10.54103/ai/17124
Digital garments are tailored computationally and dressed virtually. Intended to be displayed rather than worn, digital fashion exemplifies the function of aesthetic commodities as defined by Gernot Böhme: the production of atmospheres – intangible qualities arising from a material encounter – towards the staging of life. Yet, made from pixels instead of fabric, virtual garments beckon a new conceptual framework for the role of materiality in atmospheric productions. Drawing from new media and affect scholars, this essay traces the display of digital garments across three sites: the e-commerce website, social media, and the runway show. By analyzing the visual and literary production surrounding digital fashion, this essay proposes“elemental surface” as a representational technique and rhetorical strategy through which digital garments produce and intensify the body’s affective presence. Situating Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere in dialogue with the notion of“aura” put forth by Walter Benjamin, the study of digital fashion foregrounds the role of environmental perception in the history of haptic technology.
application/pdf
2785-7433
17124
II
en
Yizeng Zhang
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
AN-ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433]
Aesthetic economy
Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon
1
Thematic Section
2022-12-20
2022-01-23
2022-12-20
2023-04-17
AN-ICON
Yizeng Zhang
2022/12/20
10.54103/ai/17124
Harvard University
2785-7433
II
Aesthetic economy
en
Wegenstein, B., Hansen, M.B.N., “Body,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/anicon/article/download/17124/17778
1
                 Clothes with
                 no emperors:
the materiality of
digital fashion
by Jane Y. Zhang
           Digital fashion
                   Materiality
                   Atmosphere
                   Hapticity
                   Aesthetic economy




                              Issue №2 Year 2022
                              → Just an illusion? Between simulation,
                              emulation, and hyper-realism
                              Edited by Pietro Conte
                              and Lambert Wiesing
Clothes with no
emperors: the materiality
of digital fashion
JANE Y. ZHANG, Harvard University – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7956-2599
https://doi.org/10.54103/ai/17124



Abstract                       Digital garments are tailored computationally
                 and dressed virtually. Intended to be displayed rather than
                 worn, digital fashion exemplifies the function of aesthetic
                 commodities as defined by Gernot Böhme: the production
                 of atmospheres – intangible qualities arising from a mate-
                 rial encounter – towards the staging of life. Yet, made from
                 pixels instead of fabric, virtual garments beckon a new
                 conceptual framework for the role of materiality in atmo-
                 spheric productions. Drawing from new media and affect
                 scholars, this essay traces the display of digital garments
                 across three sites: the e-commerce website, social media,
                 and the runway show. By analyzing the visual and literary
                 production surrounding digital fashion, this essay proposes
                “elemental surface” as a representational technique and rhe-
                 torical strategy through which digital garments produce and
                 intensify the body’s affective presence. Situating Böhme’s
                 formulation of atmosphere in dialogue with the notion of
                “aura” put forth by Walter Benjamin, the study of digital
                 fashion foregrounds the role of environmental perception
                 in the history of haptic technology.


Keywords         Digital fashion                      Materiality                  Atmosphere
                 Hapticity                            Aesthetic economy
To quote this essay: Y. Zhang, “Clothes with no emperors: the materiality of digital fashion,” AN-
ICON. Studies in Environmental Images [ISSN 2785-7433] 2 (2022): 162-181, https://doi.org/10.54103/
ai/17124

JANE Y. ZHANG                                   162                                        AN-ICON
                               Introduction

                              Scrolling through an online fashion catalog, you
                come across a piece of clothing that reminds you of your
                favorite song: it is bold but not too bold, casual with just
                the right amount of edge. You add the item to your shop-
                ping cart. At checkout, you are asked to upload a photo of
                yourself. So you pose in front of the camera, dressed mini-
                mally under good lighting. One business day later, instead
                of arriving in a package in the mail, the garment appears
                as an email attachment in your inbox, carefully composited
                onto the photo you have uploaded.
                              Since its inception in 2008,1 digital clothing has
                quickly gained traction in the fashion industry, giving rise to
                independent digital fashion houses as well as partnerships
                with well-established clothing brands. Daria Shapovalo-
                va, the cofounder of DRESSX, summarizes digital fashion
                as being “all about how we can replicate the experience
                of physical clothes in digital.”2 The statement is counter-
                intuitive at first sight. Made from pixels instead of fabric,
                digital garments cannot shield our bodies from the bracing
                winds of winter or the unwanted gaze of another. But if we
                refrain from taking Shapovalova’s statement at face value,
                it emerges as a profound commentary on the phenome-
                nology of clothing and, by extension, the contemporary
                socioeconomic system upon which the fashion industry
                operates. For Shapovalova, digital garments are not here to
                represent but to replicate. But to replicate what? Interesting
                is the absence of a verb: do digital garments replicate the



