Appearance and the technicity of Augmented Reality fashion objects

This project uses the phenomenon 'digital fashion' to investigate how spatial computing facilitates new cultures of appearance, and asks how the use of Augmented Reality (AR) might affect our relations to and knowledge of ourselves, others, and our environments. It looks specifically at the practice of using AR to add 3D digital clothing and accessories to still or moving digital images of people.

This use of AR only became widely accessible as recently as 2019, and this project will be among the first substantial anthropological studies to centre the phenomenon.

Through an in-depth qualitative study the project aims to reveal how the technical and social intertwine and emerge in the 'digital fashion' object, and how this object might (re)produce dynamics and relations beyond its most immediate environment - the screen. The project is methodologically progressive, combining tried and true methods with the cutting edge, developed specifically for reestablishing a contemporary Anthropology of Technology (Coupaye 2020).

Ethnographically two-fold, it will explore both the technical functioning of complex ensembles of hardware and software that together make 'digital fashion', as well as the bodily, sensory, and cognitive processes that take place when participants use 'digital fashion' objects. Taken together, the subsequent analysis will reveal what becomes in and from processes of arranging, connecting, and negotiating between digital objects and physical bodies.

This project thusly examines the 'agency of things' from a perspective which aims to overcome the nature-culture divide that perpetuates human exceptionality and as such contributes to the growing conversation about technodiversity and the Anthropocene.

The project draws on literature from the Anthropology of Fashion, Digital Anthropology, and the Anthropology of Technics. Through these strands it deals with themes such as: self and personhood, appearance, posthumanism, aesthetics, design, computing, mixed and extended reality. Findings will be of relevance to those invested in human-computer interaction and spatial computing; producers of 3D digital body objects; executives and marketers in the fashion industry; designers, and those interested in digitalisation, consumption, and digital self-representation.