bengisuedotcom

Controlled Transgression: When War Becomes Wardrobe

I. Introduction

Contemporary image culture has absorbed violence not as event but as texture. Photographs of conflict, criminality and narcotics circulate with the same kind of aesthetic precision as fashion editorials; they are no longer registers of reality but indices of taste. The moral weight of their subjects dissolves in formal coherence-color grading, typographic restraint, sequencing. Projects such as 550BC or Mugshawties occupy this threshold between documentation and design, treating the image of harm as a controlled material. Their work belongs neither to journalism nor to art but to an emergent field of documentary fetishism: the conversion of evidence into ornament. What these platforms reveal is not simply voyeurism, but the recognition of violence as an aesthetic code-where authenticity, once the ethical justification for witnessing, becomes a style parameter.

Fashion functions as a parallel laboratory for this visual logic. Its history is a catalogue of sublimated aggression: military tailoring recoded as authority, fetish garments refined into minimalism, the romanticization of exhaustion in the heroin-chic campaigns of the late 1990s. In each instance, forms of control (i.e. discipline, harm, decay) are translated into surfaces of desire. When contemporary fashion imagery borrows from the iconography of warfare, narcotics or organized crime, it does not imitate brutality; it reproduces its semiotics. The sleekness of a Kevlar-inspired vest or the ritual anonymity of a hooded silhouette perform the same symbolic labor as the curated mugshot: they transform vulnerability into posture.

The recurrence of these motifs across editorial, commercial and especially subcultural spaces suggests not a fascination with violence itself but with the structure it provides. Violence introduces order where meaning has collapsed. Its visual forms (uniforms, weapons, wounds) offer clear hierarchies in an otherwise ambiguous aesthetic landscape. High fashion, by adopting and refining these codes, converts existential disorder into controlled spectacle. The result is an economy in which destruction, scarcity and power circulate as luxury values. What was once documentation of crisis now functions as aspirational design.

This essay traces how the aesthetics of guns, cartels and narcotics migrate into fashion’s visual and material systems. Through a comparative analysis of contemporary image production - spanning photobooks, digital archives and runway iconography - it examines how the logic of harm becomes legible as style. The aim is neither moral condemnation nor celebration, but to map the mechanisms by which fashion and adjacent media convert acts of collapse into signs of coherence: to understand how, in the present visual regime, violence is no longer seen but worn.

II. The Image as Evidence and Ornament

The documentary image, once a medium of truth, has become a designed object. Its claim to authenticity now depends less on context than on texture: grain, blur, flash, timestamp. These formal markers function as semiotic guarantees, reassuring the viewer that the image was taken, not produced. Yet what they ultimately stage is not truth but the performance of witnessing. Platforms such as 550BC and Mugshawties understand this perfectly. Their visual language is calibrated to suggest unfiltered access: proximity to danger without the instability of reality itself. The compositions are exact, the paper choices deliberate, the sequencing cinematic. Violence is not hidden; it is formatted.

In this visual economy, the image of harm is valuable precisely because it appears unmediated. The fascination lies in its supposed resistance to art direction, even as its dissemination depends on it. The result is a condition Susan Sontag anticipated: a culture in which suffering is no longer mediated by empathy but by style. The photographic record of collapse is not rejected: it is collected, displayed and archived with the precision once reserved for couture. The visual residue of war and crime becomes a fetish of authenticity, a substitute for moral experience.

This process could be described as documentary fetishism: the elevation of evidence to aesthetic object through design control. The documentary image, stripped of explanatory context, functions as décor for the disenchanted. It satisfies the desire for the real without demanding engagement with reality. Within the logic of the spectacle, this transformation is coherent: the wound becomes an icon, the crime scene a composition, the archive a catalogue. The viewer consumes moral rupture as texture: an aesthetic surface that delivers the sensation of significance without its burden.

The photobook, once an instrument of testimony, now performs as a luxury accessory to crisis. Limited print runs, embossed covers and high production values confer scarcity, translating atrocity into collectible aura. Each edition resembles an artifact of ethical capital, allowing its owner to possess a fragment of the forbidden. The viewer is absolved through design; the object’s refinement masks its origin. What remains is not empathy but appetite: the calm pleasure of holding destruction rendered coherent.

III. Fashion’s Internalization of Violence

Fashion has long operated as a system of controlled aggression. Its forms of beauty emerge from the management of harm - bodily, symbolic or structural. The historical vocabulary of dress is built on this tension: the uniform that disciplines, the corset that constrains, the heel that deforms. What differentiates contemporary fashion from its predecessors is not the presence of violence, but the explicitness with which it is displayed. The language of warfare, crime and narcotics does not infiltrate fashion from the outside; it merely renders visible the logic that is already inscribed in the garment.

The late 20th century turn toward “realism” in fashion imagery (heroin chic, street casting, utilitarian design) marked the first stage of this exposure. What appeared as social commentary was, in practice, a formal recalibration: the aesthetics of exhaustion and survival introduced a new mode of desirability. Designers such as Helmut Lang, Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane rearticulated aggression through minimalism, restraint and bodily precision. The violence was displaced from narrative to structure. A harness, a trench coat, a pair of sharply cut trousers- each of these enacted a subtle choreography of control. The garment ceased to decorate and began to discipline.

Contemporary fashion continues this translation of harm into surface. Alyx’s tactical vests, Balenciaga’s riot silhouettes and the ascetic severity of Rick Owens extend the same grammar: protection aestheticized as status, armor recoded as identity. These designs simulate preparedness, as if the body required fortification against a generalized threat. The appeal lies in the illusion of sovereignty: agency purchased through apparel. Violence is transformed into an aesthetic of safety, a luxury of control.

This convergence between fashion and the visual culture of conflict is not incidental. Both systems rely on scarcity, hierarchy and display. The battlefield and the runway share an obsession with visibility and erasure: the elimination of vulnerability through form. When the codes of militarism or narcotic subculture appear in high fashion, they do not signal moral transgression but aesthetic refinement. The weapon and the garment perform the same function: they allow the subject to inhabit power as image.

IV. The Narcotic Logic of Looking

 If violence supplies the structure of contemporary aesthetics, addiction provides its rhythm. The circulation of images now mirrors the pharmaceutics of desire: stimulation, saturation, withdrawal. The viewer moves through feeds and archives as through a dosage schedule, alternating between exposure and numbness. The appeal of the violent image (whether of war, luxury or decay) lies in its precise adjustment of arousal and control. One looks not to understand but to feel something, however faint.

In this sense, the visual consumption of violence operates as a narcotic practice. The viewer seeks the high of authenticity, the illusion of contact with the real, while remaining insulated by the screen or the page. The photograph of a body, the image of a weapon, the simulation of crisis: each delivers a measured shock followed by instant normalization. Pleasure depends on distance; the spectacle must remain survivable. The result is an economy of controlled offense: harm made legible, digestible and ultimately desirable.

Fashion imagery participates in this cycle with remarkable precision. Campaigns and editorials oscillate between attraction and repulsion (fetishizing fatigue, simulating danger, aestheticizing deprivation). The seasonal repetition of “realness” functions like dosage management: enough disorder to excite, never enough to endanger (especially in today’s sensitive climate). The narcotic, the crime is not the image itself but the system that administers it: the calibrated repetition that turns trauma into texture.

The audience, conditioned by this rhythm, learns to crave intensity without consequence. Scrolling becomes like ingestion, archiving becomes possession. Each new image promises a stronger hit of authenticity while further dulling the capacity for shock. This is the paradox of the narcotic gaze: the more one looks, the less one sees. Fashion and visual culture connect on this mechanism, producing desire through exhausting. What remains is a sustained haze of visual intoxication: sensation detached from event, beauty without belief.

V. The Luxury of Scarcity and Control

Within both fashion and image culture, value is generated through restriction. The limited edition, the private archive, the invitation-only show: each of these translates exclusion into prestige. Violence follows the same economy. The forbidden, the censored and the inaccessible possess heightened allure precisely because they cannot be freely consumed. When destruction is aestheticized, its circulation must be controlled; too much access dissolves its charge. The photobook that reproduces the debris of war in a run of three hundred copies operates under the same principle as a couture gown: rarity as sanctification.

