Article: Digital Fashion Between Pictorial and Tactile Practices
Abstract
This paper presents an intergenerational dialogue between a senior fashion theorist and two early-career researchers, exploring emerging perspectives on digital fashion and theory. In addition to their academic work, the two early-career researchers also edit WETWARE Magazine, an experimental publication dedicated to digital fashion. The authors examine how digital fashion functions primarily as a pictorial practice—rooted in image-making, screen cultures, and visual aesthetics—while simultaneously challenging traditional definitions of fashion as material, tactile, and body-bound. This dialogue positions digital fashion within a broader shift toward fashion’s increasing visuality, shaped by platforms such as social media, immersive VR/AR, gaming environments, NFTs, and virtual archives. The authors explore how digital garments are created to be circulated, seen, and experienced visually rather than worn physically. Drawing on posthumanism, new materialism, and visual culture, the authors highlight how digital fashion blurs boundaries between object and image, presence and simulation, fashion and media. Key themes include the nature of digital garments; the evolution of fashion as a screen-based, image-driven practice; the role of visual tactility in simulating material qualities; and the emotional attachments formed around intangible yet culturally potent fashion objects. The dialogue addresses the paradox of digital fashion’s ephemerality within a hyper-material consumer society and its entanglement with infrastructures of display and mediation. The authors underscore the current trends and changes in fashion by linking digital fashion to pictorial and medial practices, both screen-based and printed, while interrogating the position of digital fashion within the broader scope of fashion studies and contemporary fashion discourse.
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