Digital Fashion Bodies: Performing Posthumanity In Virtual Reality

Abstract

This research situated at the nexus of fashion and digital media investigates the notion of digital fashion bodies. The increasing convergence of game and fashion practices is resulting in the digitisation of actual bodies and increased interactions with born-digital virtual characters in sociotechnical contexts. Social bodies being dressed bodies, it has become important not only to ask what digital fashion bodies are, but also, what they do. Adopting a critical feminist paradigm, this practice-based study configured Deleuzian concepts with Rosi Braidotti’s posthumanism and the intersectional feminist theory of Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, amongst others, to inform my fashion filmmaking practice in a material-discursive space. From my situated and embodied position of postcolonial hybridity, I dislocate and transvalue hegemonic discourse in this project of creative deterritorialisation through practice. Practice emerged as speculative and rhizomatic and, necessarily embedded in a network of human and non-human agents. Obsidian, 9318_ and 444.2, are the three fashion XR works developed with collaborators by putting together digital studio toolkits to output a combination of animation and real-time virtual reality prototypes. Obsidian is a multi-user VR project diffractively revealed as digital baroque and scenographic space of encounter with born-digital cyborgian bodies. In 9318_, digital surfaces are proposed as metasurface for their ability to morph and confound the different orders between body and dress, alluding to the osmotic qualities of their materiality. Digital bodies as posthumanistic embodiments of fashion are deemed performative. Diffracting 9318_ through N Katherine Hayles’ theory of inscription and incorporation, I conclude that these come into being through material-discursive relationship with actual fashioned bodies, calling for a Baradian ethico-onto-epistemological approach to practice. A post-qualitative research design and diffractive approach allowed for my situated practice to perform a posthumanist position and through this, 444.2 as an Afro-diasporic volumetric journey in VR, has taken shape as pluriversal, and a decolonial contribution to fashion studies.