      1 “Carlings: The First-Ever Digital Clothing Collection,” H.R. Watkins III, https://www.
      haywoodwatkinsiii.com/digital-clothing-collection, accessed December 7, 2021. In 2018, the
      Scandinavian retailer Carlings introduced the first digital fashion collection.
      2 “Digital Clothing Is the Future of Fashion | Dell Talks with Daria Shapovalova,” Dell,
      YouTube video, 8:12, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKBePuTOB6U, accessed
      January 10, 2023.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 163                                        AN-ICON
                 experience of wearing “physical” clothes or that of seeing
                 physical clothes?
                              Made to be shown rather than worn, digital
                 fashion displays the functional liberty characteristic of an
                 aesthetic commodity. The philosopher Gernot Böhme pro-
                 poses that capitalism has entered a new phase: under the
                “aesthetic economy,”3 the value of commodities extends
                 beyond their physical utility or monetary worth. Aesthetic
                 economics restructures the dichotomy of the “use value”
                 and “exchange value,” triangulating them in service of an
                 independent utility metric: the “stage value.”4 Under this
                 metric, the aesthetic properties of a product no longer exist
                 in addition to its ability to satisfy primary needs, but func-
                 tion towards “the staging, the dressing up and enhance-
                 ment of life.”5 Observing that the outward presentation of
                 commodities is emancipated from their material function,6
                 Böhme refers to the study of atmospheres as engaging in
                “poetic phenomenology” – the study of how appearances
                 come to be.7 Böhme’s phenomenological investment in
                 the operation of aesthetic commodities aligns convincingly
                 with Shapovalova’s experiential framing of digital fashion.
                              For Böhme, the stage value of an aesthetic
                 commodity arises from its atmosphere. Understood as the
                “something more” arising from aesthetic encounters, atmo-
                 spheres are by definition “intangible” and “indeterminant.”8
                 As elusive as atmospheres are, they can nevertheless be
                 theorized at the sites of their production: aesthetic laborers
                 have long engaged in the skillful manipulation of materiality
                – the outward appearance of matter – to create and inten-
                 sify the atmospheric presence of aesthetic commodities.

       3 G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism, trans. E. Jephcott (Milan: Mimesis International,
       2017): 20.
       4 Ibid.
       5 Ibid.
       6 G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed. J.P. Thibaud (Oxon: Routledge, 2017): 144.
       7 Ibid.: 33.
       8 Ibid.: 29; 30.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                   164                                         AN-ICON
                While “pure aesthetic materials assume we won’t handle
                or touch them,”9 they nevertheless touch and move us
                emotionally.10 Bohme’s formulation of atmosphere compli-
                cates the reading of digital fashion as a testament to the
                dematerializing effect of the capitalist economy on material
                relations and social life.11 When all that is solid melts into
                air, the air becomes charged with affective presence and
                sensory impressions – it becomes an atmosphere.
                              Given the nonphysical nature of virtual garments,
                how exactly does digital fashion engage in the production
                of atmospheres? Scholarships in new media studies and
                affect theory converge on their emphasis on embodiment
                as central to the study of aesthetic mediums. Informed by
                theories of embodied perception stemming from philos-
                ophers such as Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, new media
                scholars have challenged the “immaterial” ontology of vir-
                tual technologies.12 Similarly, affect theorists foreground the
                porous boundaries between sensory modalities and ges-
                tures toward the primacy of hapticity in visual encounters.13
                Together, these studies provide additional methodological
                tools to investigate the materiality of virtual garments.
                              This essay traces digital fashion’s atmospheric
                production across three sites of its exhibition: the e-com-
                merce website, social media, and the runway show. In the
                first section, I examine the proliferation of elements – spe-
                cific forms of materiality such as water – in digital garment
                designs. Drawing from Giuliana Bruno’s work, I introduce
                the concept of “elemental surface” as a representation-
                al technique utilized by virtual garments to enhance their

      9 Ibid.: 146.
      10 Ibid.: 97.
      11 G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed. D. Frisby (London - New York: Routledge,
      2004): 150.
      12 B. Brown, “Materiality,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical Terms for Media
      Studies (Chicago - London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 49-63; W. Bao, Fiery
      Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (Minneapolis: University
      of Minnesota Press 2015).
      13 E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke
      University Press, 2006).

