Sustainable fashion (or UNsustainable fashion to be more accurate) is still on everyone’s lips, continuously oscillating between dichotomies.
On one side, consumers’ interests and preferences still seem to favour the path towards more sustainable ecosystems. At least according to statistics: environmental sustainability remains a top concern for Gen Zs and Millennials, with respectively 62% and 59% of them reporting feeling anxious or worried about climate change (Global 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey by Deloitte, 2024).
The pursuit of eco-consciousness awakening still resonates among businesses and organisations too. In April 2024, Fashion Revolution Brazil, a fashion activism movement, and Brazilian advertising agency Artplan organised the Atacama Fashion Week 2024 amid Chile’s Atacama Desert’s rubbish coming from fashion’s forever garments, to raise awareness. The same year, Patagonia unveiled The Shitthropocene, a 46-minute film documenting the origins of our impulse control issues and the impact of capitalism on our central nervous systems; while eBay UK encourages shoppers to Turn Nothing to Wear into Something to Love through a campaign that celebrates the recommerce culture as a viable answer to overconsumption.
On the other side, recent major fashion companies’ announcements in reaction to the tangled global economy send a clear message: sustainable efforts are being deprioritised. Last month, in an opinion piece published on Dezeen, Caroline Till, co-founder of design research agency FranklinTill, touched upon Nike's cutting of its sustainability teams and H&M's sustainability-focused CEO stepping down.
Sustainable fashion and its dichotomies are still on everyone’s lips. But in Dysphoria Fashion, we won’t be deciphering one more time the tenets, promises, and downfalls of eco-responsible, sustainable, and durable fashion.
Dysphoria Fashion is about identity.
Already in 2019, writer Vidya Giridharan opened up the conversation around the impact of fast fashion on our identities:
“Fast fashion has created an identity crisis; we’re trying so hard to keep up with trends that we’ve forgotten who we are and what really matters.” — Vidya Giridharan, writer for Mindless Mag, 2019
Has fast fashion created an identity crisis? Or has a generalised identity crisis created, or at least encouraged, disposable fashion? Haven’t we collectively lost our sense of self to begin with?
In the US, 63% of 18- to 34-year-old respondents agree with the statement “As I get older, I sometimes find it hard to know what my purpose in life is.” — CVS Health and Harris Poll, September 2023
“One challenge we’re facing in the world today is that we have a bunch of people who don’t know who they are.” — Adeniji Bisola, writer, October 2023
Our identities actually increasingly show signs of crisis, with the proliferation of psychiatric labels being used as identity markers and as a framework for self-understanding — as examined by Manvir Singh, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California and author in The New Yorker, May 2024. In the same vein, youth culture media Highsnobiety spoke with psychologists, therapists, and doctors and unveiled a guide to demystify the interpretations of clinical terminology democratised through the #THERAPYTOK movement.
When it comes to the relationship between fashion consumption and identity, according to researcher Dennis Soron, “since its revival in the 1980s, the sociology of consumption has largely focused on the ways in which everyday consumption choices in affluent societies facilitate the process of creating and sustaining a self-identity.” But what happens when societies’ process of creating and sustaining a self-identity is threatened in the first place?
In Dysphoria Fashion, we dissect a state of threatened and disposable self-identity, leading to the reign of disposable clothes, microtrends, and fashion systems.
In Dysphoria Fashion, “dysphoria” is not treated through the sole gender lens. The term “Dysphoria Fashion” comes from Spanish writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s work entitled Dysphoria Mundi, a book thinking of “the current world situation as a generalised dysphoria” and aiming at deciphering our world’s “dysphoric states, not as psychiatric pathologies, but as forms of life announcing a new knowledge system and a new politico-visual order to use as a framework for our planetary transition.”
01 Future Self Disconnect
Another notion that is on everyone’s lips is the polycrisis (or permacrisis), reshaping the parameters of our existence. To put it in other words, in this polycrisis, everything is collapsing.
