[In contrast to experiences that make the mediated seem “real,” a new fashion line from Loewe provides a good example of inverse presence, “when ‘real’ seems mediated.” The short DesignTAXI story below provides details. See the original story for six different images and for more, animated and interactive images (and the very high prices) visit the Loewe website. The second, short story from High Snobiety
that follows below provides some context about similar efforts to create inverse presence in fashion. –Matthew]
[Image: Source: High Snobiety]
Loewe Debuts Pixelated Clothes That Blur Line Between Virtual And Reality
By Alexa Heah
April 12, 2023
Ever wanted to look like a video game character, but in the real world? Now’s the chance, as Loewe recently launched the ‘Pixel Story’—an extension of its Spring/Summer 2023 Collection that taps into the power of optical illusions to blur the line between virtual and reality.
Instead of only expressing themselves through the pixelated outfits offered in digital worlds, fashion-forward consumers can now reenact the looks out on the street through the range’s pixel products.
According to the brand, designers focused on the lines, colors, and shapes of each garment, creating a glitchy pattern that redefines the typical T-shirts, shirts, and chinos through innovative 3D seams.
The collection first debuted at the label’s runway show earlier this year, where fans got a glimpse of the pixelated hoodie and t-shirt, but it has now expanded to include denim pieces and even a special iteration of the famed Puzzle bag.
Each piece will be presented in limited-edition packaging that reimagines Loewe’s signature logo in 8-bit form, complete with a collector’s box and paper bag reminiscent of something you’d see in an early 2000s multiplayer game.
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[From High Snobiety]
Falling Into Fashion’s Uncanny Valley
By Alexandra Pauly
March 24, 2023
Lately, fashion has been looking a little… off. Prada’s purses are cartoonishly puffy. Loewe’s 8-bit hoodies are straight out of a video game. MSCHF’s Big Red Boots occupy a borderland somewhere between real-life and the metaverse.
Increasingly, brands are “cartoonifying” their wares, resulting in clothing and accessories that would look more at home on a digital avatar than on a human. Take Loewe, for example: The label’s Spring/Summer 2023 collection featured “pixelated” clothes, 3D garments engineered to resemble flat, 8-bit renderings of hoodies, T-shirts, and pants.
If the collection’s clothing was Minecraft brought to life, its footwear was Minnie Mouse made real. The same season, creative director Jonathan Anderson debuted rubbery stilettos molded to replicate the exaggeratedly rounded proportions of the cartoon rodent’s high heels.
Now, for Fall/Winter 2023, Loewe is continuing in the grand tradition of cartoonification, supplying customers with eerily artificial looking dresses, tops, and skirts. Devoid of the creasing and movement that one would expect from a pair of, say, draped pants, Loewe’s latest appears too smooth, too static — real but somehow unreal, as if Anderson instructed an AI generator spit out its best imitation of a pink tube dress or enlisted a baker to create a cake disguised as a cropped shirt.
Plucked straight off of a Mii and dropped onto the runway, the designs play with the hyperreal, a term coined by Jean Baudrillard. The French sociologist defined “hyperreality” as the inability to distinguish reality from representations of it, a concept that Loewe mines by bringing simulacra of real-life objects — a video game’s pixelated rendering of clothing, a cartoon drawing of high heels — into the physical world.
Is your brain about to explode? Mine too.
As the boundaries between the metaverse and reality continue to blur, it’s no surprise that fashion is beginning to offer cartoonified clothing, accessories, and footwear mimicking the appearance of digital renders.
Prada sells puffy handbags and loafers that look more like playthings than functional objects. Balenciaga’s XXL stompers appear to have been designed in Rhino3D. And we can’t forget MSCHF’s Big Red Boots, “REALLY not shaped like feet” but “EXTREMELY shaped like boots,” per a press release. (MSCHF’s website went on to explain: “Cartoonishness is an abstraction that frees us from the constraints of reality… If you kick someone in these boots, they go BOING!”)
Fashion lovers, beware: It’s uncanny valley out here.
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