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 165                                         AN-ICON
                environmental presence. In the second section, I explore
                how the digital imposition of virtual garments alters the
                background-foreground relationship of existing photo-
                graphs, from which the elemental surface emerges as an
                index for the sensation of vitality and liveliness. The opera-
                tion of hapticity and vitality collides in the third section. By
                analyzing digital garments as they appear in an animated
                advertisement, I contend that elemental surface mobilizes
                contemporary anxieties surrounding the “natural” environ-
                ment in service of its construction of an affective milieu.
                              In the seminal essay, “The work of art in the age
                of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin attributes the
                demise of aura to the rise of technologies of reproduction,
                such as photography and film.14 Made available for mass
                distribution and consumption, the artwork is cut off from
                the ritualistic contexts of its exhibition and dispossessed of
                its unique presence. Benjamin’s prophetic insight into the
                elevated importance of an artwork’s public presentability
                directly anticipates the domination of “staging value” man-
                dated by aesthetic capitalism. Yet, for Böhme, the mass
                circulation of aesthetic productions is accompanied by the
                manipulation and intensification of their presence rather
                than their depreciation and demise. How might we ap-
                proach this generative tension? Digital fashion, by demon-
                strating the logic and operation of stage value to its extreme,
                is a good place to begin.

                                The web interface: atmosphere and
                                hapticity

                            Digital fashion design is not contingent upon
                the market availability of raw materials, nor is it constrained
                by the physical attributes of specific fabrics. With the recent

      14 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” trans. H. Zohn, in H.
      Arendt, ed., Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 217-251.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 166                                         AN-ICON
                integration of Adobe Substance to CLO Virtual Fashion,15
                designers can manipulate the material properties of existing
                virtual fabric available in online databases, or create a virtual
                surface entirely from scratch. Roei Derhi, a Berlin-based
                digital fashion designer, describes the fabric selection for
                digital garments as “limitless.”16
                              Despite the wide range of fabric selections
                made possible by digital simulation software, digital fash-
                ion designers have demonstrated a particular affinity to the
                elemental. The classical Greek elements – earth, water, fire,
                air – have been cited as the inspiration for a great number
                of digital fashion collections, such as that of James Mack
                and 2WB.17 Simply entering the keyword “water” yields
                over 200 searches among the 2000 articles of clothing in
                the DRESSX database, with results ranging from digital
                tops, dresses, and earrings.18 Elements, according to the
                media scholar Nicole Starosielski, are “defined by their roles
                in composition.”19 Understanding elements as constitut-
                ing parts extends their scope to encompass other specific
                forms of materiality, such as electricity, botanics, and metal –
                images similarly popular for digital fashion designers. Given
                that the elemental orientation of digital garments does not
                correspond to trends in the physical fashion industry, its
                medium specificity serves as a generative avenue to begin
                our inquiry into the materiality of digital fashion.
                             “Neon Pillow” (Fig. 1) is a garment designed
                by May Ka. Consisting of a padded jacket worn over a

      15 “CLO Virtual Fashion Welcomes Substance by Adobe, Jeanologia, and ColorDigital
      Integrations to CLO 6.0,” Businesswire (November 11, 2020), https://www.businesswire.com/
      news/home/20201111005772/en/CLO-Virtual-Fashion-Welcomes-Substance-by-Adobe-
      Jeanologia-and-ColorDigital-Integrations-to-CLO-6.0, accessed January 10, 2023.
      16 R. Derhi. Interviewed by the author. November 2021.
      17 “James Mack: TERRA MOTUS,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/james-mack-
      terra-motus?_pos=1&_sid=2fb6573d9&_ss=r, accessed December 10, 2022; “2WB Artemis,”
      DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/2wb-003?_pos=6&_sid=ca632080c&_ss=r, accessed
      December 10, 2022.
      18 “DRESSX search for ‘water’,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/search?q=water, accessed
      January 15, 2022.
      19 N. Starosielski, “The elements of media studies,” Media+Environment 1, no. 1 (2019)
      https://doi.org/10.1525/001c.10780.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                167                                       AN-ICON
                knee-length dress, the garment is rendered in a single hue
                of sea glass blue. Its pliable, creased underlayer contrasts
                texturally with the smooth voluminous shoulder panels. Yet,
                the airy silhouette is softened by the drapery’s crinkled tips
                and deflated hemlines. A thin sheet of puffer insulator folds
                into a skirt with a simple side slit. The fabric combines the
                plasticity of polyester with the reflective glare of satin. Not
                only does the digital textile resemble existing fabric, the
                specific details of its seams and patchwork are also me-
                ticulously rendered.




                                                                      Fig. 1. The Neon Pillow, May Ka,
                                                     https://dressx.com/collections/may-ka/products/
                                                        total-neon-pillow, accessed January 15, 2022.