The structural similarity between luxury and violence is not metaphorical but procedural. Both depend on the conversion of material loss into symbolic gain. The weapon, the logo and the limited print each signify command over scarcity. Their possession implies an ability to regulate access: to withhold, to deny, to control. In this sense, the aesthetic of violence is not opposed to luxury; it is its mirror. The elegance of minimalism, the precision of tailoring: these gestures domesticate excess, laundering brutality through form.

Contemporary fashion’s fascination with tactical hardware, armored silhouettes and industrial/brutalistic fabrics can thus be read as an aspiration toward control rather than aggression. The materials of protection become instruments of distinction. The jacket suggests invulnerability; the polished surface replaces the shield. The moral tension of violence is resolved through refinement: the more severe the reference, the cleaner the execution.

This dynamic culminates in what might be called the aesthetic of control - a system where the regulation of access, emotion, and exposure becomes the central sign of taste. The image of the armored body, whether in a runway look or a photographic archive, performs the fantasy of sovereignty: safety curated as luxury. In this configuration, violence is not rejected but managed, transformed from threat into property.

VI. Ethical Residue: Seeing Without Witnessing

The neutral gaze of the spectator defines the contemporary condition of viewing. The violence that once demanded testimony now invites interpretation. Aestheticization provides a physical separation: to encounter an image of harm within a designed framework is to experience safety through mediation. This safety, however, leaves a trace: a faint awareness that something has been transformed, perhaps violated, in the passage from event to form. That trace constitutes the ethical residue of looking.

In this residue, the viewer recognizes both complicity and impotence. The image’s beauty confirms participation in the system it depicts, while its universality renders moral response redundant. The photograph of war printed on fine paper, the campaign that only borrows the posture of despair, the art installation that restages catastrophe: each exemplifies how witnessing has been replaced by regard. To look becomes to curate one’s relation to horror, to manage empathy as style.

This detachment is not accidental but structural. The infrastructures of fashion and media depend on repetition and renewal; empathy interrupts circulation. The efficient image must be legible, desirable and non-traumatic. Thus the violent image is purified through composition, color grading and context until only its aesthetic residue remains. The viewer is not meant to feel but to recognize. Recognition substitutes for responsibility.

Yet the persistence of this residue (its faint uneasiness) suggests that something within the image resists domestication. However refined its presentation, the violence it encodes cannot be fully neutralized. It lingers as visual noise, an undertone of discomfort that neither design nor distance can erase. In this persistence lies the only remaining trace of the real: not the event itself, but the awareness that one has seen without truly witnessing.

VII. Conclusion — Violence as Design Grammar

The merging of fashion, documentation and violence reveals not a temporary fascination but a structural dependence. Harm functions as a design principle: an organizing logic that supplies hierarchy, scarcity, and affect where meaning has thinned. Whether through the tactical vest rendered as luxury item, the photobook of conflict printed on archival paper, or the campaign that aestheticizes exhaustion, the same mechanism operates: destruction translated into coherence.

In this regime, violence is not an aberration but a syntax. It dictates proportion, texture and desire. The body becomes an interface for control, the garment a soft architecture of defense, the image a simulation of crisis. What circulates between them is not empathy but calibration: the careful maintenance of tension between danger and distance. Fashion absorbs this equilibrium and perfects it, producing an elegance that feels moral precisely because it is clean.

The question is no longer whether violence should be represented but how it is formatted. The systems that aestheticize it (fashion, photography, media) no longer claim to depict reality; they reproduce its residue as style. Within this loop, authenticity becomes indistinguishable from design. What remains of the real is not its content but its structure: the organization of power, visibility and exclusion.

The contemporary garment, in this sense, performs the same function as the curated image. It conceals and reenacts the wound simultaneously, offering safety through repetition. To wear, to look, to collect: each gesture rehearses control over collapse. Violence endures as the hidden grammar of beauty: disciplined, redacted, endlessly reproducible.

So you’ve traded your sleekest slick back for the Pamela Anderson messy bun (that you still put an unnecessary amount of work into), now what?

Here’s my step by step guide to permission, for those of you who seem unable to grant it to yourselves without a trend cycle.

Because contrary to popular belief, this was never about hair. Or Rhode lip gloss. Or whether your kitchen still contains chia seeds. It is about the far less flattering fact that most people do not move from control to collapse organically. They wait until indulgence is socially cleared for landing. Only then do they begin to unravel—strategically, photogenically, and with just enough residue of discipline to remain superior. And only as long as it remains instagrammable.

STEP 1: Do not pretend this happened naturally. No woman wakes up one morning suddenly able to tolerate smudged eyeliner, stale cigarettes, or emotional ambiguity. Permission had to arrive first. Usually in the form of a girl on your phone who looked worse than you, but more interesting.

STEP 2: Keep one artifact of discipline.

A full collapse is unbecoming. Leave one thing intact: the skin, the body, the tone, the standards. Indulgence reads best when supervised.

STEP 3: Never abandon purity entirely. You may flirt with ruin. You may not become common. There is a difference.

STEP 4: Learn the difference between undone and lazy. Men may not know. Women do.

STEP 5: Don’t overplay the indulgence. The girl who spent two years performing moral superiority over Diet Coke (and actual coke), nightlife, and synthetics should not suddenly become a patron saint of hedonism. It makes the whole thing look less like liberation and more like dementia. Or a manic epsiode.

STEP 6: Maintain selective superiority.

You may drink, smoke, disappear, or regress—but never alongside people you wouldn’t have respected before. Collapse downward and it reads as fate. Collapse laterally and it reads as choice.

STEP 7: Do not become earnest.

Nothing ruins a collapse faster than sincerity. You’re not seeking meaning. You’re adjusting tone.

STEP 8: Archive your previous self carefully.

You will need her again. Do not embarrass her publicly. She was working.

STEP 9: Never admit exhaustion.

This was not the result of pressure, burnout, or depletion. It was a shift. A decision. Always a decision.

STEP 10: Never let it cost you something you can’t replace.

Reputation, access, optionality—these are not part of the aesthetic. They are the structure that allows it.

STEP 11: If it cannot be undone, don’t do it.

Irreversibility is for people who have been doing this for a while.

STEP 12: Keep at least one standard unbroken.

Not for yourself—for others. People need something to point to when they explain why you’re still “doing well.”

STEP 13: Don’t confuse permission with freedom.

If you needed to see it first, it was never yours.

Of course, none of this is a moral issue. I wouldn’t insult either of us like that.

It’s simply a matter of execution.

Because what you’re after was never mess itself—but the appearance of it. The version that photographs well. The version that reads as freedom without ever threatening your position.

Which is fine.

Just don’t confuse it with the real thing.

(My credentials are: 3,305 unread emails, ysl beauty eyeliner, unfinished conversations, Irish exits)

ON MY RADAR

“ON MY RADAR” IS A RUBRIC THAT LOGS MY RECENT CULTURAL EXPOSURE.

None of these are endorsements. It’s also not a ranking. Just what crossed my path - and what didn’t fully leave. 

Especially after seeing people start to consciously consume media again it appears as relevant as ever. Hopefully the “performative intellectualism” is not just a trend. I, for one, am yearning for more consciousness, intention and attention to detail. 

I’ll be covering film, art, tv, music, literature and perhaps also some things I should not admit to…

KINKY GIRLS FROM BIG CITIES “1$t” (MUSIC)  Kinky girls from big cities is an off-platform band circulating through radio, files, and word of mouth. Intentionally hard to find, even harder to place. They are not on streaming platforms. Not trying to be. Their website sounds pretty pornographic but once on it, it feels like a non updated, lost place in the whole World Wide Web. It’s inspired by myspace and band forums and also what inspired my Tumblr desktop layout. Circling back to my intention point earlier: I think this rock band specifically is as intentional as it gets nowadays. 

You can listen to them here:

www.kinkygirlsfrombigcities.com

(IMAGE FROM KINKY GIRLS FROM BIG CITIES)

2. PROZAC NATION BY ELISABETH WURTZEL (1994) (LITERATURE) Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel is a first-person account of depression before it learned how to behave online. Messy, exposed, and difficult to distance yourself from.This one deserves a trigger warning: this was well before wellness language or damage control. Personally, I think that’s part of the reason why it is missing in today’s conversation about mental health because it has to fulfill the following points: be educational, be responsible, be disclaiming or be outward facing (“this might help you”). Prozac Nation is inward facing to the point of suffocation. It also doesn’t really give you a “usable identity”. Skins (UK) for instance, gives you archetypes. The Virgin Suicides gives you mystery. Plath gives you tragedy-as-genius. Elisabeth Wurtzel gives you a woman who is: brilliant, cruel, needy, entitled, suffering - and aware of it all. There is no clean way to turn that all that into an identity or “aesthetic” without flattening her.

