Soon it'll be the default for everyone, and for free

Four, standard women of typical physical charisma were given a professional model shoot and then Photoshopped using industry standard techniques. The results were (not surprisingly) beautiful idealizations from what they originally looked like. (video link).

I had a couple of thoughts strike me on the process. 1) One woman asked, "Why would anyone want to do this?" -- i.e., want to present women in this idealized way. The answer is pretty straightforward: because it makes companies money -- lots of it.  As just a short summary of the fashion biz:

The global fashion industry is estimated to be worth over 1 Trillion Euro, or about 2% of the value of the world economy. To put it in context, the global pharmaceutical industry, which supplies all the medicines in the world, is valued at about €600 Billion, making it just over half the size of the fashion industry![1]

 2) What if, in the (near) future, anyone could easily download a Google glasses app that automatically and instantaneously performs this task, virtually, to everyone within the visual field of the observer?  What would be the effects on how we view beauty?  Should one actually use such an app?

O.

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REFERENCES

[1] "Fashion and Beauty" CarreersPortal (Accessed 2/16/14)

On which woman is less oppressed: bikini lady or abaya lady

Both are thinking a male-dominated culture has harmed the other, but one of these assessments is far more accurate than the other.

Is it really true that the women in this cartoon are both equally suffering in a male-dominated culture?  Actually, it's FAR from true: if the bikini woman takes off her bikini and puts on regular clothes, no one in her secular nation beats her.  In contrast, if the abaya woman takes off her abaya and puts on regular clothes, the religious police (known as the muttawwa) in her Muslim nation may beat her.  So, the bikini woman is far, far better off.  Again, since the bikini woman has far more liberty as a citizen, she is easily in the better position to mange whatever male domination may be present.

I imagine some would object that the bikini woman is actually more oppressed, since she doesn't know how much she's being dominated, something along the lines like-unto when children don't know when or how much they are being dominated.  However, in reply, (i) children cannot reason well and are rightly seen as not understanding when they are oppressed.  But adult women, especially adult women with a basic education and with equal voting opportunities in their culture, are able understand better when they are oppressed. So, the bikini woman likely understands her situation better than the abaya woman.  Also, (ii) many women in abaya-enforced cultures are not given basic education.  Thus, the abaya woman, not the bikini woman, is actually the more oppressed of the two. Therefore, and yet again, the bikini woman is easily in the better position to manage any male domination situations in life.

O.

Transhumanism, Clothes, and Fashion Monstrosities

{ Podcast @ 3min } I have several axioms about technology. But one of them is: "Clever people will purposely do weird things with new technology." But the weirdness of it all becomes a bit too apparent when one casually peruses the troubled minds of artists during their wandering moments, even days of boredom.

Transhumanists study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies for the purposes of enhancing human mental and physical abilities. But what counts as "enhancement" and what counts as a mere stylistic experiment in self-expression will never be sorted out on objective grounds. Humans, it turns out, are not objective creatures at all, as is well attested by the life of the greatest logician of all, Kurt Godel; or by the more mundane examples of people who acquire enhancement of self-expression via tattoos.[1]

Technology will eventually follow the basic movements of clothing fashion, and since people wear clothing for both functional and social reasons, one can see the immediate allure of tossing a bit of technology into the mix. The main issue is how easy it is to acquire and remove the technology at hand. If having radical amputations so as to attach robotic arms were no more difficult than obtaining an ear piercing, and likewise no more trouble to re-correct, then the mere whims of pop culture will produce all the fashion monstrosities that we see in the world of cloth.

Amputation and robo-grafting will come quickly, but not with the shock value that it has today when we encounter such in art. This is because the natural trends of communication technology and convenient computational clothing will make the leap to transhumanist fashion just one more avaunt guard generational marker for the young. But what seems extreme in clothing now is merely passe tomorrow:

In the last few decades, there has been a consistent trend towards the mainstreaming of formerly extreme fashion, in which "over-the-top" becomes ordinary and loses any shock value it might once have had.[2]

Moreover, the engine of differentiation will require participants to wander further and further from the human form, even if not the human essence. Wandering from the human essence has been the main worry about transhumanism, but already there exists strange outward signs in popular culture.

It has sometimes been claimed that "clothes make the man." But soon enough, a new proverb will be necessary: "Fashion fashions the transman."


REFERENCES

[image] Brian Walker

[1] "Tattoo Blog" http://www.tattooblog.org/ (12 May 2007)

[2] "Clothing." Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (12 May 2007. )



O.