“We are in an era of history defined by everything we’re losing, and our pervasive sadness marks the tenor of our times.” — Martha Schabas, novelist & critic in House of Beautiful Business, 2024
Martha Schabas’ words introduced House of Beautiful Business’ Glossary for Generation Grief, “a list of terms, ideas, concepts, and words that […] think about grief’s role in the contemporary workplace” and aim at supporting "the breadth of our complex selves” and making “new meaning in an era rife with loss.” Polycrisis is about destruction, loss, and grief.
AI-powered trend forecasting company NextAtlas uncovered another polycrisis’ feature in their Unveiling 2024 report: messiness, fiddling with contemporary unpredictability. According to the platform, The Age of Messiness trend is expected to grow by 15% in popularity in the next 12 months and to “appeal to a range of diverse consumers, with Narcissists leading the way in their quest for self-expression.”
With unpredictability and messiness comes danger, a sentiment increasing among young generations according to a recent investigation presented at the 2023 Society for Risk Analysis Annual Conference. Gabriel Rubin from Montclair State University found out that “despite risk analysis research demonstrating that we live in one of the safest times ever, Gen Z experiences a disparity in risk assessment from their older counterparts, essentially having the perception that risk is everywhere they turn.”
“Gen Z is presented with a world where risk is black and white: things are safe (safe spaces, e.g.) or contain dangerous risk. Prior research has demonstrated that risk is not black and white – there are many risks in life and they can be weighed, yet Gen Z members view risk as either the presence or absence of safety in a situation.” — The Society for Risk Analysis, December 2023
“Our world is dying around us, bodily autonomy is being stripped away, the housing and cost of living crisis may never be solved, and all of this continues on a playground primed for nuclear war. It doesn’t surprise me that [Gen Zs] would be labeled as nihilism junkies.” — Claudia Munoz, junior English major and opinion columnist at Mustang News, November 2023
Once the most praised coping mechanism against anxiety-inducing polycrisis, resilience no longer seems to be enough. While a significant proportion of consumers still feel constantly anxious, resilience is increasingly pointed out for being more toxic than liberating.
In 2024, 40% of Gen Zs and 35% of Millennials feel stressed all or most of the time. — Deloitte Global 2024 Gen Z and Millennial Survey
“Goodbye toxic positivity, hello toxic resiliency. There’s an underlying message that resilience is about always being able to cope and that it’s not OK to struggle. The reality, though, is that we all experience ups and downs.” — Cloey Callahan, Senior Reporter for WorkLife
In this polarised safe vs deadly dangerous world view, designers tap into safe products, safe devices, safe innovations mimicking safe spaces’ principles. The 2024 Rimowa Design Prize awarded Janne Kreimer’s Ro project, “a therapeutic piece of wearable technology that activates the parasympathetic nervous system for the purpose of relieving anxiety through deep pressure stimulation and activation of acupressure points”. The LVMH-owned Maison also delivered a special mention to Daniela Lindenberga for her IXO initiative, a wearable safety device that helps combat harassment in public spaces.
In this polycrisis navigating through destruction, loss, grief, danger, and anxiety comes the Solipsism Era. Elected NY Times’ Word of the Day on February 2, 2024, “solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind” (Wikipedia). The Solipsism Era is the time when, in a world of constant destruction, loss, grief, danger, and anxiety, the self is the only guaranteed existing ingredient.
But how can we manage to assess, build and develop the self in a world in constant destruction? Identity is threatened in the midst of loss: loss of livelihood, biodiversity loss, loss of resources, loss of comfort, loss of control, loss of confidence, loss of hope, loss of future perspectives, and loss of self.
“A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity.” — Adam Tooze, historian & professor at Columbia University in New York in his Financial Times’ column Welcome to the World of Polycrisis, October 2022
Answers can be found in British philosopher Derek Parfit’s Persons & Reasons concept redistilled by David Jinkins, associate professor of economics at Copenhagen Business School, to explain the climate change action scenario. In his analysis, he underlines that “personal identity is not what matters. What matters is psychological continuity and connectedness.”