                             Prior to the popularization of digital garments,
                the fashion industry has already become increasingly de-
                pendent on haptic technologies – “computational systems
                and applications aiming to artificially reproduce the sense
                of touch.”20 With the rise of online fashion retailing, clothes
                were made available for purchase on e-commerce websites

       20 L. Cantoni, M. Ornati, “Fashiontouch in e-commerce: an exploratory study of surface
       haptic interaction experiences,” in F.H. Nah, K. Siau, eds., HCI in Business, Government and
       Organizations, vol. 12204 (Cham: Springer, 2020): 493-503, 494 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-
       030-50341-3_37.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                  168                                          AN-ICON
                and social media; the physical constraints placed by the
                COVID-19 epidemic lockdowns further encouraged fashion
                stores to migrate to online platforms.21 While devices such
                as the touch screen and the mouse enabled the simula-
                tion of physical touch, the two-dimensional affordances of
                mobile and laptop screens generated the need to simulate
                tactility through visualization technologies. “You can wear
                fire, you can wear lightning, those things are done with the
                same sense of fashion – what kind of fire? Wings or glitter?”
                asks Derhi,22 gesturing to the importance of textural details
                in the rendering of digital garments. The “limitless” potential
                of fabric selection does not translate to their freedom from
                perceptual constraints.
                               In addition to the employment of visualization
                technologies, digital fashion designers have turned to repre-
                sentational and narrative techniques to enhance the haptic-
                ity of digital garments. Freed from the need to resemble ex-
                isting fabric yet striving to visually simulate tactile surfaces,
                digital garments self-knowingly plunge into the elemental.
                On the website of DRESSX, the first and biggest retailer of
                digital fashion clothing, each garment is accompanied by
                a designer’s statement. May Ka’s description of her design
                reads as follows:

This bubble put May Ka to sleep. She felt her feet were going to-
wards something new, but her footsteps were inaudible. Falling
into the deep water. Will she be able to breathe? The water is not
transparent, but she have never seen so clear until now [sic].23
                             Ka describes the inspiration behind her piece as
                the pillow that accompanies her to sleep, whereupon the act
                of dreaming resembles “falling into deep water.” When viewed

       21 Ibid.
       22 R. Derhi, Interviewed by the author. November 2021.
       23 “Ma Ka: Abstract Rose,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/products/abstract-rose?_pos=57&_
       sid=ac38fecdf&_ss=r, accessed January 10, 2021.

JANE Y. ZHANG                               169                                     AN-ICON
                 with the imagery of water in mind, the materiality of the digital
                 garment takes on a new dimension. The reflective fabric evokes
                 the placid surface of a lake on a sunny day. The softness of
                 the underlayer now takes on the fluidity characteristic of liquid
                 as a state of matter. The sagging form of the drapery gestures
                 towards the downward haul of gravity as one sinks into the
                 water, just as the airy silhouette connotes a state of buoyan-
                 cy–an opposing movement that casts the body in a state of
                 suspension. As an existing substance, water brings to mind a
                 particular combination of physical attributes. When Ka evokes
                 the element of water to describe the experience of wearing the
                 dress, specific visual details of the garment converse with each
                 other, take on additional meaning, and cohere into a tangible
                 surface. After all, what can evoke material presence better than
                 the constituting units of matter itself?
                                The technology of clothes simulation has centered
                 around the visualization of “surfaces,” a word that permeates
                 the field of textile engineering.24 Rather than describing the ma-
                 teriality of digital fashion as made up of elemental images, it is
                 more suitable to understand its composition as an “elemental
                 surface.” The phrase might appear oxymoronic at first sight.
                 Whereas elements are by nature fundamental and deep-seated,
                “surface” are merely skin-deep. The media scholar Giuliana Bru-
                 no challenges dismissive readings of surface as ornamental and
                 superficial, turning instead to surface as a generative conceptu-
                 al framework to engage with the materiality of images: “Surface
                 matters in the fabrics of the visual, for it is on the surface that
                 textures come alive and the ‘feel’ of an aesthetic encounter can
                 develop.”25 The phrase “‘feel’ of aesthetic encounter” dovetails
                 with Böhme’s formulation of atmosphere as the defining charac-
                 teristic of aesthetic production. It is at the interface of surfaces
                 that the atmosphere becomes sensible. Viewed in this light,