3. SHORT-TERM, BUT LONG-TERM BY 550BC (PRINT PUBLICATION)

The publication is a forensic visual archive compiled from dating-app profiles used by IDF (Israel Defense Forces) soldiers during operations in Gaza in 2024.

Over 300 images are collected, redacted, and recontextualized to examine how war imagery circulates casually, intimately, and largely unchecked.

Short-term, but long-term really captures how war imagery no longer just arrives through official channels, but through casual, intimate platforms. The personal images, in that dating app context, document how easily violence slips into normalcy when filtered through intimacy and platforms built for (cheap) desire. The archive feels immediate, but its implications aren’t.

(IMAGES FROM 550BC) 4. SILENT HILL 2 BY KONAMI COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT TOKYO (2001)(GAMING) Silent Hill 2 is a psychological horror game where atmosphere does most of the work.Less about monsters, more about guilt, memory, and what refuses to stay buried. That naturally feels very different in a culture where horror & gore exist to shock. And obviously also nostalgic. (Perhaps I should disclaim that gamers would not consider me a gamer and I rarely find the time. So in no way can I give an expert opinion).  In the end of the day, it reads as horror but, to me, it felt closer to a study of depression and rumination through metaphors and symptoms that don’t just disappear once they are identified. 5. HIGH FIDELITY (2020) (TV) High Fidelity from 2020 is a TV show adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel of the same title re-centered around a record store owner, - Rob played by Zoë Kravitz - in contemporary Brooklyn.The series follows romantic fixation, breakups, and a pretty relatable way of self-mythologizing through lists, music, and constant interior narration.Set against a culture of playlists, references, and hyper-articulated feelings, intimacy becomes something that’s curated as much as it’s lived. Rob remembers relationships, reorders, and replays them. Less as experiences than as personal archives. What the show captures beautifully, is how self-awareness doesn’t necessarily produce emotional movement. Insight can become a loop, taste a shield, and the brilliant narration replaces resolution. In this version, obsession isn’t framed as immaturity but as a coping mechanism. (Note: I also really just enjoy looking at Zoë Kravitz).

6. THE STROKES (MUSIC)  Another band. Who would’ve thought. They are not even niche or anything and I remember listening to them as a kid as well. Back then I used to think: ‘The lead singer (Julian Casablancas) definitely was a public mental health risk to any girl he got involved with’. Now I think ‘real’.  His voice sounds like someone who didn’t really mean to hurt anyone - which somehow makes it worse. The sound is detached yet self-aware. Slightly ashamed but still going to do it again. It’s not really supposed to be romantic. Not to a sane person anyway. It’s like emotional aftermath. Missed calls. Bad timing. Emotional negligence dressed up as apathy. Cigarette smoke and regret. And I know somewhere out there is a girl who thought she was gonna be the exception.

7. SEDITION MAGAZINE ISSUE 04 (PINT PUBLICATION) Sedition Magazine was an independent fashion magazine that’s gone quiet, not forgotten…

Inactive for years. I still reference like it never really left.  As an independent writer/blogger (I clearly don’t like labels) I love and respect independent publication. Especially today (everybody scream in unison “print is dying”). Well, the 2021 issue, and those that came before, are just that: in their own words “made in Los Angeles, CA - and put together using paper, glue, scissors, and computers. It’s something we make because we love making things”.

(IMAGE FROM SEDITION.COM) 8. DAVID LYNCH EXHIBITION @ PACE GALLERY IN BERLIN (ART EXHIBITION)  Absurd art from the king of the cinema of the absurd himself. Small and intimate setting. Go early and on week days. If you’re unemployed, that is.

After viewing the exhibit - and what follows is a direct quote from my private journal - I sat down at the café that belonged to the gallery space (Die Tankstelle, ZEIT-Café), got an overpriced tea from the overly friendly barista. While looking at Lynch’s work that consisted of photographs, film, light installations (he made some pretty cool lamps) & multimedia paintings, I overheard a lady who presumably worked at the gallery tell a middle aged couple that David Lynch had a “happy childhood” and “no trauma”. The implication was: “how can someone produce something this… grotesque, beautiful (those are not mutually exclusive), but grotesque and have had a regular childhood?” How can one come up with these fever dreams of absurdity, the violence, the humor - all of which are very trauma coded - and not have suffered? It goes against what many people believe to be an unspoken rule or perhaps better phrasing: the age old question: Do pain and suffering validate art? It appears to me, as though the tortured ones usually happen to create the most fantastic, incredible, grotesque, scary, fucking amazing shit you’ve seen, heard, touched, tasted and most importantly felt. Even if you don’t get it. And perhaps Lynch was fucked in the head too. In his own way. Who knows. Or maybe that’s something I need to tell myself to remain comfortable in this environment I have created for myself. 

The journal entry ends here. 

The silver-lining is I stole an almost completely destroyed poster advertising the exhibition across the street. And also that I never stop looking for one.

(IMAGES ALL TAKEN BY ME, FIND MORE HERE)  That’s it for now. Hope you enjoy this rubric. Leave a nice comment if you did. Or don’t. I can’t tell you what to do. 

written by bengisuedotcom for FLYN

(read unlayouted version below)

Every few years, culture announces a return. It’s called a trend cycle, duh. Even the non fashion-folk get it. This time it’s the mid 2010s. The fonts are back, the filters are back, the silhouettes are back. Instagram looks suspiciously like itself again. According to the internet, we’re reliving a simpler time.

The easiest explanation is economic. It is also the most boring. Recessions always bring nostalgia with them. When the future feels uncertain, culture looks backward for stability. This argument is correct and like I said, kind of boring. Economics alone don’t explain why people are suddenly longing for an era that was visually cheap, emotionally reckless, and, by today’s standards, often deeply embarrassing.

What’s happening isn’t a revival of taste. It’s a revival of atmosphere.

2016 wasn’t particularly refined, ethical or intentional. It was messy, inconsistent and often incoherent. But it existed at a strange in-between moment: social media was already everywhere, yet it hadn’t learned how to watch itself. Platforms were curated, but not self-conscious. People posted constantly, but rarely strategically. Content circulated without footnotes, disclaimers or a clear sense of consequence.

Looking back, it’s tempting to confuse that lack of polish with innocence. It wasn’t. The appeal lies elsewhere. Around 2016 marked the last phase of the internet before everyone understood what visibility was worth and before that knowledge began to shape everything that followed. 2016 B.A. (BEFORE AWARENESS)

What separated 2016 from now wasn’t necessarily aesthetics. It was awareness. 

Social media was already curated, but it wasn’t yet self-conscious. People knew they were being seen, but they hadn’t fully internalized what that visibility meant. Posting didn’t feel like a whole content strategy. It felt closer to impulse. You shared because you wanted to, not because you had mapped out how it would land, who it might offend or whether it aligned with a ‘long-term narrative’ of yourself.

Content was often superficial, sometimes stupid, occasionally embarrassing. There were fewer talking videos, less explaining, almost no obligation to contextualize or justify what you put online. Looking back we can realize though: that wasn’t really a failure of depth. It was a difference in function. Social media wasn’t yet expected to educate, correct or perform moral literacy. It was allowed to be kinda dumb. It was allowed to be unfinished.

Cringe thrived in that environment. And cringe, uncomfortable as it is in hindsight, is usually just sincerity that hasn’t been retroactively edited. The reason so much from that era feels hard to look at now isn’t because people lacked taste: it’s because they lacked foresight.

Self-awareness hadn’t caught up to scale yet. And before it did, there was room for inconsistency, contradiction and unpolished content. All things that are much harder to afford once every post starts feeling permanent.

TRIGGER WARNING: NO TRIGGER WARNINGS

Of course, that era wasn’t harmless. Anyone pretending otherwise is either lying or curating their memory.

