepherd’s lifestyle to be re-enacted but the fact that he’s even going to this realm where vocations of yesteryear are being resurrected, is interesting.  I had to marvel when I picked up a magazine in Tokyo, which was purely dedicated to Japanese dudes wearing American workwear on the streets but in an extreme and heightened manner.  It doesn’t get more specific than that and it’s a demonstration that Tokyo fashion’s continued fascination with a storybook version of the past has interesting repercussions and results.  ASEEDONCLOUD’s collection definitely falls into that category. 

P.S. Yes, I’ve been absent but as my next post will show, I’ve been consumed by a cocoon of extreme sticky heat, high sugar levels and a copious amount of coconut action.  Bangkok has treated me well.  Too well really. 

This is my friend Maite.

She is a packaging + branding designer from Puerto Rico who I met back in design school. Maite is definitely not afraid of color, if you can’t tell. She wears it so well!

Oh and sorry boys, someone recently put a ring on her… ya snooze ya lose. She’s going to be such a gorgeous bride!!!

Edeline Lee Autumn/Winter 2012 | Photo: Matt Wash

LONDON, United Kingdom — Seeing the designer in her element, there is no mistaking that Edeline Lee is woman who wears many hats. At her live-in studio in Kensington, clothing samples, notes and reference books are strewn about the space while Lee and her assistant cast a fit model for her upcoming season. Around the corner and just in sight, Lee’s son is drawing a birthday card for a friend.

For the designer, entrepreneur and mother, the reality of a multitasking lifestyle is central to her work. “I’m always thinking of real women. They are mothers, they own their own businesses and go to events. I’m thinking of the woman who has 20 roles,” Lee said when talking through her streamlined aesthetic and attention to details and functionality.

Lee moved to London from Canada 13 years ago to begin her fashion design studies at the prestigious Central Saint Martins. There, amongst peers like Christopher Kane and Gareth Pugh, she flourished both creatively and professionally by immersing herself in her craft and learning from trial and error. “No one teaches you how to make patterns in depth, no one teaches you how to design. And I definitely didn’t have business classes. But it does teach you to be completely creatively independent, so you figure it out.”

Between 2002 and 2003, while still at St Martins, the designer apprenticed at Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Then, in 2004, she dropped out of school to take up a position in New York as the associate creative director at Zac Posen, at the time a start-up. “I loved New York,” she said. “But I didn’t really know who I was as a designer. I’d only worked for other people”. She eventually returned to London to finish her studies and, in 2006, back when BoF first discovered Lee, she signed on to launch womenswear for conceptual fashion label The Rodnik Band.

Now, after a brief hiatus and with child in tow, Lee is back with her own eponymous label and has turned to her new life as a mother for inspiration. “It’s a really different perspective being a mother and being a bit older,” she explained. “Now I understand what, practically, a woman needs, and the function of a garment as well as the aesthetic.” She also finds comfort being back in London. “Here, it’s smaller and there’s a little more room to breathe.”

For Fall/Winter 2012 — her first official retail season as an independent designer — Lee referenced the architectural drawings of El Lissitzky and the Pre-Modernist works of the Vienna Workshop, or Wiener Werkstätte. “It’s a composition of shapes, yet highly decorative and feminine,” she said of the collection.

With each piece, she juxtaposes severe lines and geometric patchworks with soft elements like raw silk edges, pleats and washed fabrics. In technique, she strikes a balance between the traditional and the modern. On several garments, synthetic fringe mimics the look and feel of fur, while hand-wrapped closures and hand-painted buttons make her pieces feel that they are one-of-a-kind. Other details, like the way the inside of a pocket feels or the way a coat fastens, are elements she takes equally seriously.

Edeline Lee for BoF

For this month’s Spotlight, Lee designed a logo that captures and communicates her aesthetic, with elements of classicism and an emphasis on careful composition and craftsmanship.

And it seems her eye for detail is paying off. After a “wild” first selling season (including two back-to-back road trips to Paris and a 48-hour blitz in New York City) Edeline Lee has captured the attention of editors and buyers alike. She counts Hamish Bowles as a supporter and a selection of her pieces will be stocked at Browns and Ikram come Autumn. It’s all exciting momentum for an emerging designer who, so far, has managed to put all the right pieces into place.