       24 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: Theory and Practice (Cham: Springer,
       2000).
       25 G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy,” in D. Martin, ed., Mirror-Touch
       Synesthesia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017): 107-125, 118.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                  170                                        AN-ICON
                the invocation of elements emerges as a representational – or,
                in Böhme’s words, “presentational” technique through which
                virtual garments mobilize our prior conceptions of matter to
                generate a greater sense of environmental presence.
                             To attend to surfaces is to engage with media as
                environments. In her study of early Chinese cinema, the me-
                dia scholar Bao Weihong describes affect as the “platform/
                interface of experience produced by media technology and
                media aesthetic in interaction with the perceptual subjects.”26
                In this sense, affect does not designate any singular medium
                or sensory modality, but instead constitute a condition of me-
                diation that envelops individuals and machines and redraws
                their intimate boundaries. In Ka’s description, water envelops
                the dreamer just as the digital garment encloses the wearer.
                Water becomes an intermediary substance through which
                the dreamer confronts her “fears and anxieties” and sees the
                world with heightened lucidity. Surfaces “hold affect in its fabric”
                and enable “the passage of empathy,” writes Bruno.27 When
                beckoned to interact with the body and its surroundings, the
                environmentalizing tendency of the elemental surface is further
                dramatized. In the next section, I situate Ka’s garment in the
                context of its intended function: to be worn and displayed by
                the human body.

                                The DF image: atmosphere and vitality

                               Digital garments are sold digitally and dressed
                digitally. To wear a digital garment is to superimpose its form
                onto an existing photograph with the help of graphic engineer-
                ing technologies. This procedure is accomplished through the
                use of “collision detection,”28 a computation technique that
                simulates the points of contact between the virtual fabric and

       26 W. Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945: 12.
       27 G. Bruno, “Surface tension, screen space,” in S. Saether, S. Bull, eds., Screen Space
       Reconfigured, (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020): 35-55, 28.
       28 P. Volino, N. Magnenat-Thalmann, Virtual Clothing: 6.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 171                                       AN-ICON
                the surrounding objects. Despite having little effect on the ap-
                pearance of the virtual garment as an independent entity, the
                importance of collision detection becomes readily apparent
                when we examine the entirety of the digital fashion image (here-
                on referred to as the DF image).
                               In Fig. 2, shadows enable a dialogue between the
                wearer’s body and the virtual garment. The bottom rim of the
                dress projects its silhouette on the thighs of its wearer, assert-
                ing itself as a material surface that receives the light in place of
                the wearer’s skin. Shadows project an entity’s image upon a
                foreign surface. By insisting on its ability to rechannel the light,
                the dress appears under the same sunlight as the body. In the
                lower right corner of the image, the shape of the body’s shad-
                ow takes on the silhouette of the garment. Not only does the
                garment envelope the wearer, it environmentalizes the body to
                converse with the soft, chilly grass on a winter morning.




                                                    Fig. 2. The Neon Pillow purchased from
                                                     DRESSX, Cambridge, December 2022
                                                              (photographed by the author).
                                                                          January 15, 2022.

JANE Y. ZHANG                            172                                     AN-ICON
                              The digital reflects light just as it displaces light.
                Under the piercing sun, the dress’ monochromatic surface
                takes on a new life. No longer enveloped by solid hues of gen-
                tle blue, the garment now radiates in a purple glow marked
                by overexposed highlights. Hints of green make their way
                to the outer edges of the garment, gradually intensifying as
                they approach the lawn and foliage in the background.
                              Through the skillful manipulation of shadows
                and reflection, the DF image is no longer a replica of the
                original photograph with the addition of the digital garment.
                Rather, it strives toward the overarching reality of the index-
                ical and causally affirms the existence of the constellation
                it depicts.
                              Given that the staging of the digital garment
                implicates the entire photographic image, digital fashion’s
                concern with visual congruency manifests prior to the cre-
                ation of the DF image. Clicking into the tab “How to Wear”
                on the DRESSX website, an alternative title immediately
                appears: “Choose the right picture: recommendation for
                receiving the best photo looks.” The requirements for the
                photo fall under four groups: natural light, fitted clothes,
                high quality (photograph), and uncovered parts. While the
                expectation for compact clothing pertains to the appear-
                ance of the body, the demand for natural lighting concerns
                the environmental setup.29 In an earlier version of the web-
                page, the list also asked the buyer to locate themselves
                relatively close to the camera to ensure “less background.”30
                Digital fashion demands from the wearer not only a body
                but a context, where the physical environment becomes
                an integral part of the process of “wearing” the clothes.
                              Clothing is external to the body yet an exten-
                sion of the body. It is at once the interface upon which the
                body and the external world come into contact, but also
       29 “How to wear DRESSX and digital fashion,” DRESSX, https://dressx.com/pages/help,
       accessed January 15, 2021.
       30 Ibid.