Tumblr, in particular, was a mess in ways that are hard to look at now. Not just aesthetically, but ethically. It was a place where self-destruction circulated freely, often dressed up as taste. Eating disorder culture wasn’t exactly hidden in dark corners. It was in fact pretty… casual. Rebloggable. Thinness wasn’t just desired, it was aestheticized, affirmed, repeated until it felt normal. And it did. There were no disclaimers. No protective language. No distance.

That doesn’t make it good. And it doesn’t need to be defended. I’m not here to moralize. 

But it does matter that it existed in a space that hadn’t yet learned how to frame harm. What circulated back then wasn’t really ideology or people forcing their views. It was just uncensored exposure. People didn’t share because they wanted to influence. They shared because they were inside it. Because the internet still functioned as a place to spill, not a place to package.

Looking back, it’s easy to flatten that mess into a moral failure. It’s harder (and more honest) to admit that what made it dangerous is also what made it real. That authenticity we seem to value so much nowadays was arguably more presistent back then. Nothing was buffered. Nothing was explained away. There was no clear line between expression and damage, because the infrastructure to draw that line didn’t exist yet.

Today, that kind of mess would never survive unmediated. It would be reframed, contextualized, flagged or monetized into something more palatable. Safer, maybe. But also less revealing. Less honest about how people actually felt before they learned how to perform being okay.

THE LEARNING CURVE OF BEING AN ATTENTION WHORE

Once everyone learned what the attention that social media brought with it was worth, the shift didn’t happen all at once. It crept in quietly, disguised as opportunity.

At some point, social media stopped feeling like a place and started feeling like a market. Ads multiplied. Then they camouflaged themselves. “This changed my life.” “You need this.” “The only product you’ll ever need.” PR hauls blurred into personal taste. Recommendations turned into revenue streams. You can’t always tell what is genuine anymore and that is kind of the point.

More importantly, people started having something to lose.

A following. A reputation. A branddeal. A future collaboration. Once attention became legible as currency, behavior changed. Posting stopped being impulsive and started being strategic. Messiness became a liability. Silence became a tactic. Even authenticity had to be managed. Released in controlled doses, timed carefully so it read as relatable without ever becoming inconvenient.

Perfection followed naturally. Or at least the appearance of it. Flaws were allowed back in only once they were reviewed, or served a purpose and most importantly stripped of risk. Vulnerability today is content. Personality today is branding. Everything is suddenly intentional. Even the things pretending not to be.

This is where the self-awareness mentioned earlier hardens into something else: calculation. Not everyone became an influencer, but everyone learned to think like one. The question was no longer “do I want to share this?” but “what does this do for me?”

And once that question enters the room, the atmosphere changes for good.

R.I.P. 2016 (YOU WOULD HAVE HATED REELS)

Looking back 2016 doesn’t merely feel messy and chaotic. It feels unfinished. 

Social media at the time resembled a building still under construction: The wiring was visible. The safety rails weren’t fully installed. Some doors led nowhere, others opened too easily. You could get hurt moving through it: but you could also move freely. Nothing had been sealed yet. Nothing had been insured.

That incompleteness is what people mistake for authenticity.

The mess wasn’t a feature. It was a side effect of infrastructure that hadn’t hardened. People didn’t know how to behave because the rules weren’t fully written yet. There was no clear manual for how to present yourself, how much to reveal, how to monetize attention or how to protect your future self from your present one. Exposure came before foresight.

Over time, the building was completed. Platforms stabilized. Monetization models solidified. Social norms calcified. Walls went up. Risk was mitigated. PR agencies caught up. Everything became safer, smoother, more controlled and far less permeable.

What we’re nostalgic for isn’t the danger and it isn’t the harm. It’s the feeling of standing inside something that hadn’t yet decided what it was. A space where presence mattered more than outcome. Where posting didn’t immediately translate into consequence, leverage or loss.

Once a structure is finished, you can’t live in it the same way. You can decorate it. Rebrand it. Recreate the floor plan. But you can’t return to the moment before the walls set.

And that’s the part that’s gone for good.

DO NOT RESUSCITATE

That’s why every attempt to revive everything around 2016 feels slightly wrong (even if I’m literally doing it right now #blogger). Not embarrassing but a bit uncanny.

The problem isn’t execution. It’s awareness. You can bring back the fonts, the filters, the fashion. You can recreate the feed with the filters, the references, even the attitude (And hopefully one day: the iconic square format on instagram). But you can’t undo the knowledge that now sits behind every post. We know what attention does. We know what visibility costs. We know how quickly something careless can become permanent (#cancelled).

Performance is no longer optional. It’s structural.

Even “mess” has learned how to behave. Authenticity arrives pre-framed. Vulnerability shows up with boundaries. Nothing appears without anticipating how it will be read, archived, monetized or misused. The conditions have changed and pretending otherwise only makes the revival feel hollow.

So maybe we should let sleeping (Givenchy Rottweiler) dogs lie.

And for the record: I’m not saying 2016 was better. It was just earlier.

PORN IS EVERYWHERE. EROTICISM IS NOT.

Sex is everywhere, but eroticism is not. It slips through feeds and soundtracks and the films that barely pretend not to be pornography. Bodies are arranged just short of naked, language just short of explicit, so intent can always be denied. And if denial becomes inconvenient, explicitness is immediate: four letters, a checkbox confirming adulthood on good faith. Good faith, on a porn site. The blasphemy is not sexual excess but the casual invocation of moral language in a space that has no use for reverence, hesitation or initiation. Access has replaced initiation. Visibility has replaced risk. Nothing this exposed should feel this empty.

PORN AS PROTECTION

Porn pretends to be about excess when in reality it’s obsessed with control. It’s framed as radical when in practice, it is one of the most conservative forces in contemporary culture. Every variable is managed: timing, outcome, intensity. Nothing unpredictable survives long enough to matter. The bodies may look unruly, the scenarios are extreme, but the structure is rigid. Desire is routed through a system that guarantees a resolution. Nothing is allowed to linger. Nothing is allowed to invoke questions.

This is why porn integrates so seamlessly into contemporary media. The logic is identical across platforms: endless visual availability, escalation, easy access. The tease without tension. The reveal without real risk. Suggestive enough to activate, explicit enough to resolve. Pornographic logic no longer requires just nudity; it also requires efficiency. Arousal with no interruptions. Intimacy with no consequence.

Porn bypasses the psyche the way fast food bypasses hunger. It satisfies the instinct without giving you a meal of actual nutritious value . There is stimulation, but no digestion. Desire is reduced to a loop, before it has time to organize into anything of value. A primitive logic dressed up as liberation: want, click, cum, forget.

Crucially, porn eliminates the most destabilizing feature of desire: the other person. There is no hesitation, no refusal, no misalignment of wanting. No one can change their mind. No one can register disappointment or boredom in real time. Desire is stripped of reciprocity. Porn is intimacy without the inconvenience of another person. And that, more than pleasure, is why it proliferates.

EROTICISM = THREAT

Eroticism does not scale. It resists optimization. It cannot be made efficient without ceasing to be itself. Where porn goes pedal to the metal, eroticism delays. Where porn resolves, eroticism suspends. It introduces friction where the system prefers flow.

Eroticism is threatening because it does not conclude on command. It stretches time instead of collapsing it. It lingers in the body and reorganizes attention. It does not deliver a product; it produces a state. One that is unstable, difficult to narrate and impossible to fully control.

This is why eroticism has always been closer to danger than to pleasure. It implicates the self. It exposes preference, fantasy, power, dependency. It asks questions that cannot be dismissed: Why this? Why now? Why you? Desire, in its erotic form, does not remain abstract. It points. It selects. It risks being wrong.

Porn eliminates this risk. Eroticism insists on it.

To be erotic is not simply to be aroused. If that’s what you still think I’m afraid you haven’t been paying attention. It is to be aware of oneself wanting. To feel anticipation without anesthesia. To tolerate the possibility of misalignment, refusal or humiliation. To remain present while desire is unresolved. This is precisely what contemporary culture has lost the patience (and quite frankly the stomach) for.

Eroticism also requires another person in full. Not as an object, not as a function, but as a variable. Someone who can hesitate. Someone who can withhold. Someone whose desire may not mirror yours. That unpredictability is not a flaw. It is the condition.