The Spotlight is BoF’s showcase for emerging talent who employ creativity and business acumen to make their mark in the fashion business.

When it comes to skincare products, I’m a sucker for simplistic, clean packaging. Kiehl’s and Fresh do it perfectly! These are some of my regulars… been using them for years.

What are your favs?

Fresh Sugar Face Polish /  Rose Floral Water/  Fresh Sugar Lip Treatment/ Kiehl’s Eye Treatment/ Kiehl’s Abyssine Cream

Summer’s coming… and I’m super excited! I’m already scouring the swimsuits.

I’ll be teaching a class on how to make these animated .gif illustrations in Boston soon (and then NYC if you like it!). Is that something you guys are interested in? It’s so simple. Once you have the know how, you’ll be makin ‘em no problem! It’s addicting!

A new Paper Friend tomorrow!

I didn’t get to go to the A/W 12–3 edition of Tokyo Fashion Week but I did get to relive my experience from last October by way of the S/S 12 collections that are in store right now.  I’m not normally a “I see on catwalk, I buy pronto” kinda gal.  Well, normally that strategy requires a fair bit of dosh unless you get a cheeky discount, do a cheeky personal order or wait it out until the sales.  That said, Tokyo is now my bi-annual indulgence — a place where I eat and shop and live up to the reputation, that all people who originate from Hong Kong do those two acvities very well indeed.  Therefore, blowing out on a few items that linked back to my Tokyo Fashion Week S/S 12 experience was a treat to myself.  Oh, and I can just reassure myself with the old chestnut about physically supporting the things that I write about.  There’s justification for everything.  

First up, a bit of Peno-meno aka Phenomenon.  The Contemporary Fix in Aoyama, once again ensnared Steve, Phil, Tommy and I in there with their fine mix of Tokyo’s best menswear selection, super kind shop assistants and tomato flavoured gelato downstairs.  We spent far too long trying EVERY single thing on.  With regards to this Phenomenon S/S 12 dragon printed red shirt that could be fit for a Japanese yakuza gang member, Phil and I tussled over whether it was worth BOTH of us getting the same shirt, when we could easily borrow it between us.  We then decided that trans-Atlantic borrowing, with me in London and him in New York, wasn’t going to work, which is why you see us here fooling around in Tsukji market (we queued two hours for Sushi Dai — it was bloody worth it) looking like Phenomenon’s biggest loser fans. 

Of course designer Takeshi Osumi of Phenomenon was looking towards Japanese garment regalia for references in his S/S 12 collection and this shirt is probably the most visually recognisable as  “Japanese” in the scheme of the collection.  That said, the dragons and some of the patternation took me back to the A/W 12–3 Qing dynasty permutations from collections such as Jason Wu and Dries Van Noten.  Both have got me rethinking my attitude towards Far East Asian-inflected collections.  The positive upshot of all of this is that, five years ago, I would never have touched this Phenomenon shirt with a bargepole but now suddenly, I’m all gung-ho about dragons and imperial yellow and red all over my body.  Another personal taboo knocked down.  All I need to do now is get over wearing the colour poo brown and navel-revealing garments and then I’m all set.    

(Worn with Comme des Garcons mens satin kilt, Nicholas Kirkwood shoes.  In first pic, Comme des Garcons Tricot scarf print skirt, Christopher Kane brocade sandals)

Phenomenon’s useful product drop blog throws up a few choice items from the S/S 12 collection, that are dragon-free, if you fear of looking like you’re taking part in some sort of themed costume float. 

In other Phenomenon news, menswear nuts out there will probably already know that Osumi aka Big ‘O’ of Phenomenon has teamed up with The Contemporary Fix owner Yuichi Yoshi to launch their own brand Mr. Gentleman.  There’s nothing annoyingly dapper or twee about this label though.  Their impressive A/W 12–3 lookbook has just been released and rest assured, we’ll be back hanging out at The Contempory Fix in October, eating more seasonal gelato and trying on all the new Mr. Gentleman bits. 

Next up is a long-awaited Jenny Fax wardrobe addition.  Jenny Feng and her label Jenny Fax have been beguiling me for a while now and her show last October was one of my visual highlights of 2011.  I raced over to Harajuku multi-brand store Macaronic as soon as I found out Jenny Fax was stocked there and lo and behold, one of my favourite pieces from the collection — a pleated pinafore dress with knitted straps picked out by flashes of neon and red — was hanging on the rails.  Handily, the neon in the Jenny Fax dress happens to pick up on the neon in my now battered Nike neon Oldhams.

