Lookbook.nu And The Viral Game Of Fashion

Lookbook.nu and the Viral Game of Fashion Otto von Busch - October 2008 (jan2009 edit v.1.1)

Fashion is full of paradoxes and certainly one of the most profound is how we try to express individuality using only ready-made objects whose meanings are created outside of ourselves. We assemble an outfit that we want to use to express our modest uniqueness; individual but at the same time not too individual. We try to say something personal through fashion, yet it can never be totally autonomous, just like we cannot have our own personal language since it has to be somehow shared to work as communication. It is thus stuck in-between its heteronomous process of creation as a communication tool and the autonomous will of the wearer to express something personal. Traditionally fashion has been a totally ready-made phenomenon, usually dictated from above and according to linear logics or repetition. But fashion is not simply repeated, it follows some form of basic rules which gives it an organic quality and dynamic characteristics – it follows some rules of life. These rules are a sort of “logic” of how fashion spreads between us, here among us. It acts quite like a “meme”, a gene-like unit of information or a “virus of the mind” to use Richard Dawkins term, or like an epidemic “virus” to use contemporary advertising speak. If we want to study this type of viral fashion one such example could be the editorless style community of the site lookbook.nu where everyday fashionistas upload images of their latest outfits and comment and discuss each others way of dressing and modeling. Here the roles of designer, stylist, model, producer and consumer are blurred and all have many ways for participating in the creation of new looks. It is an organic fashion that grows at lookbook, a special life form of cultural production and style transmission that acts as a living system of new turbulences and flows – something like a swarm of fashionistas at a boot camp for the creative industries.

The looks of the lookbook community show great innovation and sophistication, not only in composition but also in photographic artistry.

This system of lookbook fashion could be imagined as leveled and flat, as an arena, a scene, a game-board, or even a plateau, where we play the serious game of fashion. A game played between engaged participants and not by flowing commands from “above”. At this flat surface all players are equal; they contribute and comment, imitate and innovate. In this sense all players are engaged in the play on the same level and they all have the possibility to “contaminate” each other, as if carrying a disease or a virus. In these arenas contamination happens through direct relations between equals, like word-of-mouth in social networks, rather than obeying top-down mediated or broadcasted dictations from Paris or from the fashion magazines. In fact, the whole lookbook community is a user generated fashion magazine, generated by interactions between fellow fashionistas. It is another layer of the fashion system, complementing the classic system of mass dissemination. Yet, the inner mechanisms of fashion remain the same as it seems that fashion spreads between us following some basic protocols, some unwritten intersubjective social commands. Put extremely simplified these commands could be formulated as basic rules or laws. This would be fashion in its most heterogeneous form. The pure nomos of fashion; its most fundamental rules. These rules should guide how fashion works socially – between people and how we use these rules to see what is in fashion, what is not, and how the diffusion of fashion works between us, how it is spread – like a contagious virus. Of course, in reality, this is extremely complex, but I wanted to establish a set of extremely simplified rules and fashion in its most basic sense is always very simple, to be fashion, it has to be in fashion. There are only two modes: in or out. It could thus be something like an algorithm, like game rules. The rules to the “Game of Fashion”. As I condensed them it came to this: * If the fashion expression is too unique, it is not fashion. (it is too original) * If the fashion expression is too popular, it is out of fashion. (it is too popular) * If an accessible status group wears the fashion, it is in fashion. (it functions; imitating the once we like, differing from the ones we dislike) * Fashion expressions are somehow “contagious”. But at the same time it cannot be too original or too popular. (as in rule 1 and 2) As I elaborated on the rules of fashion I got surprised in how much these protocols somehow came to reflect a game simulation I have been fascinated with for a long time, but never been clever enough to fully comprehend; Conway’s “Game of Life”. This game is a mathematical game with extremely simple rules and it renders its data visually. What makes the “Game of Life” so interesting is that it generates complexity with simple rules. From simple combinations of binary data,

