Designer Aleksandra Blinova says screens have made designers lose touch with themselves. She favours artisanal techniques for her clothes. “When garments are mass-produced by machines for companies like H&M or Zara, they all look the same,” she says. “It creates this homogenised crowd with no face. Machines are implementing this idea of normality and similarity.” For her, one-off dresses made with the human hand offer a sense of individuality and meaning that cannot be replicated.
Aleksandra’s work takes time to make, with each seam carefully hand-stitched. “When I’m stitching with my hands, I feel that I’m in a meditative state,” she says, “I feel more aware of my surroundings and the tension of the thread. I feel more free and liberated.”
For other designers, screens do the opposite, giving rise to creative freedom and liberation rather than taking away from it. Newgen designer Leo Carlton has a 3D virtual reality studio, which they plug into to work on their sculptures. Once done, Leo is able to bring pieces from the digital to the physical world through 3D printing. In an online space, they can create something totally unique that surpasses the creative boundaries that existed previously.
“If you aren’t doing socials as a new designer, I don’t know what you’ll do.” – Cameron Jukes
Like many other Gen Z and millennial designers, Leo has a big presence on Instagram. For designer and Instagram personality Cameron Jukes, his online fame is his only option to survive. “For someone like me who doesn’t come from a lot of money, we have to have different ways of making our dreams a reality,” he says. “If you aren’t doing socials as a new designer, I don’t know what you’ll do.” From Cameron’s perspective, Instagram and TikTok are simply a blessing, giving emerging designers autonomy and the chance to compete in the same arena as luxury fashion houses. “Someone could spend a whole load of money and get a big photoshoot,” Cameron says. “I don’t need loads of money. If the garment is good and the aesthetics are there, then I can compete.”
In September, Cameron recorded one of his designs against a white wall, and it achieved 339,000 views. “Even from that reel I had 100 to 200 people ask for commissions,” he says. “I’ve loaned stuff to Lady Gaga and Rosalía, and that’s all from socials.” Farah Maloof, the head of TikTok’s fashion department, emphasises its democratisation of shoots and flexible production standards. “It doesn’t have to be a full studio production or a really polished institutional asset for it to work, and I think this is also an environment where you’re really rewarded for experimentation,” she said in November.
While social media channels have an incentive to talk up their necessity, though, not everyone agrees. Digital leader of the Fashion Programme at Central Saint Martins, Margarita Louca, points out how “that doesn’t suit everyone because it takes a lot of emotional labour, a lot of time in terms of strategy and planning. And also it can be very difficult because that line between you as a designer and you as an individual can become very blurred. It’s not necessarily good for your mental health.”
“I think it affects our brains badly because we’re unable to be with ourselves.” – Aleksandra Blinova
For Aleksandra, she’s keen to avoid it where she can. She feels the digital world does not match her introspective design philosophy. “The speed of our lifestyles is much faster than before, so people want something quick and easy to understand,” she says. “I think it affects our brains badly because we’re unable to be with ourselves. A lot of people have to be constantly stimulated now, and it’s like an addiction.” However, this doesn’t mean Aleksandra steers completely clear of Instagram. “I post very rarely,” she says, choosing to “post online to share with other people and create community.”
Whether creatives feel stifled or liberated by the digital world, being able to promote your work for free is hard to resist. Rave and queer subculture photographer Mia Evans is persisting with Instagram despite their images being censored. “I have created a lot of nude work,” they say, “and due to the nudity not being in a sexual context, have posted it onto Instagram.” After being suspended by Instagram three times, Mia has now been blacklisted from the platform. “To find my account you must type in my full username (ahgeewiz) accurately,” they say.
Margarita explains that “because social media sites use software, it’s not necessarily decisions made by humans. So say when they’re using human content moderators, what’s considered indecent or offensive in one country isn’t necessarily in the next. Moderators are also timed to make those decisions, so often it’s a snap judgement.” Since their unorthodox photography was rejected, Mia finds comfort in thinking, “This is a photograph that can’t be degraded into an existence purely on the internet.” Instead, they’ve produced seven physical exhibitions and a book.
Plagiarism has always been an issue, but in the world of instant digital duplication, it’s becoming even more problematic. While social media is of upmost importance to designers looking for free visibility, Meta is also using images posted by designers to train it’s AI models. “They made it really difficult to opt out,” Margarita says, making it very exploitative. But there are ways around it. “You can essentially watermark your images before uploading them,” Margarita adds, through an ethical AI company called Spawning. “It’s basically an independent third party that created a ‘do not train registry’, so it’s a registry where you can opt out of any of your images being used to train AI.” Margarita also recommends a data tool called Nightshade, which poisons a single pixel in an image, so when automated scrapers are grabbing everything in their path, that one pixel poisons the entire well of images. “What it does is it turns a dog into a cat, a car into a cow,” she says.
While designers debate whether or not to use social media, Margarita recommends everyone has their own website. “You’re always in control of that one space, and it means people always know how to contact you because there’ll be an email,” she says. “I also think it’s really important to have your own archive, you cannot use something like Instagram and think that’s your own,” she adds. “You never know; loads of peoples accounts get banned, they get hacked, and all sorts of things happen. It’s so devastating if you’ve built up a really interesting presence for yourself.”