“If it is psychological connectedness that matters […] our distant future selves are less connected to our present selves than we might have imagined […] This fact may well provide a reason for us to discount our future, which is not directly related to time itself. We discount the well-being of our future selves because they are less psychologically connected to our present selves, and that is what matters.” — David Jinkins, associate professor of economics at Copenhagen Business School
In Dysphoria Fashion, individuals’ identities’ disposable feature emerges from a future self disconnect in a world of constant destruction, loss, grief, danger, and anxiety.
02 Flattened Identities
In his stupendous book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture published in January 2024, digital culture expert Kyle Chayka delves in insightful details in how algorithmic recommendations changed culture, tastes, experiences, and aesthetics, resulting in the homogenisation — and impoverishment — of our digital and IRL realities.
A majority (64%) of young Europeans aged 8-12 prefer to buy items pushed by algorithms on social media and recommended by influencers — over athletes and authors. — YPulse, 2024
Lyrics across the music genres of rap, rock, country, R&B, and pop have exhibited a decline in vocabulary richness over the last five decades. — Scientific Reports, March 2024
“The outcome of such algorithmic gatekeeping is the pervasive flattening that has been happening across cultures. By ‘flatness’ I mean homogenization but also a reduction into simplicity: the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted the most. Flatness is the lowest common denominator, an averageness that has never been the marker of humanity’s proudest cultural creations.” — Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, January 2024
Before advocating for a comeback to human curation in praise of cultural renaissance, Kyle Chayka establishes that culture has become insipid, generic, and "marked by a pervasive sense of sameness." Welcome to the age of monoculture. A culture dictated by the reign of algorithms programmed to push what’s average: average music, romantic partners, fashion styles, movies, series, etc. — in other words, what’s not dramatically loved or execrated, but what offers the best chances of being followed, adopted, liked by the masses. In this average-first world, identity is no longer shaped by what’s distinctive and different.
“Taste is a fundamental part of the self; developing or indulging it means constructing a firmer sense of self. It becomes the basis for identity […] Yet catering to ‘the taste of the majority’ might be the single goal of algorithmic feeds.” — Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, January 2024
Monoculture is directly feeding a mono-identity, emerging on our algorithm-driven platforms to further invade the very essence of our human lives.
Yet the original etymology of the term “identity” seems prophetic to this mono-identity characterised by sameness.
identity (n.)
c. 1600, "sameness, oneness, state of being the same," from French identité (14c.), from Medieval Latin identitatem (nominative identitas) "sameness," ultimately from Latin idem (neuter) "the same" — Online Etymology Dictionary
It does not come out as a surprise that those data-driven platforms shaping our culture, tastes, and sense of self are also the ones responsible for dehumanising individuals initially capable of forming an identity. In MIT Technology Review, tech-specialised writer and editor Taylor Majewski questioned the use of the term “user” employed by executives, founders, operators, engineers, and investors defaulting to “people”.
“Sometimes a user isn’t even a person; corporate bots are known to run accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms, for example. But ‘users’ is also unspecific enough to refer to just about everyone. It can accommodate almost any big idea or long-term vision. We use—and are used by—computers and platforms and companies. Though ‘user’ seems to describe a relationship that is deeply transactional, many of the technological relationships in which a person would be considered a user are actually quite personal.” — Taylor Majewski, writer and editor at MIT Technology Review, April 2024
On the contrary, anthropomorphism — i.e., the inclination to ascribe humanlike qualities or behaviours to god, animals, objects — is applied to machines to inspire a sense of connectedness between people and technology.
In Dysphoria Fashion, identity-forming characteristics transition from individuals to machines, responsible for the production of an average monoculture that leads to flattened and disposable mono-identities.
03 Alter Vanities
Beyond flattening cultural production, the digital world raises another key identity-related question, as per AR artist Johanna Jaskowska’s headline on her Instagram profile: “What’s reality?”
The authenticity vs fakery clash — reconciled in the Faked Authenticity beauty trend inhabited by aesthetics balancing both extremes — resonates with individuals’ never-ending obsession with self-portrayal. While the younger generation embraces new selfie trends as reported by POPSUGAR and CNBC, Millennials will take an average of 25,700 selfies in their lifetime as estimated by Dr. Katina Michael from Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence.