With this S/S 12 collection, Fax explored the demented hierarchy within a girl’s school to arresting effect and specifically she fused American high school culture with the cliched aesthetics of Japanese school girls to come up with something that isn’t just a straightforward pastiche of all things kawaii.

(Worn with Tao by Comme des Garcons shirt, Nike trainers.  Note: All aforementioned Comme pieces were all bought in the ever-awesome Rag Tag stores dotted all over Tokyo.  Designer consignment shopping for Comme plays a huge part in our trips to Tokyo)

Her latest A/W 12–3 collection is a continuation of her previous one, influenced once again by Jenny’s upbringing, a combination of being Taiwanese born, American high-school-educated and currently Japanese-based.  She looks to 90s girlhood imagery — Shampoo, Spice Girls, Laura Palmer, Clueless and Drew Barrymore and her daisy days — and combines it all with high school clicques.  She put on not one but two presentation, one that was Japanese otaku and car-wash themed, with school girls in all shapes and sizes running all over the place and her other main presentation where the real clothing action took place, with disctinctly darker vibes.  Four girls were arranged into Heathers/The Craft type formation with retro screens flashing with Jenny’s inspiration imagery.  The collection itself features more of those uniform-inspired garments mixed with a kinky edge — the satin is somehow too shiny, the plastic too plasticky and the pastels too candy like -  the sad expressions on the girl’s faces tell another tale behind all that prettiness.  The vintage wedding photo printed on a sweatshirt is particularly eerie.  It makes you want to stare but then look away in a flash.  Fortunately for Jenny, once the clothes are out of her own designated context, they gain another life on their own, precisely why I’ll be back to Tokyo to stalk these pieces when they’re merely on hangers on a rail. 

Collaborate and Curate — the two C’s that have bolstered much of fashion’s newsflashes in the past decade or so.  They don’t seem to want to cease but hear me out on this collab/curatorial venture.  WOK in Milan, a saving grace of a store that showed me there was more to Milan than Via della Spiga, will be popping up in Triple Major, a store in Beijing that I’ve yet to visit but have on good authority that it’s pretty awesome.  Owner of Triple Major Ritchie Chan, is someone that I’ve met briefly and wrote about when he launched Project White T-Shirt.  For the project, WOK owners Federica Zambon and Simona Citarella have worked together with a few young Italian designers, names that may not ring a bell but should prompt a Google flurry, to create a cohesive collection of exclusive items themed around the grotesquely hilarious, sex and food fest film that is La Grande Bouffe, directed by Marco Ferreri.  A night of La Grande Bouffe and Caligula a few years ago was enough to give me surreal dream-inducing imagery to last me a lifetime.  Thankfully, the inspirations from the theme have subtly infiltrated the collection, which is now in-store at Triple Major and online on Far Fetch.com.  Highlights include a meat cardigan and bacon print t-shirt designed by Uppercut, a diffusion menswear line that fuses recognisable streetwear casuals with fine Italian craftsmenship.  Men and women alike can now get their meat on, with perhaps the most overtly literal reference to La Grande Bouffe.   

Many pieces in the collection have been designed by Caterina Coccioli and Alessandro Manz of Il Sistema Degli Oggetti, a menswear and womenswear label with a sporty leaning.  Contributions include a perfecto inflected marble print short sleeved shirt with matching trousers, two-tone casual blazers and a blood-red parka in sheer organza.

Girly label Vivetta has taken her cut-out dress and applied a marble print to it, topped off by a PVC collar in two delectable shades of peach and mint. 

Simona Citarella herself has also got in on the action with a pair of white cut-out shoes from her Simona Vanth shoe label. 

Young Milanese milliner Lika has created some criss-cross cut-out straw sun hats, with panama styles that are also adorned by the signature ceramic bows by Cor Sine Labe Doli. 

