Judith Donath: Virtual vogues

We are now going to talk about virtual vogues and the acceleration of fashion in the digital age. I will start by talking a little bit about what fashion is. I am not sure whether you can read this slide up here, but one of the really important things is about fashion is that it is a visible representation of identity.

For those of you who cannot read it, this is a cartoon by Roz Chast, a New Yorker, it has a label on her little hat, which says: my favourite food is tuna fish, I eat it every day. There is a label on her skirt, saying: my mother lives in Sacramento, but we speak quite often on the telephone. The idea behind this is that through the ways people dress - and by fashion I mean not just clothing, but by all kinds of things people accumulate around them at homes, their tastes - are ways that represent who they are, what kind of identities they see for themselves.

But it is not simply how people wish to be seen - and what is going to be my point here, is that one way of speaking about fashion is it is the intersection of desire and information. It is a quick take on a complex subject. But this idea of desire - who one wishes to be and how one wishes to be seen - and using information, which is how you know how to express that sort of thing, and that is really what we are concentrating on here, which is how changing rates of information access can affect the rate of fashion. So this is my sort of requisite semi-gratuitous side of accelerating rates.

But historically, a lot of people positively begin to fashion around the 14th century, the coming of the Crusades, and the opening up of Europe to a lot of new materials and things of that. It is really the beginning of fashion.

One of the important things is that by 'fashion', I do not mean just 'any clothing'. Obviously, people have been wearing clothes all over the world for thousands and thousands of years. But the idea of fashion is a way of expressing yourself through some kind of object as a temporal change. So that in order to make that same expression over time you have to continually change what you do. So the real salient fact is that very temporal change. That is what really marks fashion from other forms of clothing or style.

And so we see here this accelerating rate that we've been seeing these two days with the idea that I am going to argue that this rate is going to keep increasing over time, but what it's really linked to is the increasing rate to which we have access to information.

So we start with a brief historical view, but that real, initial bird of fashion - this is a picture of the 15th century, but in the early 14th-16th century had three basic reasons behind it: a lot of objects started coming into Europe, because of the crusaders bringing back the spoils of war, and also through trade, all these gems and fabrics coming into Europe, there was also much greater social mobility.

Another big piece is that is that fashion is very rarely related to a very modal society, a very static society. Even if there is a great deal of objects and a fair amount information, if society is very static, you will not get fashion as this kind of sociological phenomenon, because fashion is really about being able to express a very changing social position.

And so the third reason, one that we're most interesting here, is that the rate of information access was really beginning to change at this point. That through frequent travel and other things, people were starting to have a lot more information. There are letters from Polish princesses in the 15th century, writing telling their noblemen that when they were going to Paris to bring back the models of the Parisian fashions. So there is information that is travelling at perhaps the rate of a style a year from France to Poland, but it was the sort of flow of information that was marked by changes in the way people were dressing.

So by the 19th century we have increasing volocities; the rates of fashion are changing faster and faster, and this is when theerists like Veblen and Semmel are starting writing about fashion and started to think about it as a phenomenon and why it is happening.

Their basic theory about it, what was later called the trickle-down theory of fashion, is still accepted with various complications, and I think it was Veblen who stated that he saw fashion as a way in which an upper class elite was trying to differentiate itself and there was this whole group of others who were trying to imitate them. And whatever the upper class were doing, they had to keep changing, because as other people were able to imitate that, then the message they were sending about their being different no longer made sense, as everyone else adopted that. So this was already being written about in the 19th century.

So here we are in the age of global communication. I use this example - it's an album cover by a group called Dee-Lite - and it was a big hit in the clubs and they were also very famous for being fashion icons themselves, because they continuously changed fashions on almost a weekly basis. And you look things like music and to a certain extent youth fashion, we are almost at the state where all over the world people are becoming aware of music if the statement they are making is that they are at the forefront of fashion in terms of the music world, that is something they can change on a weekly basis and your knowledge of what to do with that has to change at that rate.

So what we also can see, which is very interesting, is that we also had the birth of the world wide web and the initial sort of style and fashion nerd appearing there. This is like someone's homepage, showing frames, which can be seen as some online fashion, she has every little doo-dad which is new. And like fashion it has different ways of approaching it.

This is a boy's page - she was a housewife from California - he has a whole thing about this site has no frames - there's starting to be little things - smiley faces, frames and no frames, and different types of text, . and homepages that are a virtual version of style online, and people express different things with it.

So we are now reaching an era where it is going to be very easy to change things virtually, information is flowing very quickly, there is this idea of fashion being something happening at a very fast rate.

If any of you read the book The Subliminal Man by J.G. Ballard, his argument is that we are ending up in a world in which people are going to spend all their time and energy trying to catch up with this constant change in what they have to do to be at the forefront of the ideal consumer.

So, as designers, what can you do? I have one minute left in which to posit two directions which are critically valid.

One, and perhaps this is a sort of very trendy fashion for computer programmes, is that you can have agents, so you do not have to spend all your time trying to figure out what to do next and run around and go shopping. As computer programmers we can build agents for you that would go out and do that, and competing agents that will run out and make the rate go ever faster and faster.

But, you know, you could worry about whose agents are fastest, but the other side - and a lot of people have been speaking about this and this conference goes in this direction, is that in the same way that fashion developed as a response to changing social conditions 500 years ago. You can also see we are at a stage now where we reached the opposite extreme in which information changes itself so quickly that the idea of trying to always show our position in it is too exhausting, and it is not really what we want to be doing, and instead that representations of self have to be built up much more over time, dealing with individual history. It is something that grows over time, and the reason here that I use the image of a tree is a very interesting one, it is something that very slowly grows, but continues to keep a continuous record of everything that happens to it. So at all times it is becoming increasingly individual as a self representation. It is an interesting metaphor: the idea of new representations based much more on history than just a marker of immediate knowledge.