JANE Y. ZHANG                               173                                      AN-ICON
                the veil that separates the body from its immediate sur-
                rounding. This dynamic is perfectly captured by Emanuele
                Coccia, “[The dress] does not act directly upon our own
                anatomical body or the media that surround it, but rather
                it incorporates extraneous fragments of the world, foreign
                bodies through which our self is made to appear.”31 Al-
                exander Knight, a London-based digital fashion designer,
                affirms this statement through his description of pockets:

It brings me joy to see something crazy and then see the details.
Like when you see a Versace evening gown with a pocket, and
the model walking down the runway with their hands in the pocket.
I guess it gives it life. Digital garments can have a cold, static, and
unlivable quality to them. Giving it these details gives it life.32
                             Knight does not employ the rhetoric of realism,
                describing the ideal of digital garments instead as a state
                of aliveness. Serving as a container for not only the body
                but also parts of an external world, the pocket signifies a
                garment’s potential to enter into relationships with others.
                Having a pocket allows digital garments to make a promise
                of everyday companionship: the wearer’s hand, keys and
                wallet, a bus ticket, a crumpled piece of candy wrapper. In
                doing so, pockets endow the garment with “life.” To sim-
                ulate the experience of wearing physical clothes entails
                more than appearing unedited; it demands no less than to
                situate garments alongside the living so that they in turn
                take on a life of their own.
                             Read this way, the DF image reaches beyond
                the synthetic towards the additive. The color of the gar-
                ment is more vibrant than the skin of the wearer, and its
                form more dynamic than the posture of the body it adorns.
                The difference in luminosity and animacy is not only one of
       31 E. Coccia, Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image, trans. S.A. Stuart (New York:
       Fordham University Press, 2016): 28.
       32 A. Knight. Interviewed by the author. November 2021.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                  174                                         AN-ICON
                quantity but quality: the resolution of the dress is decidedly
                higher than that of the original photo. The virtual garment
                creates a unique region of clarity, ushering forth a sense
                of saliency impossible to be captured by a digital camera
                from the same distance away. The elemental surface steps
                forward in an outward radiance, endowing an otherworldly
                vitality to the concrete and ordinary. The seamless photo-
                graphic overlay creates an image of pictorial rupture – not
                from a sense of visual incongruity but, quite to the contrary,
                the hypersensitivity between the figure and ground. Similar
                to the pocket, the digital garment’s ability to respond to
                the body and the environment not only serves to conjure
                a realistic image, but one that feels convincingly and dra-
                matically alive.
                              The language of life and liveliness permeates
                Böhme’s theorization surrounding aesthetic commodities.
                Describing the perceptual effect of atmospheres, Böhme
                writes, “the establishment of a world of images on the sur-
                face of reality, or even independently of it, may well serve
                the intensification of life.”33 The function of aesthetic com-
                modities is “made of their attractiveness, their glow, their
                atmosphere: they themselves contribute to the staging, the
                dressing up, and the enhancement of life.”34 The perceptual
                pattern and affective construction of digital garments relo-
                cate Böhme’s invocation of “life” from the general condition
                of living to the immediate sensation of vitality. The elemen-
                tal surface of digital fashion is not only elemental because
                it evokes hapticity through the portrayal of specific forms
                of materiality, but also because it endows a fundamental
                feeling of liveliness to the body it claims to envelop.
                              The reciprocity between hapticity and vitality
                has been evoked by Bruno when she describes the sur-
                face as the site in which “textures come alive.”35 In the
       33   G. Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 199.
       34   G. Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism: 21.
       35   G. Bruno, “Surface encounters: materiality and empathy:” 118.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                  175                          AN-ICON
                next section, I examine digital garments as they appear in
                a virtual runway animation in order to further excavate the
                mode of embodiment enacted by the elemental surface of
                digital fashion.

                                The virtual runway: atmosphere and
                                embodiment

                               A silver parka comes to life within the first three
                seconds. An orange thread slithers into the right-hand
                sleeve, followed by the contraction of the backside pad-
                ding. As the full parka comes into view, additional strands
                fly into the frame, endowing form to an otherwise slackened
                figure. With its arms outstretched, the parka inhales for the
                first time with the simultaneous compression of its seam
                lines – rapidly yet unfalteringly assembled almost as if by its
                own will. A single decisive zip renders the garment upright,
                and a hood pops into place. The resurrection is complete.
                               Such was the opening sequence to a commer-
                cial on digital fashion.36 The creative team, not so subtly
                named “ITSALIVE,” offers us a glimpse into the worldbuild-
                ing of industry. As the virtual garment appears increasingly
                alive, the body and its surroundings take on an inert and
                lifeless quality. This perceptual pattern, already evident in
                the DF image, is further dramatized by the advertisements
                and runway shows released by the digital fashion industry.
                               As the animation progresses, flame emanates
                from the parka just as the music picks up, unleashing dy-
                namic dashes of green and silver light that illuminates the
                dark background. Just as the parka begins to dance, a
                satin jumpsuit walks up to the parka and unveils its head
                mask. A moment of revelation follows: there was nothing