This is why eroticism feels destabilizing rather than comforting. It threatens the fantasy of self-sufficiency. It interrupts the illusion that desire can be consumed without any consequence. It introduces the possibility that wanting might change you. Your attachments, your self-concept, your future. And change, unlike arousal, cannot be undone with a click.

Porn teaches the body to demand. Eroticism teaches it to wait. One preserves the self. The other risks rearranging it.

BY THE WAY

I am not outside this. I know the impulse to end things the moment they start to hover. To make desire explicit so it stops watching me. To force it into clarity before it has the chance to ask for anything I can’t give without changing shape. Resolution is efficient. Ambiguity is not. But although efficiency has become muscle memory, ambiguity is far more enticing to me.

This is not a confession. It’s a pattern. One I recognize everywhere.

Eroticism does not announce itself as pleasure. It arrives as a disturbance. It stretches moments past their usefulness. It refuses to hurry. It doesn’t climax on cue. It waits. It watches. It lingers in the body long after the body would prefer to be done with it.

Porn ends things. Eroticism opens them.

That’s the real difference. Not morality, not taste, not how much skin is shown. Porn concludes. Eroticism destabilizes. Porn offers relief. Eroticism introduces risk. The risk that wanting something might reorganize you. That it might follow you out of the room. That it might attach itself to memory, to image, to art, to the way you look at the world afterward.

This is why eroticism has never belonged comfortably to mass culture. It doesn’t behave. It doesn’t optimize or scale. It resists being turned into content.

Think of the way desire moves in Eyes Wide Shut: masked, delayed, ritualized, never consumable. Sex isn’t the point. Power is. Looking is. Being implicated as a viewer is. It feels voyeuristic. The film doesn’t arouse so much as it unsettles. You leave it altered, unsure what exactly happened, only that something did.

That’s eroticism.

Or the way bodies exist in Helmut Newton’s images: not available, not warm, not reassuring. Charged with hierarchy. With danger. With the uncomfortable awareness that looking is not neutral. Never was. Nothing invites you in gently. You are either implicated or excluded.

Or the way Nan Goldin photographs intimacy: bruised, exposed, unprotected. Desire tangled with dependency and love and damage. There is no payoff. No clean resolution. Just residue. The kind that stays with you longer than you’d like.

This is exactly what pornographic logic cannot tolerate.

Because porn demands closure. It demands that images end where they begin. That nothing leak. That nothing follow you. That desire remain contained, harmless, personal. Not structural, never destabilizing and definitely not meaningful.

Erotic art does the opposite. It refuses to let desire remain private. It drags it into consciousness. It forces the viewer to notice themselves noticing. To confront what attracts them, unsettles them, frightens them, excites them — and why.

This is why a culture that is overexposed to porn does not become “freer”. It becomes flatter. Louder images. Safer sensations. Less capacity for tension. Less patience for ambiguity. Less tolerance for work that doesn’t immediately explain itself or resolve.

We haven’t lost eroticism because we’ve become too sexual. We’ve lost it because we’ve become too afraid of being changed by what we feel.

Porn asks nothing. Eroticism asks everything.

And that is why it is disappearing.

Text by Bengisuedotcom

if you want to actually read about fashion (not just consume aesthetics), start with writers who treat it as culture, philosophy, politics and psychology. not as product.

a lot of the literature that inspires my writing or gets me going isn’t even inherently fashion theory at all.

here are some recs though:)

Roland Barthes – The Fashion System (annoying, dense, brilliant. teaches you to think about clothing as language)

Susan Sontag – not “fashion” but essential to understanding image, aesthetics, performance and seriousness (love her essays and notes on camp!!)

Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation Desire systems, illusion, luxury as fantasy. explains fashion’s hallucination. more philosophy, less fashion but still a great reference.

and i have so many other amazing writers and books up my sleeve but they are not directly fashion theory. so i will leave it at that.

to get into i also recommend platforms and publications like 032c, pin-up, i-D and AnOther (especially archive) and going into your local magazine store and see what speaks to you. designers are also lovely to read. not just to look at;)

my only real advice: don’t read fashion like a shopping catalogue. read it like you’re trying to understand a civilisation through its clothes. fashion is messy, political, erotic, ritualistic, manipulative, healing, destructive. start where it hurts, not where it flatters.

WHY HAVING A BOYFRIEND IS BAD PR

VOGUE ASKED THE RIGHT QUESTION... BUT COMPLETELY LOST THE PLOT

The Vogue headline asked, “Is having a boyfriend embarrassing?” and the internet immediately combusted.

Men called it misandry. Women called it unhinged. But the only thing truly shocking was how defensive everyone got over such a simple observation.

I’ve been saying it for years: a boyfriend doesn’t suit my image.

When I used to say that, people thought I meant it ironically - as if I were just playing into the aloof, unbothered archetype. But what I really meant was strategic. Boyfriends are a liability. No matter how feminist, educated or emotionally literate he is, at some point he will threaten the (brand) value of the woman next to him.

Cheating, micro-cheating, a bad outfit, a worse opinion, emotional laziness - the list is endless. Something will inevitably crack the illusion.

The Vogue article, for all its viral potential, missed this point entirely. The title was the article. There was no analysis of optics, no recognition of the quiet truth women have always known: a girlfriend almost always increases a man’s aura. A boyfriend almost always decreases a woman’s.

It’s not personal. It’s statistical.

THE OUTRAGE WAS THE POINT

What fascinated me most was the outrage itself. Men were offended by the insinuation that they could be embarrassing, which is precisely why they are. The defensiveness confirmed the hypothesis.

Meanwhile, women scrambled to perform moral distance - posting photos of their partners with captions like “Not my boyfriend though!” or “Actually, mine’s an exception.” The eagerness to prove that their boyfriend isn’t that kind of boyfriend only reinforced the idea that such a category exists.

The boyfriend is not embarrassing because he exists. He’s embarrassing because the cultural expectation of him hasn’t evolved.

For men, a girlfriend is an asset: a status marker, a social upgrade, a PR campaign in human form. For women, a boyfriend is a potential scandal. He can tank your image in one post, one rumor, one lazy outfit at a gallery opening.

THE BOYFRIEND LIABILITY CLAUSE

If we were to draft a contract, the boyfriend would come with a liability disclaimer.

Moral liability: cheating, hypocrisy, fake feminism, “I respect women” energy that expires the moment he feels inferior.

Aesthetic liability: bad posture, H&M basics, the inexplicable fear of tailoring.

Intellectual liability: the refusal to read, to evolve, to question.

Social liability: the off-hand joke, the half-baked opinion, the inability to behave in public without revealing his inner Reddit thread.

Every woman with a public-facing image knows the calculus: your partner becomes part of your aesthetic output. His presence edits your narrative: his taste, his body language, even his silence online (refusing to post you etc.).

And in a culture where aura is capital, that’s not romantic paranoia. It’s brand management.

THE FEMINIST OPTICS OF EMBARASSMENT

When I say boyfriends are liabilities, it’s not a manifesto against love. It’s a critique of optics.

For decades, women were told that having a man validated them. That his interest was proof of desirability. Today, that logic has reversed: being associated with the wrong man can destroy your aura faster than a scandal ever could.

To reject a boyfriend, or even the idea of one, isn’t cynicism: it’s self-preservation. The internet doesn’t just archive mistakes; it aestheticizes them. If your partner cheats, lies, dresses badly or posts something tone-deaf, you don’t just experience betrayal - you experience brand contamination. There are influencers who have been canceled over their boyfriends (Hannah Kae) and lost face (Halley Kate) over their boyfriend’s behavior. 

And yet, the cultural response is always to accuse women of being shallow for caring about appearances. As if the appearance of a man hasn’t always been our risk to manage.

LOVE IN THE AGE OF OPTICS

Sometimes I wonder if the fear of embarrassment has replaced the fear of loneliness. If being single now feels safer than risking association.

When I see celebrity couples, I don’t think “cute.” I think risk assessment. There are exceptions, of course: rare pairings where the man elevates the woman. But more often, we get the Bella Hadid / The Weeknd dynamic: she glows, he broods and the internet can’t decide if it’s chemistry or contrast.

The reality is, dating a man with taste, intelligence and emotional literacy shouldn’t feel like winning the lottery - and yet it does. Which tells us everything about the state of heterosexual relationships.