After finding out that 90% of the content seen online is expected to be AI-generated by 2025 (The Real State of Beauty: a global report by Dove, April 2024), beauty brand Dove opted for authenticity by committing to never using AI to represent women in its advertising. Yet, the recent decline of French photo-sharing app BeReal that promised to show “the realest persons on earth” threatens our conception of individuals’ quest for authentic haven from the artifice of social media.
BeReal’s monthly downloads have been slipping since September 2022. The number of daily users has dropped 61% from its peak, from about 15 million in October 2022 to less than 6 million in March 2023. — Sensor Tower & Apptopia, 2023
As the digital world provides us with increasingly elaborate tools to transcend the limits of self-presentation, the democratization of alter egos, alter vanities, and hyper-humans is accelerating, tilting the balance in favour of fakery. French startup silkke wants to “(Re)humanize digital worlds & recreate the link between people & brands” by developing digital humans as a real time crypto-active. In the same vein, Synthesia’s new EXPRESS-1 model launched in April 2024 is a new generation of synthetic avatars dubbed as the more realistic and expressive avatars ever seen.
“As we collectively wrestle with new identity codes, confront the existence of our species for the first time, and search for new meaning in our world (or look to escape it all together), the worlds that alter egos create for us the perfect antidote.” — MØRNING, May 2024
Do synthetic and digital alter egos offer an escape to our IRL identity crisis? Published in 2021, The Extreme Self book by Shumon Basar is a graphic-novel that shows how individuals have been “morphing into something else” and tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity crisis and eternity. More recently, in April 2024, at the occasion of the event Tech & Media Unmasked: Redefining Self-Image & Authenticity, the University of Wollongong explored the potential emergence of an online identity crisis fostered by our digital identities and questioned: “In today’s hyperconnected world, the never-ending cycle of selfies, filtering, posting, and checking for likes and comments is almost second nature. But what’s the cost to our sense of identity, self-worth and mental health?”
Researchers might not have come yet with a clear answer on what came first (our identity crisis, or our digital self-presentation), but artists and designers keep exploring the ubiquitous relationship between both. Opening at the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, Switzerland, on June 7, 2024, the Virtual Beauty exhibition explores the definition of human identity and beauty in the post-internet era. Featuring over 20 emerging and established artists including Ines Alpha, Isamaya Ffrench and Daniel Sannwald, "Virtual Beauty unveils and examines the politics, anxieties and prejudices of the identities built by our digital lives” through film, photography, virtual and interactive media art (Dazed Beauty, May 2024).
Adding the conspicuous consumption of immaterial goods to the equation, artist-led creative collective STUDIO HALIA has recently published SKIN DEEP: PERSPECTIVES ON THE EVOLUTION OF DIGITAL IDENTITY, a report on the future of digital identities and dematerialised luxury. The piece of research explores “a new era of self-expression, where augmented and virtual realities offer us unparalleled autonomy over our digital guise” and examines how today’s expansive algorithmic domain invites us “to delve into deeper contemplations of identity, representation, and the delicate dance between our physical selves and our digital embodiments.”
“Makeup and face embellishments have long served as a medium for expressing the identity and values of subcultures, visually delineating a group's boundaries and conveying its ideologies, resistance, and solidarity. While algorithms excel at bringing micro-communities to light, they often distill and fetishize these groups' unique visual codes, priming them for the digestion of the lowest common denominator.” — Agus Panzoni, trend forecaster in SKIN DEEP: PERSPECTIVES ON THE EVOLUTION OF DIGITAL IDENTITY report by STUDIO HALIA, 2024
Here comes again the “lowest common denominator” already called out by Kyle Chayka to point out the flattening effect of algorithms on cultural productions and, by extension, on identity formation.
In Dysphoria Fashion, the digital worlds altering our presentation of the self foster the duality of our identity construction, entrenched between authencity and fake self-portrayal.
