#chris cunningham

The console gaming and cellphone print ad campaigns from the late 1990s and early 2000s heavily utilised a "sex sells" philosophy, with risqué humour and shock value on full display.

Tech and media brands leveraged innuendo and sexual tension to target a predominantly young male demographic, leaning into hypersexual, provocative, and body-horror imagery.

A lot of these advertising campaigns were selling identity and belonging, rebellion, sexual desire and aspiration just as much as the physical PlayStations and Motorola flip phones.

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.

All Is Full Of Love (1998)