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Fashion's digital body: seeing and feeling in fashion interactives

The recent expansion of online fashion has forced a radical rethink of the concept of ‘fashion media’. While the development of fashion media has typically been considered in terms of the broad social and technological transformations that have characterised modernity, the expanded field of fashion media explores relationships between technology, society and identity at the turn of the millennium. Shinkle brings recent theories of human/computer interaction to bear on the analysis of fashion interactives. She asks: If the address to the corporeal body is key to the way that fashion media become meaningful, then (how) is this privileged relationship with the body extended and enabled by fashion interactives? Employing ‘second generation’ VR theory, which examines the way that augmented reality interfaces merge real-world experience with computer-generated sensory inputs, she extends the theoretical range of fashion media discourse by referring to the ideas of media theorist Mark B.N. Hansen to examine how fashion interactives address and engage the body alongside more conventional modes of display. This essay is part of Shinkle’s recent body of work on the interaction of the fashioned body with visual technologies (which also includes her essay ‘Playing for the Camera’, REF Output 4). It extends theoretical models typically used in other fields (i.e. HCI, videogame theory) to the discussion of fashion interactives – electronic media that allow the user to interact with images of fashion. It questions widely-held assumptions that fashion is defined and delimited by the visual, and dominated by a critical understanding of the fashioned body as a signifier. It argues, significantly, that fashion interactives suggest a more dynamic relation between the body as a signifier, and the body-in-depth – between the surface of the fashioned body as a representation, and the deeper, more visceral sensory responses or ‘affections’ that describe the experience of being clothed.