04 Communities Enmeshment
“Once upon a time people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are born individuals and have to find their communities.” — Youth Mode: a report on Freedom by K-HOLE, 2014
The construction of the self seems to be fixed in another duality: community belonging vs individuality. On that matter, the 2024 edition of House of Beautiful Business Festival focused on Creating a Life-centred Economy and explored the polarity between community being overly marketed as a commodity, and loneliness posited as a contemporary “anthropocentric disease”.
Communities have flourished both as a buzzword and as an antidote to loneliness. But when it comes to individuality, researchers increasingly point out a surge of egocentric behaviours encouraged by modern usages of self-representation. Back in 2016, Olivia Remes from the Cambridge Institute of Public Health discussed the rise of individualism in response to narcissism-oriented social media. The same year, The Hidden Brain Podcast hosted by Shankar Vedantam dedicated an episode to The Rise Of Narcissism In The Age Of The Selfie. More recently, in 2024, Nigel Barber Ph.D. confirmed in Psychology Today the continuous rise of narcissism, in which the selfie culture takes the centre stage.
“Considered as a personality disorder that seriously disrupts everyday life, narcissism is rare. Yet, narcissistic tendencies are on the rise as more young people experience high self-esteem and are more concerned with what others think of them.” — Nigel Barber Ph.D., evolutionary psychologist & author
More than 10% of people in their 20s are believed to suffer from subclinical narcissism. — Psychology Today, 2023
Despite the rise of individual-focused behavirours, and even disorders, community-based identity seems to take over personal identity. In the recent and extensive Redefining Subcultures report published by Dazed Studio in December 2023, young interviewees often refer to the identity markers of the subcultures they identify with to introduce themselves — whether they identify with Marxism, feminism, Gen Z, LGBTQ+, Black communities, etc. The moral values of the community become personal identity’s attributes.
88% of youth believe that subcultures exist today and the majority of youth believe subcultures are influential to them in their lives.
“It’s hard to define between one’s own identity and subcultures. Is queerness a subculture? Is anti-capitalism and Marxism?”
— Redefining Subcultures: The Report by Dazed Studio, December 2023
The same phenomenon is observed in generational labelling implying a unique DNA for all the individuals gathered in marketed generations. Beyond stereotyping behaviours, voices are elevating to denounce the fact that individuals are encouraged, or even forced, to behave and identify according to the generation they are labelled in. In 2021, Dr. Philip N. Cohen and about 150 other demographers and social scientists sent an open letter to the Pew Research Center, urging them to stop promoting the use of generation labels (the Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z, Gen Alpha). Another consumer behaviour expert, David Allison, founded the Valuegraphics project and built a database to help organisations create better customer segments, beyond demographic markers, especially made-up ones.
“Worse than irrelevant, such baseless categories drive people toward stereotyping and rash character judgment.” — Dr. Philip N. Cohen, sociologist & Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland
“We are not definable as humans based on demographic characteristics. They only tell us what people are, not who they are on the inside, where it counts. The only way to understand who people are is to know what they value. Because our values determine how we live, how we walk through the daily rituals of our life, what we pay attention to, what we choose, how we feel.” — David Allison, founder of Valuegraphics
In both cases of identification to subcultural or generational values topping individual markers of the self, we are witnessing a community enmeshment. In psychology, the term “enmeshment” refers to a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, resulting in individual identities losing importance and a threatened development of a stable, independent sense of self.
This enmeshment echoes the community validation since “self-conscious beings can recognise that we are the objects of other people’s thoughts. This opens up the possibility of a conflict between our own identities and how we are perceived by others” as described by Elizabeth Schechteris, associate professor in the department of philosophy and in the cognitive science programme at Indiana University Bloomington and author.
Researchers confirm this community enmeshment taking over the individual identity markers. According to a recent study examining whether the cognitive mechanisms underlying social influence are affected by the source of influence, in-group social identification (i.e., being aware of one's social identity as an in-group member) exerted more influence than out-groups. Another research on the psychological profile of the moral person found out that one component of the identity is the “moral reputation” that reflects aspects of morality that only peers or others members of the community see and value.