AESTHETIC, NOT EMOTIONAL

I’m not arguing that men are inherently lesser. I’m saying that in the cultural marketplace of perception, the average boyfriend does not add value.

The most common defense I hear is, “But I’m not like other guys.” “Not all men though!”

And maybe he isn’t. But statistically speaking, he will still commit one of the following image crimes:

Like his ex’s photo from 2019.

Argue about feminism with a tone of weary tolerance.

Forget your birthday but remember the release date of a video game.

Wear sneakers that look like orthopedic devices.

In short: even the good ones embarrass us eventually.

THE PR OF DESIRE

The real question isn’t whether having a boyfriend is embarrassing. It’s why we’re still shocked that it can be.

In an era where identity is a visual asset, romance has become a collaboration agreement. The “boyfriend reveal” is no longer a personal milestone; it’s a press release. We soft-launch men like new collections, hoping they won’t tank after the first drop.

When a woman says a boyfriend doesn’t suit my image, what she really means is: I’ve spent years curating an aesthetic, a life, an aura - why risk it on someone who might post minion memes?

It’s not cruelty. It’s curation.

AURA AS AN ASSET

To be clear, I believe in love. I just don’t believe in risking my image for it.

If men weren’t such volatile PR assets, we wouldn’t have to treat dating like crisis management. But here we are, auditing their playlists, their politics, their shoes - all before the first kiss.

The irony is that men often mock this vigilance, calling it superficial. But what’s more superficial than expecting women to absorb the social cost of their mistakes?

THE FINAL CALCULATION

Maybe the point isn’t that boyfriends are embarrassing. Maybe it’s that the bar for male impressiveness has collapsed under the weight of female competence.

We built our own taste, style, aura, intelligence. We became our own brands. And now we’re supposed to hand that over to someone who thinks The Barbie Movie was about a “plastic doll with big boobies” to quote Jo Koy at the Golden Globes?

Love is not dead. It’s just due for rebranding.

In 2025, aura is an asset.

And sometimes, the most radical act of self-respect is admitting that having a boyfriend is simply bad PR.

HEAVENLY BODIES, HOLLOW FAITH

the unholy collision of belief and aesthetics

I. INTRODUCTION

Fashion has always existed in dialogue with belief. Long before it was an industry, it was a language of devotion - the visual grammar through which faith projected onto the body. Byzantine mosaics, clerical robes and sumptuary laws positioned clothing as both a spiritual and social tools: to clothe oneself was to perform order, piety and submission. The Church did not merely influence aesthetics, it authored them.

In contemporary fashion, however, the sacred has been recontextualized as surface. What once signified worship now operates as atmosphere. The veil, the cassock, the rosary - formerly objects of theological gravity - have become recurring motifs across couture and subcultural dress codes. Alexander McQueen’s rosary heels, Dolce & Gabbana’s baroque Madonnas and Rick Owens’ monastic silhouettes all appropriate religious iconography not as expression of belief, but as an aesthetic technology of transcendence. Faith becomes form, emptied of doctrine yet charged with symbolic weight.

This phenomenon extends beyond the atelier. On social media, “Catholic-core” and its (quite frankly very) derivative micro-trends transform religious motifs into stylistic tokens - gestures toward moral or spiritual depth, detached from their original cosmologies. What emerges is a visual theology of simulation: a culture that borrows sanctity as aesthetic currency.

The modern wardrobe no longer communicates belief; it performs the memory of belief. Fashion’s engagement with religion thus reveals a broader cultural condition: one in which transcendence survives not through faith, but through form.

In other words: fashion now does not appear resurrect God; it rebrands Him.

II. RELIGION AS THE ORIGINAL STYLISTIC SYSTEM

Before fashion became a matter of taste, it was a matter of theology. Across medieval and early modern Europe, the Church operated as both moral and aesthetic regulator, embedding hierarchy directly into cloth. Dress functioned not as self-expression, but as visible submission to divine and social order. In Byzantium, the imperial wardrobe mirrored the iconography of the mosaics: gold thread and precious stones were not decorative excess but manifestations of celestial hierarchy on earth. The body itself became a moving reliquary, enveloped in sanctioned splendor.

Throughout the Middle Ages, sumptuary laws extended this theology of appearance into civic governance. Color, textile and silhouette were established to preserve moral order: scarlet and gold reserved for the aristocracy, coarse wool for the devout, black for clerics. The Church’s moral cosmology thus produced a color code system that defined virtue through visibility. The result was a proto-fashion infrastructure, where fabric mediated salvation as well as status at the same time.

The liturgical wardrobe codified this logic further. The chasuble, the cope, the alb - all garments designed not for comfort or individuality, but for symbolic function. Each fold and layer communicated hierarchy, chastity, humility. Even the act of dressing was ritualized: a slow choreography of sanctification that blurred the line between costume and consecration. What modern fashion calls “styling” was once a liturgy of fabric.

By the time early couturiers such as Cristóbal Balenciaga emerged, this visual theology had already become embedded in Western aesthetics. Balenciaga’s sculptural black gowns, directly referencing the Spanish mantilla and clerical vestments of his Catholic upbringing, demonstrate how religiously motivated restraint could evolve into modern elegance. The silhouette’s kind of abstinence was less a rejection of ornament than a continuation of sacred discipline: an inheritance of the Church’s obsession with form as morality.

Religious structures thus established the essential framework of fashion: hierarchy, codification, ritual. Even the industry’s vocabulary that we know today (collection, season, procession) echoes churchly origins. Before the runway, there was the nave; before the stylist, the sacrist. To understand fashion’s fixation on transcendence, one must first acknowledge that its earliest vocabulary was written in the language of faith.

III. HIGH FASHION’S SACRED IMAGE ECONOMY

If religion authored the visual grammar of hierarchy, high fashion perfected its spectacle. In the 20th and 21st centuries, couture houses began to appropriate religious iconography not to communicate belief, but to manufacture aura.What the Church once achieved through ritual and fear, fashion now achieves through production value and desire. The sacred is no longer experienced: it is directed.

Alexander McQueen remains the most explicit architect of this visual theology. His runway shows operated as liturgies of resurrection, martyrdom and transcendence. In The Widows of Culloden (A/W 2006), holographic spirits and funereal veils transformed grief into aesthetic spectacle. The staging mirrored a requiem mass: slow and ceremonial and punctuated by revelation. McQueen’s use of cruciform structures and religious ornamentation recoded suffering as beauty, performing salvation through craftsmanship. He did not reference God; he reconstructed the emotional choreography of faith.

Dolce & Gabbana pursued a different form of sanctification: one rooted in surface and sensuality. Their collections of the 2010s, especially those inspired by Sicilian Catholicism, reproduced the Byzantine mosaics of Monreale Cathedral onto corseted bodices and brocade gowns. Madonnas became prints; golden mosaic became sequins. The garments appeared devotional but operated as simulacra: iconography without icon. Their message was less theological than territorial: Catholicism repackaged as Mediterranean identity, luxury nationalism disguised as holiness and faith.

At the opposite pole stands Tom Ford’s Gucci of the late 1990s, where the sacred became profane. Crucifix jewelry, leather cassocks and black silk shirts mimicked a religious kind of simplicity while embedding it in an erotic economy. Ford’s work inverted the Church’s semiotics: chastity became performance, desire became doctrine. The body, once concealed by faith, was now elevated by fashion as the new altar.

Together, these designers demonstrate how couture transforms religious aesthetics into a kind of symbolic currency. The veil, the cross, the procession are no longer instruments of moral discipline but become techniques for commanding attention and producing affect. High fashion uses faith as an atmospheric device, like a shortcut to transcendence. Each collection promises what religion once offered: an encounter with the sublime, orchestrated this time by marketing departments and creative directors.

Fashion does not reject the sacred; it professionalizes it.

IV. RITUAL WITHOUT RELIGION: RICK OWENS AND THE AESTHETICS OF DEVOTION

Where McQueen staged miracles and Dolce & Gabbana printed Madonnas, Rick Owens constructs a chapel. His work does not quote religion; it inhabits its architecture. Each collection operates like a liturgy, a slow ritual of ascetic repetition. The runway is not a stage but a nave, the audience not spectators but congregation.

