Neon Playground - The State of Fashion in the Dawn of the New Aesthetic
Last Friday, The Creators Project’s Global Editor Julia Kaganskiy put together a blog post in response to Bruce Sterling’s “Essay On The New Aesthetic”—an oration to a new emerging visual movement that’s quickly making waves across the internet. Being a clothes whore with a vendetta for style that’s “so bad it’s good,” I decided to do a little fleshing out of what implications the New Aesthetic has for fashion.
As a medium that’s re-invented at least twice a year and constantly referencing past decades, the idea of the New Aesthetic (NA) is at once a challenge and a welcome breath of fresh air to the world of fashion.
But as Sterling mentioned, designers must move beyond the surface if they’re really going to embrace the NA.
Moving Beyond The Digital
It’s like what we’ve been seeing with digital prints, which essentially copy and paste designs from the computer and render them onto physical clothing to give the illusion of different textures or fabrics. This method seems to be the current lowest common dominator as far as reaching towards the NA goes—that, and putting pixels on everything.
The most widespread example out there illustrating the digital print phenomenon is the Comme des Garçons Junya Watanabe MAN x Levis “jeans,” but I think a better one (and a more fashion-y one at that) can be found in Jeremy Scott’s F/W 2012 collection. For fall, he’s designed pants made to look like Mac keyboards, sweatshirts and tees bedazzled with pixelated emoticons, and a Tumblr page-printed sweatsuit, among other spastic, 90s neon pieces.