The idea of cross promoting stores from around the world isn’t a new one but is definitely more than welcome when independent bricks and mortar is dwindling.  I loved it when for instance, Kita Kore in Tokyo, No Discount in Melbourne and Primitive in London all did a sort of three-way exchange programme.  Or when recently, a group of Tokyo boutiques such as Candy and Sister popped up in Hong Kong for a while.  It’s interesting to see that borders of a lone physical store can be broadened by travelling around the world, in addition to having e-commerce offerings.  The teaming up of a group of like-minded designers to present a cohesive and coherent collection also enhances the curatorial aspect behind WOK’s pop-up in Triple Major.  Citarella and Zambon aren’t just bunging together a bunch of designers with dispirate collections in to another store but instead, have carefully chosen to project a united front that simultaneously showcases the strengths of the individual designers but also the ethos behind WOK.  Cross-store, cross-designer, across-the-world — it’s all one happy fashion version of the Disney ride It’s a Small World. 

There are further cultural and social implications to analyse here in WOK and Triple Major’s collaboration — taking a group of young fashion upstarts from Italy, which is well known for fashion power houses but isn’t so recognised for churning out new talent to a country like China, where grassroots creativity is burgeoning but not given many platforms to grow, as consumers are still adopting the “West is Best” approach.  This is the sort of thing I’ll be furrowing my brows over when I visit Shanghai and Beijing over the next two weeks or so.  For now though, everyone can pig out on the feast that WOK and Triple Major have laid out, and can look forward to a group of young Chinese designers participating in this project in vice versa motion.   

Editorial GIF by Reed + Rader | Source: V Magazine

LONDON, United Kingdom — Instagram, Barbour, vinyl records, artisanal butchers, moustaches, and the biography of your potatoes lovingly detailed on chalkboard signs at Whole Foods. What is wrong with this picture? As London-based writer and entrepreneur Russell M Davies puts it, “most of Shoreditch would be wandering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets. Every new coffee shop and organic foodery seems to be the same. Wood, brushed metal, bits of knackered toys on shelves. And blackboards. Everywhere there’s blackboards.”

For the last few years, the stylistic purview of much of the creative class in places like Shoreditch in London, the borough of Brooklyn in New York, and Berlin’s Mitte district has been curiously backward-looking. Perhaps this retreat into retro nostalgia is a reaction to economic uncertainty and technological change. Maybe it’s a craving for what we imagine were simpler times or a search for authenticity in a world that is increasingly artificial. Whatever the reason, the backward-looking trend extends to fashion, as well. In fact, perhaps more than any other design discipline, fashion is engaged in an intense dialogue with the past. “There’s so little innovation in fashion in its current state,” Susanna Lau, widely known as Susie Bubble, told BoF. And indeed, from Belstaff to Moynat to Schiaparelli, reviving dusty heritage brands is undoubtedly the business model du jour.

But over the past year, a loose group of creatives in London’s East End have given birth to a counter-narrative to the growing tide of heritage and nostalgia, examining the reality of our increasingly artificial and technology-mediated world head-on. Known as “The New Aesthetic,” the movement was born last May with a blog post by London-based writer and technologist James Bridle, who began collecting found images at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com that dealt with the “eruption of the digital into the physical world” and the idea of “seeing like a machine” in an attempt to capture and communicate the possibilities for a more contemporary visual culture. Subjects included everything from glitches in Google Maps to photographs from military drones in Afghanistan and the techno-organic forms of contemporary architecture that betray traces of the computer-aided design (CAD) programmes used to create them.

The movement really struck a chord and came to wider attention at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference where Mr Bridle led a panel called “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices” and futurist Bruce Sterling asked what the New Aesthetic meant for fashion in his highly-anticipated closing address. “Although SXSW people do look chic, it’s a rather retro look,” he challenged the tech-savvy audience in attendance. “They don’t actually look very futuristic. I would suggest, when you come back next year…come back in robotvision glitchcore!”

In fashion, a growing number of designers have embraced the digital prints revolution. But which designers, imagemakers and fashion editorial outlets are actually producing “New Aesthetic” work that actively engages and deals with our digitally-mediated world?

Low-resolution pixilation is a major New Aesthetic theme and was perhaps most elegantly used in Preen’s Spring-Summer 2012 collection, which features romantic floral prints processed by a computer.

Preen Spring/Summer 2012 | Source: Style.com

Both Gareth Pugh and United Nude have borrowed from videogames, producing blocky geometries that reference “voxels,” volumetric pixels once used in constructing videogame environments. And Arnhem-based Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has made what is surely fashion’s most beautiful and radical use of digital imaging technology with her Photoshop-designed, 3D-printed polymer dresses, which play with the tension between digital and organic forms.

