[*] this is a reduced and a read-only adaptation of the fashion systems' algorithmic gaze, a research project that took place between 2018 and 2021. This text emerged from case studies of digital footprints and was later translated in a series of workshops that travelled through academic and public contexts.
This essay encompasses the exploration and interconnection of the fashion system and the concept of the algorithm. As they both possess a certain rhythmic ability that blurs our perception of consumer agency, it is my belief that through the utilisation of algorithms by the fashion system in our current digital based society — these rhythms function as tools for mystification. Through the concepts of rhythm analysis, fashion in the non- textile realm, the propagandistic core of new media and defining the consumer-as-user within new media, I aim to explore and explain the way rhythms are used to mystify and subliminally influence the consumer on a daily basis.
This influential strategy ultimately manipulates the sense of autonomy and therefore ones agency. Unconsciously acting upon consumer culture attributes to the already polluting character of fashion and diminishes the consumers ability to convey change within the confined structures of consumer society. Once we realise that we are being addressed as full-time consumers by all media surrounding us in everyday life, regaining digital agency and taking responsibility within our digital environment is an important step to take.
Overall, fashion uses the attendance of natural rhythms in daily life and conditions these in order to affect its consumer. These rhythms influence the consumer which results into them adapting to the likings of the fashion system. Fashions’ strategy to influence consumers rests on spreading a rhythm of repetitive images throughout the consumers landscape. Because this overload of images influence the consumers sub-conscious we could state that seeing becomes consuming.
In the non-textile realm of fashion, its repetitional visuality helps to determine our decisions in terms of what trends to follow. The algorithm offers us options based on knowledge it has accumulated by our previous clicking behaviour, thus helps to push us in a certain direction. Because the consumer is not aware of these behind-the- scenes processes our engagement with fashion is mediated through the state of constantly updating wardrobe options, which motivates the consumer to buy, but also shapes and stimulates our consuming habits. Stimulating the consumers uniqueness through the use of algorithms, and their ability to learn from what you’ve previously shown interest in, enables a digital form of propaganda. When pushing the consumer to constantly update their wardrobe via new media, information is simultaneously gathered regarding the users commercial preference. This gathered information navigates itself through digital media as commercial propaganda and is used by fashion brands to adapt the consumers buying habits.
Traditional forms of propaganda have been translated to an online realm in which control over infrastructure and narrative are monitored by algorithms and the fashion system. Fashions hidden and inherently commercial agenda uses these algorithms to create a deceptive online realm based on a bias narrative. This bias narrative purposely rules out (visual) information outside of the users’ preferable spectrum.
Fashion online does net exist without new media and relies on it to create a propagandistic infrastructure, in order to sustain commercial profit. New media has created the possibility to connect to (and influence) the consumer in new ways, as it uses new media every day. Digital society has turned the consumer of fashion into a user of new media in which it encounters fashion online. Through the algorithm, information is portrayed in form of an interface specific to each user. This interface visualises the bias narrative by only showing content based upon the users digital history. By using digital media the consumer gives access to personal information which is obtained by the algorithm and transformed into push notifications that encounter the consumer in a rhythm of repetition across multiple new media applications. This deceptive online environment tends to us in form of ‘service’, in which the the consumer falls victim under the loss of digital agency.
A rhythm of elaboration regarding the workings of the digital realm is needed to demystify the field of machine learning, as it is creating a narrative through our personal data in which we, as providers of this data, have absolutely no control over. We need to reprogram passiveness towards analysis of the algorithms we encounter on a daily basis and their influential effect on our habitual rhythms within the fashion system. •