One could analyze the lookbook phenomena in style phenotypes and genotypes as both concepts are tagged in the lookbook interface; Palettes (phenotypes) and Brands (genotypes)

starting from a simple configuration, unexpected results emerge. Since its publication in 1970 the game, as a generator of cellular automata, has fascinated mathematicians and biologists. Despite its simplicity, the system of rules achieves an impressive diversity of behavior over time, fluctuating between apparent randomness and order. It is an experiment in extreme trivial real life biology, but simulated at the smallest scale in a pure mathematical or computational game. It is a game of computer generated artificial biology, resembling an evolution of life through simple rules or protocols, visually playing with emergence and selforganization. The game board consists of cells where each cell of the two-dimensional square grid is considered to be either “live” or “dead”. The game-play is very simple, you only “play” it in solitaire mode, as it is actually a zeroplayer game; you only set up the initial configuration and then let the rules determine the fate of your cellular life form. The game is in this sense the initial seed, and the simulation following its evolution with every “generation” re-applying the rules on the new form. As simple starting point for life simulation. The rules of “Game of Life” are as follows: * A cell dies of loneliness if it has one or zero neighbours. (“death by isolation”) * A cell dies of overcrowding if it has four or more neighbours. (“death by overcrowdning”) * An alive cell with exactly two or three neighbours survives to the next generation. (the cell is “stable”) * A new cell is born if it has exactly three neighbours. (called “birth”) An evolution can thus look something like this, following the rules over 10 generations.

GoF 1: An example of a “blinker” an emergent dissipative structure that repeats itself endlessly after eight generations. Is this the life pattern of a classic cut of a suit jacket, the little black dress or pleated pants?

The simple rules applied to various starting configurations evolves into

unexpected forms over the generations, and they show certain straits and characteristics, but keeping their simple rules. Some evolve to become stable but oscillating “blinkers” (as in the GoF1 illustration, which starts to repeat itself after eight generations), while others move around or crawl over the grid, as “gliders”. GoF 2: The Gosper Glider Gun, a seemingly random starting pattern that repeats endlessly and also gives “birth” to a constant stream of new gliders during its life time. Is this the pattern of a fashion house, a micro-culture or perhaps a miniature scheme of fashion itself?

Other forms create complex patterns of movement from their initial configuration and move in repetitive patterns while giving “birth” to independent life forms. These new life forms shoot out from their bodies, and are called “guns”. As the Gosper Glider Gun (illustration GoF2), producing a new living “glider” every 15 generations. It is a simple pattern of mathematical cells that produces life on its own. The origin of life at the simples level. For sociologist Gabriel Tarde, his analytic resource of idea “germs” is at its full potential at the moment of innovation, and this creates “vibration”, just like cell multiplications or the “firing” of neurons between nerves. This is pure difference, pure intensity, and and resonates well with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion that “Fashion is the latest fashion, the latest difference.” We could say that fashion is the latest intensity, the latest firing of social life. This latest difference is the potential “contamination” of the virus. It does not require too much imagination to see an analogy between this viral approach and fashion, itself signifying a social vibration of status and desire that dies over time, usually in a season or two. We are “immune” to last season’s fashion, and indeed most of us have some “dead” garments buried in the back of the wardrobe that once were highly vivid as we made the latest moves on the dance floor. The cells in the “game of fashion” that oscillates between life and death can thus be seen in a quite literal sense – as the “vibration” or “intensity” we experience as we balance with fashion, the new, the innovative, the vivid, on the edge between a social life and death.

The flat field of the viral Game of Fashion where looks meet, mutate, and generate new intensities, new life, new patterns, without a hierarchical, centralized and elevated designer-god. All squares are equally active, all have the same potential of agency and spread of intensity.

This means that we could see the fashion system or the “game of fashion” as a living system, as an ecology of living parts, rather than a mechanical system of simplified cause-and-effect relationships, of dictations and blind followers. In this living system every actor is both sender and receiver and as the virus mutates the fashion bends and is constantly reinterpreted, even if there is some medial functions still work as a “key” to how fashion “should look like”, as the fashion magazines or the looks of the massmedialized beautiful people. Lookbook is a flat field of two-way fashion agency and pure viral intensity, yet following the playful rules of diffusion. In this regard I see the act of contamination, of following the rules, the heteronomy of fashion as a form of vibration in itself. A fashionista does not need to be autonomous to feel alive. On the contrary; a fashionista feels alive by abiding the rules, and by being engulfed in the intensity of the social game. It is this unpredictable game that is fashion, this vibrant celebration of life. The game is indeed played on a “field”. And it only refers to the last season (or in this sense ”generation”). If it was skinny jeans last season it is now flares. If it was white last season, it is now black. We all know the rules: it should neither be too original, nor too popular. What a lovely game to play.

The smooth plateaus of lookbook facilitate viral lines of imitation, innovation and new patterns of fashion to emerge.