Browsing the virtual boutique with Baudrillard: The new realities of online, device-based, luxury fashion design and consumption
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Contemporary engagement with fashion is with slick simulacra, daydreams and digital fantasies – an impossible promise of a beautiful, de-corporealized perfection. The virtualizing of fashion consumption has in turn dematerialized garments completely. Although late to the party, the consumer engagement with online luxury fashion has grown exponentially. Extremely expensive items are now purchased before they are engaged with physically. Therefore, within the new realities of device-based fashion design and consumption, the ‘wow’ factor and virtual considerations are paramount. There should be no surprise though that these garments align so closely with our taste, our consumption habits and our life patterns; they have been designed to do just that. In this research, through observation of a garment that was virtual before it became physical, the ascendant contemporary structure of modern fashion retail is analysed. This research explores how physical aspects of clothing have been devalued by the technology of modern capitalism, even as the importance of the ‘look’ has ascended. Another important aspect of the research is the seductive aspects of the marketing of fashion goods. The methods of procurement, in addition to the physical characteristics of the object itself, undergo a close analysis – how we as consumers are shaped by our methods of consumption as much as by our goods now. This research uses an object-based method, a process wherein both intrinsic and extrinsic information can be gleaned from a close examination of a garment, as well as an interview with a fashion journalist who witnessed the reorganization of a leading fashion website into a retail portal. This data is then combined with relevant theoretical frameworks to form ‘grounded theory’. The dematerialization of the modern ‘boutique’ that has now migrated online, the incipient forms of marketing to engage consumers and, ultimately, the recontextualization of the body and understanding of the self, all catalysed by online consumption are considered. As garments are now as ephemeral and placeless as the mechanism for the acquisition, an examination of the manufacture and dissemination of fashion product is warranted, and this in turn provides a more nuanced understanding of the ontology of luxury garments as well as their consumption in the modern fashion retail agora.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".