       36 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE,
       YouTube video, 0:58, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed
       January 10, 2023.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 176                                        AN-ICON
                underneath. What we had assumed to be a mannequin has
                been a hollow void all along.
                             In a sense, physical runway shows have be-
                come “digital” decades before the rise of digital fashion.
                With the rise of Instagram and other forms of digital media
                platforms, the clothing commodity is staged with its after-
                life as a photograph or short video in mind.37 One of the
                most notable impacts on fashion photography, as noted by
                Silvano Mendes, was the elevated importance of runway
                scenography. A runway show constitutes an intermedial
                event, and its success depends on the close collaboration
                between fashion designers, stage designers, architects,
                and photographers.38 On the other hand, just as digital
                garments are made from pixels rather than textiles, digital
                fashion shows prefer computer animation over live-action
                footage. Rather than employing specific staging technol-
                ogies such as fog machines or lighting equipment, digital
                fashion commercials employ 3D animation to portray the
                product, its wearer, and the surrounding. In doing so, the
                aforementioned revelation becomes especially jolting and
                unsettling, as the body’s absence renders it virtually indis-
                tinguishable from the background.
                             For the philosopher Hans Jonas, the human
                embodiment is characterized by the simultaneous expe-
                rience of the body as a subject for self-invention and an
                object for self-scrutiny.39 While the dynamic interplay be-
                tween this dual perspective has enacted highly divergent
                modes of embodiment across temporal and cultural ge-
                ographies, inherent to the human experience is this gen-
                erative tension between the first- and third-person per-
                spective. Joanne Entwistle, drawing from Merleau-Ponty’s

       37 S. Mendes, “The instagrammability of the runway: architecture, scenography, and the
       spatial turn in fashion communications,” Fashion Theory 25, no. 3 (2019): 311-338, https://doi.
       org/10.1080/1362704X.2019.1629758.
       38 Ibid.
       39 H. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: A Delta
       Book, 1966): 186-187.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                   177                                          AN-ICON
                phenomenological approach to embodiment, explores how
                this dual perspective of the body is evidenced and enacted
                by the act of dressing: “the experience of dress is a sub-
                jective act of attending to one’s body and making the body
                an object of consciousness and is also an act of attention
                with the body.”40 The existence of clothing, especially in its
                ornamental context, is not only a product of but the active
                site upon which the body functions, according to Berna-
                dette Wegenstein, as the “medium for experience itself.”41
                             Digital garments relocate the site of our dual
                perception from the body to its representation by the digital
                image –already when the body has become an object of
                its own perception, whether in a mental image of ourselves
                posing in front of the camera, or in the photomontage pre-
                pared for social media. “Contemporary technoscience is
                in a unique position to exploit this phenomenological con-
                vergence of first- and third-person perspectives,” writes
                Wegenstein.42 The word “exploit”– connoting the intentional
                instrumentalization and manipulation of fashion – precise-
                ly gets at the power of digital fashion: the digital garment
                separates and redistributes the dual perspectives along
                a temporal axis – our attention with our body is fated to
                precede our attunement to our body.
                             And so, we watch the two headless figures
                dance to their own rhythm. When the jacket slips off from
                the satin jumpsuit, light directly passes through the regions
                uncovered by the garment, leaving a disembodied arm that
                nevertheless propels the dancer into the air. As the body
                fades into the dark space of projection, what remains is
                the outward radiance of the elemental surface. Our frisson
                of unease is reframed as an experience of wonder and


