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WELCOME TO
Fashion Through
The Looking GLass
Fashion Through The Looking Glass is an interactive, location-based, room-scale augmented reality experience, exploring digital alternatives for the fast fashion industry. Is cyberspace the solution to the environmental and human rights crises caused by this industry? Or are other, more radical solutions needed than a mere transferring of unsustainable attitudes?
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Project
The fast fashion industry poses some of the biggest environmental and ethical challenges of our time, due to extensive resource exploitation, water consumption, labour malpractices, and other major concerns. However, there is a fundamental difference of opinion within this industry on what the future of sustainable fashion should look like: a techno-chic world where digital fashion, virtual fittings, and techno-fixes, such as 3D printed garments, come to the fore; or a slow-paced, local, artisanal approach to fashion production that steers away from technological advancements. Through the use of augmented reality, a medium that combines the virtual and physical, technological and artisanal, we hope to show that ahead lies hybrid futures where such positions will inevitably coexist and intertwine as the fashion industry continues to evolve. Furthermore, being the new generation of immersive artists, we demonstrating an exciting use case of Vuforia's cutting-edge Area Targets technology for interactive installation art.
Screen Recording
As the project, and consequently the application, is location-based, we have embedded a screen recording of the piece as you would experience it in the Reading Room at Arnolfini, Bristol.
Avatars
To create this experience we tell the story through the different segments.....
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We make the avatar heads tell the stories of the impact of fast fashion and over consumtion.
Sewing Machine
Worker conditions
“93% of brands surveyed by the Fashion Checker aren’t paying garment workers a living wage” (Fashion Checker, 2020)
Technology
AI & SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTS
"80% of users follow at least one business on this platform. Thus, Instagram users like messages from brands more than users of other social media platforms" (GettingGrowth.com 2020)
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AI adverts are determining how we present our digital identities and impacting on how we want to alter our physical appearance.
Environment
Landfill
“The average American throws away around 81 pounds of clothing yearly” (Saturday Evening Post, 2018)
World
Co2 Emmisons
“The fashion industry is responsible for 8% of carbon emissions” (UN Environment, 2019)
Water
water consumption
“Fast fashion brands use open-loop production cycles that pollute water and land” (The New York Times, 2019)
User
trapped
We believe that the general population is trapped in a cycle of blind mass consumption and ecocide.
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Our user head is trapped and gagged within this capitalist hellscape.
Clothes
Accesories
Collaborators
To create our experience we worked with fashion designers Angel Brains & Empty Brains who rework clothes to make new garments.
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Empty Brains
WORLDWIDE
ANGEL BRAINS, founded and run by Apple Blossom Cousins Scovell, is a kawaii-punk-queer-anime fantasy, heavily inspired by Harajuku fashion subcultures. Angel Brains celebrates wearing fashion for yourself and decorating your body in a way that makes you happy and comfortable. Angel Brains serves us a healthy mix of femme, cutesy vibrance and all the badass energy you desire. Angel Brains provides a slow fashion, sustainable option to alt clothing for those who wish dress cute, guilt-free.
Empty Brains is a radical punk inspired label that was established in response to the current political and environmental crisis by Jay Sebastian Williams. It has been producing out of Bristol for nearly 3 years alongside completing my Fashion Degree. After sourcing deadstock pieces, garments are de and re- constructed, and embellished through processes of print, embroidery, and patchwork. Underpinned by a dogmatic approach to sustainability and an appreciation of old school punk aesthetics. Empty Brains is just as much an activist art project as a brand. The aim is to use clothing as a platform to discuss important social, environmental, and political issues.
Meet The Creators
Mitchell Wilson
After diving into the world of ethnographic documentary filmmaking, I have now entered the immersive world to explore my passion for telling stories in more intimate and creative ways. Currently, I am most interested in the use of augmented reality as a novel experiential medium for interactive installation art. Philosophically, I am interested in how AR activates the event potential of installation/gallery spaces, creating a unique environment for interacting with non-fiction subject matter, as well as with other users, who are experiencing their own unique reality in response to both virtual and physical cues.
Lilly Parr
As a creative technologist I enjoy innovating new ways for media to be consumed and bring stories to life through the use of AR,VR and other immersive technology. I enjoy creating these virtual environments which can host a plethora of information, media and beyond. I'm interesting in recreating the way we exhibit but digitally. designing these spaces has allowed me to see how some of the leading industries can implement these mediums but do it just because its fun and exciting, not because its the best way to display their story. With the use of AR in the way we have created, there can multiple exhibits of different genres happening within the same space which i find fascinating, the fact people can go to the space but have completely different experiences.