Owens’s visual language (columnar silhouettes, sculptural drapery and monochromatic color palettes) recalls the structural gravity of clerical vestments. The garments are not decorative; they function as a reminder of ritual, designed to discipline the body rather than embellish it. Leather, jersey and felt become monastic materials: protective, burdened, ascetic. To wear Rick Owens is to submit to form.

His shows often unfold with the deliberate pace of procession: low-frequency soundscapes echoing Gregorian chant, models moving as if bound by a collective vow. There is no climax, no seduction, no narrative resolution, only endurance. In this sense, Owens’ fashion performs what theologians once called anamnesis: the act of making the sacred present through repetition.

Yet Owens’ devotion is entirely secular. His faith lies in form, not doctrine. By appropriating the choreography of ritual(posture, uniformity, minimalism) he achieves the gravity of belief without the burden of belief itself. The spectacle becomes prayerful, almost punitive. His universe evokes a spirituality of exhaustion, where transcendence emerges through discipline rather than ecstasy.

In contrast to McQueen’s baroque martyrdom, Owens offers a modern asceticism: the designer as high priest of control (also makes sense considering he has established a cult like following). His collections are not sermons but exercises in restraint-proof that the sublime can be engineered. What appears spiritual is, in fact, architectural: a cathedral of proportions, draped in silence and smoke.

Owens’ practice thus represents fashion’s ultimate theological evolution: the translation of faith into form. The sacred becomes procedural: a ritual of making and wearing. In his universe, belief is obsolete; the act of construction is the prayer.

V. ALGORITHMIC SACRAMENTS: THE MICROTREND AS FAITH SIMULATION

If haute couture re-engineered the sacred into spectacle, social media has further reduced it to mood. The “Catholic-core” aesthetic (alongside its variants, “nun-core,” “angel-core” and “heavenly-girl”) marks religion’s final mutation into an algorithmic accessory. What once required conviction now demands only curation. A very cheap form of curation at that. 

These microtrends operate through simulation rather than belief. Rosaries, crucifixes and lace veils appear not as signs of devotion but as shorthand for melancholy, irony or eroticized innocence. The religious signifier circulates without its signified, detached from theology and reabsorbed by the visual economy of self-presentation. On TikTok and Pinterest, faith becomes filter: a device for generating moodboards of moral ambiguity: girls draped in sheer veils, candlelight diffused through VHS grain, captions invoking sin and salvation with equal detachment.

What distinguishes this from earlier appropriations is not irreverence but scale. Platforms transform symbolic language into templates; the sacred becomes infinitely reproducible thus endlessly shareable. The aura that McQueen and Owens cultivated through ritual and scarcity is here flattened by replication. The devotional object becomes digital debris: a rosary emoji, a crucifix worn for vibes, a Virgin Mary print resized for engagement ratios.

This collapse of meaning mirrors the broader commodification of sincerity within contemporary culture. In a landscape saturated by performance, faith survives only as affect: an aesthetic of yearning for moral coherence. The “Catholic-core” participant does not seek transcendence; they simulate the mood of having once sought it. The result is a culture that wears reverence as costume, mistaking visual solemnity for spiritual depth.

In this sense, microtrends complete fashion’s theological cycle: from belief to branding to content. The Church once mediated salvation through ritual; the algorithm now mediates validation through imagery. Both reward visibility, obedience and replication. Both rely on faith: one in God, the other in the feed.

VI. THE CHURCH OF IMAGE

Fashion has never abandoned religion; it has simply restructured it. What began as devotion became design and what began as ritual became repetition. Across centuries, the same mechanisms persist: hierarchy, choreography, transcendence through spectacle. The altar turned into a runway; the procession into a season.

Contemporary fashion does not pray: it performs. It has learned that the sacred can be manufactured, that aura can be scaled, that reverence can be replicated through form. Designers such as McQueen, Owens and Ford understood what the Church once mastered: that the body can be both stage and scripture, that beauty and suffering share a ritualistic intimacy. The modern believer is no longer kneeling before God, but before the mirror or the screen.

The digital age has completed this transfiguration. Platforms operate as new cathedrals, interfaces as confessionals. Faith itself has been outsourced to aesthetics: the yearning for transcendence persists, but only as a visual impulse. To post is to pray; to dress is to declare belief in visibility.

Yet beneath the irony lies a genuine hunger. The recurrence of religious imagery - across couture, subculture and content - reveals not mockery but absence. These borrowed symbols attempt to re-enchant a violated world. Fashion’s obsession with the divine is not faithless: it is faith deprived. What we call “style” often conceals a metaphysical ache: a desire for order, meaning, ritual.

In this sense, fashion is not religion’s successor but its residue. It inherits the structure without the salvation. The sacred survives as silhouette, the sermon as slogan, the miracle as marketing campaign. What was once revelation now appears as release drop.

diagnosing a collective psychosis called nostalgia™

Nostalgia is the most successful rebrand of the century - a feeling turned into a franchise. But before it became an actual trend I would think of the Pusha T song with the same title. Then, after thinking about it a bit more of the Hannah Montana, the good Disney Channel years, when Miley still wore bootcut jeans and low-saturation filters didn’t exist yet. I think of my older cousin’s video games and his playstation 2 (Rainbow Six, Silent Hill) and the vague sense that everything was both too adult and too simple. I think of Chief Keef on cracked iPhone screens, of early A$AP Rocky Tumblr edits, of grainy gifs and yes the American Apparel campaigns. Even 2016 feels nostalgic now, which is absurd, but that’s the point: time collapses faster than it passes. The archive refreshes itself every few months.

Nostalgia used to feel private. Something that sneaked up on you in the middle of a song or a smell, not something you scrolled through. Then came King Kylie - not the 2015 version, but her recent attempt to resurrect it. That was the moment nostalgia ate itself. What once felt chaotic and accidental now feels premeditated and optimized for engagement. The original King Kylie era had its own messy kind of authenticity. Problematic? Yes, drenched in cultural appropriation, but still raw in its amateur excess. The reboot, though, is sterilized, PR-approved and self-conscious. It’s nostalgia as necromancy: reanimating a version of herself that the internet already mourned. That’s when I realized: when we revive what once felt alive, it rarely survives the rebrand. 

Fashion, of course, gave it language - and a business model. Miu Miu’s micro-skirts, Marc Jacobs’ Heaven line, Blumarine’s glittered y2k: all proof that nostalgia isn’t cyclical anymore, it’s serialized. The archive became the moodboard, the moodboard became the product. Every season pretends to discover what we’ve already exhausted. It’s not revival; it’s replication. Fashion doesn’t reference the past: it recycles its ghost. What was once history turned into inventory and now into content.

The algorithm became the new creative director. It doesn’t feel; it recognizes. It sees a shape, a palette, a face that performed well last season and resurrects it. The algorithm doesn’t crave the past: it just monetizes your craving for it. Meanwhile, Gen Z became the unpaid marketing team, mood-boarding a collective hallucination of a time most of them never lived through. Their nostalgia isn’t chronological; it’s curatorial. They don’t remember the 2000s: they remember how remembering the 2000s looks on TikTok. And honestly: I think they remember the feeling associated with it. The simpler time. When they were little and not confronted with the burden of knowing and understanding just yet. 

But at some point, nostalgia crossed over from emotion to infrastructure. It stopped being a feeling and became a framework. Every brand now sells before. The campaign copy reads like obituaries for futures that never arrived: “timeless,” “vintage,” “archival,” “classic reissue.” Luxury became the art of exhumation. We are living through aesthetic necrophilia: the erotic charge of reanimating what’s already been declared dead.

But maybe that’s the only thing left to desire: something that can’t reject us. The past doesn’t ghost you. The past doesn’t leave you on read. It’s perfectly preserved and permanently unavailable: an ideal lover. A paradox that feels safer than anything alive. No wonder we keep dressing like memories; it’s the only way to flirt with something that won’t disappear.

Nostalgia, for me, isn’t about reliving the past but rewriting its aesthetics. It’s a quiet act of control: curation masquerading as emotion. We restyle old imagery not just to revisit who we were, but to refine how it looks now. The archive becomes an editing suite: color-grading the past until it flatters us. Maybe that’s what survival looks like in our era - post-production.