The moment when technology reveals itself through digital glitches and errors is another major theme in New Aesthetic imagery and something that has appeared in the work of Australian fashion designer Josh Goot who has made particularly striking use of digital prints that tend towards noise and distortion. While Goot’s process is carefully controlled by the designer, Philip Stearns’ Glitch Textiles project uses short-circuited cameras to auto-generate colour patterns that are then woven into blankets, with hypnotic and beautiful results.

Amongst fashion imagemakers, Brooklyn-based Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader, working under the name Reed + Rader, have worked extensively with animated GIFs, producing fashion stories for magazines including V and are currently working on a project called Pyramid Hill, a 3D world for which the duo leveraged a videogame level-builder called the Unreal Engine to create an immersive, interactive environment.

How to Hide from Machines | Source: CV Dazzle

Perhaps fashion’s most overtly “New Aesthetic” magazine is DIS, edited by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, Nick Scholl and David Toro. In a landmark example of New Aesthetic work in fashion, the magazine recently collaborated with Adam Harvey to create a radical beauty story based on CV Dazzle — styling techniques that use asymmetric make-up, hair and accessories to disrupt facial recognition algorithms — entitled “How to Hide from Machines: The perilous glamour of life under surveillance.”

“We need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder,” wrote James Bridle in his first essay on the New Aesthetic. Digital methods of image research, image editing and production have quickly become embedded in the fashion industry, but the possibilities for digital creativity have yet to be fully explored. “It’s still not something people are consciously thinking about,” said Ms Lau.

As a term, “The New Aesthetic” may be short-lived. Surprising many, James Bridle shut down the New Aesthetic Tumblr ten days ago, exactly one year after it was launched. But if the “New Aesthetic” movement is already dead, this is surely only the beginning of digital technologies impacting the way fashion creatives think, see and design. Indeed, the generation of students just starting to arrive in fashion schools have only ever known a world that’s mediated by digital technology and learnt to process visual culture through a ceaseless digital stream of appropriated and juxtaposed images.

Long live the New Aesthetic.

Jay Owens is a social media and technology researcher based in London.

Editorial GIF by Reed + Rader | Source: V Magazine

LONDON, United Kingdom — Instagram, Barbour, vinyl records, artisanal butchers, moustaches, and the biography of your potatoes lovingly detailed on chalkboard signs at Whole Foods. What is wrong with this picture? As London-based writer and entrepreneur Russell M Davies puts it, “most of Shoreditch would be wandering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets. Every new coffee shop and organic foodery seems to be the same. Wood, brushed metal, bits of knackered toys on shelves. And blackboards. Everywhere there’s blackboards.”

For the last few years, the stylistic purview of much of the creative class in places like Shoreditch in London, the borough of Brooklyn in New York, and Berlin’s Mitte district has been curiously backward-looking. Perhaps this retreat into retro nostalgia is a reaction to economic uncertainty and technological change. Maybe it’s a craving for what we imagine were simpler times or a search for authenticity in a world that is increasingly artificial. Whatever the reason, the backward-looking trend extends to fashion, as well. In fact, perhaps more than any other design discipline, fashion is engaged in an intense dialogue with the past. “There’s so little innovation in fashion in its current state,” Susanna Lau, widely known as Susie Bubble, told BoF. And indeed, from Belstaff to Moynat to Schiaparelli, reviving dusty heritage brands is undoubtedly the business model du jour.

But over the past year, a loose group of creatives in London’s East End have given birth to a counter-narrative to the growing tide of heritage and nostalgia, examining the reality of our increasingly artificial and technology-mediated world head-on. Known as “The New Aesthetic,” the movement was born last May with a blog post by London-based writer and technologist James Bridle, who began collecting found images at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com that dealt with the “eruption of the digital into the physical world” and the idea of “seeing like a machine” in an attempt to capture and communicate the possibilities for a more contemporary visual culture. Subjects included everything from glitches in Google Maps to photographs from military drones in Afghanistan and the techno-organic forms of contemporary architecture that betray traces of the computer-aided design (CAD) programmes used to create them.

