CRITIQUE / SERIES

FASHION, DISCRETIZED HUMAN AND ITS MODALITY

Fashion, Discretized Human and Its Modality is a six-part critical
essay that examines fashion not as a decorative supplement to the body, nor
as a merely commercial system of taste, but as a modality through which human
beings, social codes, perceptual environments, and forms of life are composed,
discretized, and transformed.

Originally published in Japanese as a single essay, the text is presented
here in six sections. Its central concern is the extent to which fashion can
be understood as a practice of designing human conditions: not simply by
producing garments or images in the immediate vicinity of the body, but by
acting upon the distant structures through which bodies, societies, signs,
desires, and behaviours continue to organize themselves.

The Japanese title of the original essay uses the coined word
yōsō — written as 様装 — combining
様, the character associated with modality, aspect, or
mode of being, and 装, the character associated with
dress, attire, and appearance. The term therefore names a condition in which
fashion is no longer reducible to clothing, but becomes a problem of how the
human being appears, operates, and is made intelligible within a given world.

Across the six sections, the essay moves from the question of producing
“new human beings” to the distinction between designing nearby and designing
in-distance; from fashion as mode to fashion as code; from religion and viral
transmission to big data and artificial intelligence; and finally to the
possibility of resisting a world increasingly organized through
discretization. In this trajectory, fashion is reconsidered as a system that
both participates in and contests the technical classification of human life.

Fashion to Create “New Human Beings”

The opening section begins with the question of the human being itself: cognition, embodiment, mathematical abstraction, and the possibility of fashion as a practice that does not merely clothe the body, but participates in the production of human conditions.

Designing Nearby, Designing In-Distance

This section distinguishes between design that acts in the immediate proximity of objects and design that operates across distance, duration, and social consequence. Through architecture, systems, and bodily transformation, it defines fashion as a practice capable of acting beyond the object itself.

From Mode to Code

The third section reconsiders fashion as a movement from mode to code. Clothing is treated not only as visual expression, but as a system of legibility through which bodies, identities, affiliations, and social positions are rendered readable and mutable.

Fashion, Religion, and Virus

This section examines fashion through the logics of belief, contagion, and collective transformation. Fashion is approached as a transmissive system: one that can propagate across bodies and communities like a symbolic, affective, and behavioural virus.

Enabling “The Fashion System” with Big Data and AI

Returning to Roland Barthes’ The Fashion System, the fifth section considers how big data and artificial intelligence may reactivate and transform the analysis of fashion. What Barthes once limited to written descriptions can now be expanded into images, behaviours, transactions, networks, and machinic systems of classification.

Resisting the World of Discretization

The final section addresses the political and existential implications of a world increasingly parsed into discrete data, categories, and predictions. Against this condition, fashion is presented as a possible mode of resistance: a practice through which the irreducibility of the human being may continue to appear.