      40 J. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015): 118.
      41 B. Wegenstein, M.B.N. Hansen, “Body,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, M.B.N. Hansen, eds., Critical
      Terms for Media Studies (Chicago-London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010): 21.
      42 Ibid.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 178                                        AN-ICON
                enchantment by the closing message: “We are the future.
                Wear the future.”43
                              Characterized by seasonal change and stylistic
                variation, the fashion industry actively mobilizes future-ori-
                ented rhetoric. Yet, digital fashion offers a specific image
                of the future. In the final acts of the animation, the satin
                jumpsuit leaps and twirls amidst the fleeting background:
                the sunrise over a desert, snow-capped mountains, a blos-
                soming flower, great waves of the ocean, thunder, clouds,
                the atmosphere of the earth seen from space. Marketing
                products made of code instead of cotton, the digital fash-
                ion industry brands itself as a sustainable solution to the
                perils of climate catastrophe. Rather than interrogating the
                patterns of consumption that underlie over-extraction and
                waste, the digital fashion industry consistently evokes im-
                ages of nature in celebration of the triumph of life.
                             “The eternity of art becomes a metaphor for the
                eternity of the soul, the vitality of trees and flowers become
                a metonymy of the vitality of the body…”44 Umberto Eco’s
                description of sculptural replicas in California graveyards
                possesses strange resonances with the internal logic of
                digital fashion. Referring back to Starosielski’s definition,
                elements are specific materialities that constitute our eco-
                logical conditions. In the animation, it was precisely a flame
                emanating from the parka that transformed the background
                from an empty cosmos to a colorful creation myth. The
                sense of vitality afforded by the hapticity of the elemental
                surface is tasked to mediate the premonition of future ca-
                tastrophe and to offer a promise of humanity’s continuous
                livelihood.
                              Asserting that the aura of “historical objects”
                may be illustrated “with reference to the aura of natural

      43 “Digital Clothes Production | Virtual Wear Development | Digital Fashion,” ITSALIVE, 2022,
      YouTube video, 0:58, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAsRGOqx0o, accessed January
      10, 2023.
      44 U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. W. Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, 1986): 96.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 179                                         AN-ICON
                ones,”45 Benjamin depicts a meditative encounter with na-
                ture:

If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes
a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its
shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of
that branch.46
                             Comparing the view of the distant mountain
                offered by Benjamin with the virtual projection of the land-
                scape in the digital fashion concept video, digital garments
                indeed appear to testify to the demise of aura in our age
                of digital reproduction. And yet, digital fashion is similarly
                invested in the interplay between the natural and affective
                environment. To situate the phenomenal structure of “at-
                mosphere” in dialogue with that of “aura” is to foreground
                the primacy of environmental perception in the history of
                technological mediation. By expanding the constitution of
                media from communicative forms to ecological conditions,
                elemental surfaces provide an analytic framework for eco-
                critique beyond the study of “nature,” focusing instead on
                the perceptual patterns and representational techniques
                through which physical and affective environments are felt,
                performed, and lived.

                                Coda

                             We are familiar with the fairy tale of an emperor
                without clothes; now it seems as though our clothes have
                lost their emperors. “What we need is the digital body to be
                for people to wear our clothing,”47 says Kerry Murphy, the


       45 W. Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction:” 5.
       46 Ibid.
       47 “FASHION MADE: The Future of Digital Fashion with Kerry Murphy, The
       Fabricant,” Product Innovation, YouTube video, 38:2, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/
       watch?v=Up8B9WUoKg4, accessed January 10, 2023.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 180                                        AN-ICON
                founder of the pioneering digital fashion brand Fabricant.
                For Murphy, as for many others in the industry, the current
                coupling of digital garments and physical bodies is only a
                transitory phase in the field’s progression toward complete
                virtuality. Before that day comes, holding our love and fear
                in its fabric, preserving the contours of our hollow form, the
                digital garment dances in a world without us.
                               As new materialisms have argued for the inher-
                ent vitality vested in all matter, Mel Y. Chen reminds us that
                animacy is political–the assignment of liveliness to bodies
                is viscerally bound to the technologies and discourse of
                biopower.48 In the same way, as media scholars have in-
                creasingly expanded the notion of hapticity beyond phys-
                ical tactility, our experience of materiality is nevertheless
                structured by nonneutral social relations. What is endowed
                with the vitality to “touch us emotionally,”49 and whose life
                gets to be touched, staged, and enhanced? The elemental
                surface of digital garments reminds us that the questions
                of vitality and hapticity are tightly intertwined and invites us
                to interrogate their intersecting histories. More concretely,
                elemental surfaces beckon us to approach the history of
                elements—from its classical inception to its post-classical
                legacy—with an eye towards the sensationalization and
                environmentalization of life. It is from this vantage point that
                digital fashion’s danger emerges alongside its allure, and
                our critical intervention emerges alongside constructive
                possibilities.




       48 M.Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke
       University Press, 2012).
       49 Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres: 97.

JANE Y. ZHANG                                 181                                        AN-ICON
AN-ICON has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Grant agreement No. 834033 AN-ICON.
The project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti” – Department of Excellence at the State University of Milan.



                                                                                           1 / I                                                                              AN-ICON