The movement really struck a chord and came to wider attention at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference where Mr Bridle led a panel called “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices” and futurist Bruce Sterling asked what the New Aesthetic meant for fashion in his highly-anticipated closing address. “Although SXSW people do look chic, it’s a rather retro look,” he challenged the tech-savvy audience in attendance. “They don’t actually look very futuristic. I would suggest, when you come back next year…come back in robotvision glitchcore!”

In fashion, a growing number of designers have embraced the digital prints revolution. But which designers, imagemakers and fashion editorial outlets are actually producing “New Aesthetic” work that actively engages and deals with our digitally-mediated world?

Low-resolution pixilation is a major New Aesthetic theme and was perhaps most elegantly used in Preen’s Spring-Summer 2012 collection, which features romantic floral prints processed by a computer.

Preen Spring/Summer 2012 | Source: Style.com

Both Gareth Pugh and United Nude have borrowed from videogames, producing blocky geometries that reference “voxels,” volumetric pixels once used in constructing videogame environments. And Arnhem-based Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has made what is surely fashion’s most beautiful and radical use of digital imaging technology with her Photoshop-designed, 3D-printed polymer dresses, which play with the tension between digital and organic forms.

The moment when technology reveals itself through digital glitches and errors is another major theme in New Aesthetic imagery and something that has appeared in the work of Australian fashion designer Josh Goot who has made particularly striking use of digital prints that tend towards noise and distortion. While Goot’s process is carefully controlled by the designer, Philip Stearns’ Glitch Textiles project uses short-circuited cameras to auto-generate colour patterns that are then woven into blankets, with hypnotic and beautiful results.

Amongst fashion imagemakers, Brooklyn-based Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader, working under the name Reed + Rader, have worked extensively with animated GIFs, producing fashion stories for magazines including V and are currently working on a project called Pyramid Hill, a 3D world for which the duo leveraged a videogame level-builder called the Unreal Engine to create an immersive, interactive environment.

How to Hide from Machines | Source: CV Dazzle

Perhaps fashion’s most overtly “New Aesthetic” magazine is DIS, edited by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, Nick Scholl and David Toro. In a landmark example of New Aesthetic work in fashion, the magazine recently collaborated with Adam Harvey to create a radical beauty story based on CV Dazzle — styling techniques that use asymmetric make-up, hair and accessories to disrupt facial recognition algorithms — entitled “How to Hide from Machines: The perilous glamour of life under surveillance.”

“We need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder,” wrote James Bridle in his first essay on the New Aesthetic. Digital methods of image research, image editing and production have quickly become embedded in the fashion industry, but the possibilities for digital creativity have yet to be fully explored. “It’s still not something people are consciously thinking about,” said Ms Lau.

As a term, “The New Aesthetic” may be short-lived. Surprising many, James Bridle shut down the New Aesthetic Tumblr ten days ago, exactly one year after it was launched. But if the “New Aesthetic” movement is already dead, this is surely only the beginning of digital technologies impacting the way fashion creatives think, see and design. Indeed, the generation of students just starting to arrive in fashion schools have only ever known a world that’s mediated by digital technology and learnt to process visual culture through a ceaseless digital stream of appropriated and juxtaposed images.

Long live the New Aesthetic.

Jay Owens is a social media and technology researcher based in London.

Editorial GIF by Reed + Rader | Source: V Magazine

LONDON, United Kingdom — Instagram, Barbour, vinyl records, artisanal butchers, moustaches, and the biography of your potatoes lovingly detailed on chalkboard signs at Whole Foods. What is wrong with this picture? As London-based writer and entrepreneur Russell M Davies puts it, “most of Shoreditch would be wandering around in a leather apron if it could. With pipe and beard and rickets. Every new coffee shop and organic foodery seems to be the same. Wood, brushed metal, bits of knackered toys on shelves. And blackboards. Everywhere there’s blackboards.”

For the last few years, the stylistic purview of much of the creative class in places like Shoreditch in London, the borough of Brooklyn in New York, and Berlin’s Mitte district has been curiously backward-looking. Perhaps this retreat into retro nostalgia is a reaction to economic uncertainty and technological change. Maybe it’s a craving for what we imagine were simpler times or a search for authenticity in a world that is increasingly artificial. Whatever the reason, the backward-looking trend extends to fashion, as well. In fact, perhaps more than any other design discipline, fashion is engaged in an intense dialogue with the past. “There’s so little innovation in fashion in its current state,” Susanna Lau, widely known as Susie Bubble, told BoF. And indeed, from Belstaff to Moynat to Schiaparelli, reviving dusty heritage brands is undoubtedly the business model du jour.