But there’s a darker undercurrent to all this reenactment. We say we miss “simpler times,” but what we’re really missing is the illusion of simplicity: the years before knowing became unbearable. Childhood was just the beta version of denial. And yet, even knowing this, I still long for it. Maybe that’s the secret engine of nostalgia™: it lets you grieve safely, inside a moodboard.

Personal nostalgia is messy. It arrives unannounced and leaves you hollow. Branded nostalgia is clean, predictable and optimized for engagement. It’s melancholy with shipping options. We used to remember because we wanted to feel; now we remember because we want to be perceived as people who feel.

Fashion mirrors that perfectly. The “archival” obsession isn’t about reverence for craft: it’s about proof of consciousness. Wearing a Helmut Lang reference says I understand context. It’s a flex of intellect disguised as sentiment. Even the resurgence of indie sleaze isn’t rebellion: it’s documentation. We’re not reviving it; we’re archiving it in real time.

There’s something tragic in that, but also human. We aestheticize memory because it’s the only permanence left. In a culture allergic to stillness, nostalgia gives us the illusion of pause. The irony is that the more we chase it, the further it runs. We flatten it, package it, sell it, until it stops meaning anything at all. But still we scroll. Still we buy. Still we post our ghosts.

Maybe that’s okay. Maybe nostalgia isn’t supposed to heal us. Maybe it just reminds us that we once felt alive enough to miss something.

I used to think nostalgia was proof of stagnation - a kind of refusal to move forward. Now I think it’s a language for grief we haven’t yet learned to name. We romanticize what hurt us because it’s the only way to forgive it. We turn old wounds into aesthetic direction because that’s the only way to look at them.

And maybe that’s what keeps me hopeful: that behind all the filters, behind the thrifted Y2K tees and grainy flash photography, there’s still something real trying to surface. Maybe the brand isn’t the enemy; maybe it’s just a mirror, reflecting how desperate we are to find beauty in what’s already gone.

RENDER ME HUMAN: FASHION'S PLAYSTATION 2 ERA

The PlayStation 2 didn’t just change gaming; it changed what reality looked like. Its worlds were half-rendered, endlessly loading, drenched in the melancholy blue of a screen trying to remember what light feels like. Every face shimmered a few pixels away from human. Around the same time, fashion was doing the same thing. Tom Ford’s vinyl YSL bodies, McQueen’s chrome corsets, Prada’s blue-toned campaigns-all existed in that same synthetic frame, where skin looked uploaded and desire was refracted through plastic. The early 2000s didn’t dream of realism; it dreamed of simulation. It was a moment when both the console and the catwalk rehearsed humanity rather than embodied it, testing how far surface alone could feel alive.

The Visual Logic of the Machine

The PS2’s worlds were drenched in a kind of synthetic melancholy-a haze that came not from intention, but from at the time technical limitation. Surfaces shimmered without precision; shadows floated, detached from their bodies. Especially Silent Hill 2 comes to mind. This was an aesthetic born of computational inadequacy that paradoxically felt emotional. The system’s inability to render detail produced atmosphere. The blur became the mood.

Fashion, in the same years, was cultivating a parallel language. Look at Helmut Lang’s metallic nylons, Raf Simons’ AW99 blur photography or Mert Alas’ & Marcus Piggot’s early editorials where skin was airbrushed to the edge of unreality. Everything was glossy, semi-transparent, and alien, less flesh than interface. The PS2 and fashion magazines of that era shared the same visual ontology: light without source, texture without tactility, the simulation of heat.

Where the PS2 offered low-res landscapes, fashion offered high-gloss bodies. Both were chasing a vision of perfection that technology could almost-but not quite-deliver. The result was a strange, tender distortion: beauty that trembled under its own construction.

II. The Body as Console

The human form in the early 2000s was no longer treated as organic-it was modular. Bodies were upgradable, editable, sharpened at the edges. Fashion was entering the era of the synthetic body: plastic surgery as accessory, abs as architecture, the face as glossy hardware. What the PlayStation 2 did to its characters-rigid joints, rubbery skin, that uncanny lag between gesture and response-fashion did to its models.

Runways began to look like cutscenes: bodies moving with precision, not emotion. Garments gleamed like rendered armor: chrome, latex, tech nylon, reflecting the blue-tinted light of a world that had just discovered the idea of “digital.” It was as if we were dressing to match our machines. The skin was no longer a limit but an interface; the body no longer private but programmable.

This was the birth of the modded self. The PS2 let players customize avatars, rewrite movement, restart entirely. Fashion mirrored that psychology through aesthetics of control: corsetry reimagined as sculptural constraint, heels as extensions of the body’s operating system. The fantasy wasn’t about transformation anymore: it was about optimization.

III. The Texture of Unrealism

Every material choice from that era seemed designed to remind you that it wasn’t real. Plastic was the new silk; sheen replaced depth; reflections replaced emotion. But instead of alienating us, this artificiality felt strangely intimate. There was something tender about the smoothness, something fragile in the perfection, like a machine trying to understand desire.

In PS2 games, light never quite landed; it hovered. Characters glowed faintly, as if illuminated from within. In fashion imagery, the same internal luminescence existed: models appearing backlit by their own aura, skin rendered almost translucent and clothes catching light as if reality had been rendered through gel. This wasn’t about futurism; it was about artificial empathy. The machine was learning to feel and we were teaching it through gloss.

The tactile realism of the ‘90s  (denim, grit, skin texture) gave way to a new sensibility: softness without warmth. The world became slick, like everything had just been polished for the first time. PS2 graphics, mirrored sunglasses, laminated magazine covers and patent leather all shared a single emotional tone: the quiet ache of something almost perfect.

IV. The Sound of the Future That Never Arrived

The PS2 didn’t greet you with melody; it greeted you with reverberation. That ambient humming became a kind of emotional architecture. It was the sound of a world loading, forever unfinished. In those few seconds before a game began, the console created a cathedral of delay: pure potential suspended in blue light.

Fashion’s soundscape of the early 2000s mirrored that same liminal futurism. Runway shows opened with synthetic breathing, echoing heartbeats, mechanical rhythms that suggested life without origin. The early Dior and Gucci soundtracks hummed like ventilation systems in luxury spacecrafts. Even ad campaigns adopted this tonality: whispering voices, metallic reverbs, glitching percussion. It was optimism without melody, the sound of desire stripped of narrative.

These frequencies weren’t accidental; they were the emotional counterpart to the PS2’s metallic visuality. Both industries were obsessed with the sonic texture of anticipation: the hum before connection, the silence before data. You could call it the noise of modernity before it became content. 

The 2000s imagined progress as something quiet, glowing, and slightly broken. We were listening to the future booting up - and it never quite finished loading.

V. The Afterlife of the Glitch

We chased resolution and lost the feeling. The world finally rendered in 4K, fabrics now simulate physics in real time and yet everything feels flat. What the PS2 and the fashion of that era understood (by accident or intuition) was that imperfection was a form of intimacy. Those blurred textures, those misaligned shadows, the faint lag between input and reaction: each one reminded us that someone, somewhere, was behind the machine.

Today, fashion tries to resurrect that tension under new names: lo-fi, Y2K revival, AI grunge. We filter clarity to bring back the blur, add grain to images that never had it, fake depth in an algorithmic world that refuses to produce any naturally. But these are simulations of simulations, nostalgia without a wound. The original glitch wasn’t an effect; it was the evidence of limitation - a trace of human breath caught inside code.

On TikTok, in campaigns, even in runway design, the unfinished is suddenly luxury again. Error becomes exclusivity, delay becomes aesthetic. It’s as if culture wants to feel handmade once more, to prove there’s still latency-still something unoptimized, something human.

VI. Epilogue: Ghosts in High Definition

In the age of AI, everything is rendered instantly and perfectly - and that perfection is precisely what estranges us. Machines no longer stutter, images no longer load; everything appears, frictionless and total. Yet something crucial disappears in that instant arrival: the aura of becoming. The PS2 world, with its delays and half-rendered bodies, reminded us that technology once carried humility - it revealed its struggle to imitate life.

Fashion now faces the same dilemma as image generation: how to preserve the residue of the human hand when the machine can simulate every fold, every shimmer, every imperfection. What we’re really missing isn’t nostalgia - it’s error. The old interfaces and their textures of hesitation carried emotional proof that someone was on the other side of the screen.