"THE CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF A FASHION OBJECT"

Does the internet captivate society?

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Or, does the internet hold society captive?

 

        The year 2000 was the start of an era that championed innovation. Fashion, technology, politics, and more all made advancements in their respective sectors of the world, but some seemed to consume society more than others. Hussein Chalayan’s 2000/2005 “Remote Control” dress comments on the ways that forms of technology like the internet dehumanize the body, simply revealing the cultural anxiety created by the rising digital revolution. By composing juxtapositions through materials, form, and visibility, Chalayan’s garment depicts how society's allure with digital perfection, as well as its simultaneous fear of losing unique human identity, reveals how the internet blurs the line between the material world and the digital world.

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        Through synthetic materials and a mechanically operated form, this garment's initial outer-shell dress embodies the unease that society faced when learning to navigate the digital world. In 2000, while the internet was no stranger to the digital revolution, the innovations and advances with it quickly shifted this form of technology from simply existing to a dramatic mainstream use in society's everyday life. The internet's attractive essence revealed to the world its never-before-seen qualities, allowing society to only dream of the endless yet uncertain possibilities of technology. Chalayan’s garment materializes the tensions between human softness and technological stiffness, specifically through the hard outer shell portion of this dress. This mechanically operated dress features a woman’s A-line silhouette in a baby blush pink colorway. With its shiny, hard outer shell made from composite materials of metal, fiberglass, and resin cast in a one-of-a-kind mold, Chalayan depicts a new relationship between the body and technology. The synthetic essence of this outer shell dress works to symbolically mutate the human body into a mechanical object, echoing the representation of what is seen on the internet during today’s era. With the internet acting as this true public image for many people in pursuit of a glossy sense of perfection, individuality becomes visibly concealed under its perfected surface. Ultimately, people use the internet in a way that obscures their true core, but like this concept, the body in this dress doesn't just exist exclusively in the hard outer shell dress, as the push of a few buttons leads to the reveal of a pre-existing inner tulle skirt.

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        Through the juxtaposition of visibility, the mechanically operated reveal of the garment’s inner tulle skirt frames a performance of control and exposure, depicting how the internet controls certain aspects that humans are forced to choose from and allowed to reveal. The human nature of the pre-existing pencil skirt, with its organic and delicate flesh-like pink tulle material, contains natural fibers of cotton that allow Chalayan to use a tactile contrast that creates a tension with the hard outer shell dress. This tension ultimately foreshadows the same tension that is often seen between internet personas and the physical essence of humans that technology both conceals and controls. Quiet until given an opportunity to be shown, the protruding tulle skirt that stands tall in the opposite direction of the back of the hard outer shell dress, echoes the often unique individuality and hidden vulnerability that is core to every human in society. These human qualities are being tucked away only until the control of the internet comes to reveal, by unnatural force, aspects of people that were already there to begin with. It forces society to have to decipher between what is genuinely individual and vulnerable versus what is staged, as the internet is the only thing to have a say in when these human qualities can be visible. It essentially forces the human body to live through the internet rather than be accompanied by it. By controlling when, where, and how vulnerability becomes visible in the garment, in this case, symbolizing the internet, it portrays authenticity as this controlled illusion. It ultimately uncovers the fact that society is both captivated by and captive to its own digital reflections.

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        Ultimately, Hussein Chalayan’s “Remote Control” dress is a pivotal cultural commentary on the blurred lines between humans and the internet. The curated juxtapositions of the garment through differing materials, forms, and visibility play on each other to reveal the cultural anxieties that the new digital revolution brought upon society in the year 2000 and remained for the years to come. While Chalayan’s design suggests the dehumanization that the digital revolution brought upon society, his garment also acts as a visual wake-up call for the human society as a whole. With the anxiety in the 2000s being due to the unknown of the digital revolution, today this garment instead provides a thought-provoking realization on how much the internet has become of society's innate being. Consequently, this garment questions how much further the human qualities of society can be objectified by the internet before there is no real “soft and flesh-like pink tulle skirt” in humans to be revealed at all.