But over the past year, a loose group of creatives in London’s East End have given birth to a counter-narrative to the growing tide of heritage and nostalgia, examining the reality of our increasingly artificial and technology-mediated world head-on. Known as “The New Aesthetic,” the movement was born last May with a blog post by London-based writer and technologist James Bridle, who began collecting found images at new-aesthetic.tumblr.com that dealt with the “eruption of the digital into the physical world” and the idea of “seeing like a machine” in an attempt to capture and communicate the possibilities for a more contemporary visual culture. Subjects included everything from glitches in Google Maps to photographs from military drones in Afghanistan and the techno-organic forms of contemporary architecture that betray traces of the computer-aided design (CAD) programmes used to create them.

The movement really struck a chord and came to wider attention at this year’s SXSW Interactive conference where Mr Bridle led a panel called “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices” and futurist Bruce Sterling asked what the New Aesthetic meant for fashion in his highly-anticipated closing address. “Although SXSW people do look chic, it’s a rather retro look,” he challenged the tech-savvy audience in attendance. “They don’t actually look very futuristic. I would suggest, when you come back next year…come back in robotvision glitchcore!”

In fashion, a growing number of designers have embraced the digital prints revolution. But which designers, imagemakers and fashion editorial outlets are actually producing “New Aesthetic” work that actively engages and deals with our digitally-mediated world?

Low-resolution pixilation is a major New Aesthetic theme and was perhaps most elegantly used in Preen’s Spring-Summer 2012 collection, which features romantic floral prints processed by a computer.

Preen Spring/Summer 2012 | Source: Style.com

Both Gareth Pugh and United Nude have borrowed from videogames, producing blocky geometries that reference “voxels,” volumetric pixels once used in constructing videogame environments. And Arnhem-based Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has made what is surely fashion’s most beautiful and radical use of digital imaging technology with her Photoshop-designed, 3D-printed polymer dresses, which play with the tension between digital and organic forms.

The moment when technology reveals itself through digital glitches and errors is another major theme in New Aesthetic imagery and something that has appeared in the work of Australian fashion designer Josh Goot who has made particularly striking use of digital prints that tend towards noise and distortion. While Goot’s process is carefully controlled by the designer, Philip Stearns’ Glitch Textiles project uses short-circuited cameras to auto-generate colour patterns that are then woven into blankets, with hypnotic and beautiful results.

Amongst fashion imagemakers, Brooklyn-based Pamela Reed and Matthew Rader, working under the name Reed + Rader, have worked extensively with animated GIFs, producing fashion stories for magazines including V and are currently working on a project called Pyramid Hill, a 3D world for which the duo leveraged a videogame level-builder called the Unreal Engine to create an immersive, interactive environment.

How to Hide from Machines | Source: CV Dazzle

Perhaps fashion’s most overtly “New Aesthetic” magazine is DIS, edited by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, Nick Scholl and David Toro. In a landmark example of New Aesthetic work in fashion, the magazine recently collaborated with Adam Harvey to create a radical beauty story based on CV Dazzle — styling techniques that use asymmetric make-up, hair and accessories to disrupt facial recognition algorithms — entitled “How to Hide from Machines: The perilous glamour of life under surveillance.”

“We need to see the technologies we actually have with a new wonder,” wrote James Bridle in his first essay on the New Aesthetic. Digital methods of image research, image editing and production have quickly become embedded in the fashion industry, but the possibilities for digital creativity have yet to be fully explored. “It’s still not something people are consciously thinking about,” said Ms Lau.

As a term, “The New Aesthetic” may be short-lived. Surprising many, James Bridle shut down the New Aesthetic Tumblr ten days ago, exactly one year after it was launched. But if the “New Aesthetic” movement is already dead, this is surely only the beginning of digital technologies impacting the way fashion creatives think, see and design. Indeed, the generation of students just starting to arrive in fashion schools have only ever known a world that’s mediated by digital technology and learnt to process visual culture through a ceaseless digital stream of appropriated and juxtaposed images.

Long live the New Aesthetic.

Jay Owens is a social media and technology researcher based in London.