Fashion is trash

Dani Loftus and Lamia Priestley of DRAUP give their top tips for digital dumpster dressing.

There was once a time when the digital felt separate, synthetic, divorced from our everyday lives. That time is long gone. Today, the digital spills into everything, with the potential to soil each and every part of our lives.  

Similarly, fashion––and the status that underpins it––is now all fast, simplified, summarized, recycled, skimm-able, exaggerated, bite-sized, easy, fleeting, immediate, unscrupulous, diverting. It’s all shorter, lighter, brighter. Instantaneously gratifying and not that difficult…it’s all trash.

Throw away images, digital affectations, overflowing tabs, desperate performances—we’re defined by the forms our online world takes and the forms we’re forced to take within it. Every one of us frantic, only ever half-read. Each day we get to work on our online presentations, striving to better fit their form—more authentic images, sharper quips to remind others that we’re clever and cool. It's hard to keep the words of Blackbird Spyplane in mind, “you are not a commercial for yourself.” 

But it’s not all bad. Much like most trashy things, there’s a sweetness to the sickness of our lives online. Just as we’re attracted to the disgusting in the physical—the same is true of our digital trash.

Detached from the material, it’s not gross, it's not found in bodily deterioration, in guts and gore, instead this abjection leaks out of our digital avatars. It’s a feeling that runs under all of our online activities. It’s at once both grim and wonderful and makes you feel bad about yourself about as often as it reveals entirely new worlds of meaning and experience.

We think and act differently living a parallel life marked by this trash, and so, we should dress like it. 

DRAUP’s Top Tips for Digital Dumpster Dressing

TOP TIP 1 - Lean into the screen

Today, a lot of things that interest us, that feed our inner lives, are accessed through a screen. That screen has its very own visual language. Each window of life is illustrated with a special set of signs and symbols. The references, cultures and ideas don’t exist outside of the screen just as much as the pixel-made shapes and colors that express them don’t.

To dress your digital image appropriately, you’ll need to be site-specific, so pull out those light-backed RBGs and hard-edged silhouettes.

TOP TIP 2 - Keep moving, and do it fast

Everyone knows you should never wear the same thing twice. But the digital clock ticks at a whole different speed. Things are all-consuming. No one cares if you’re recycling old looks—there’s too much to get through, and no time to focus. So don’t slow down. 

Dress your digital image frequently, and with haste. Don’t be precious with it.

TOP TIP 3 - Do something different

Of all the terrible things one can say about living online, it does allow for a creative freedom to exist in entirely new ways. So, don’t chicken out, try on different versions of yourself. Dream up alter egos, wrap yourself in new realities. Commit to a lesser-explored performance of yourself and have fun. 

The screen’s your stage. Be larger than life or completely anonymous, just try something new. 

Still need help? Try the TRASH TRENCH

In collaboration with Dirt, DRAUP has created the Trash Trench to help you dress like the online trash you are.

At home on a screen, the Trash Trench takes a very literal interpretation of fashion today as merely a system of signs and symbols. It’s made entirely from stretched plastic trash bags embellished with the Dirt and DRAUP logos.

Recycled readymades, fixtures of the everyday—the bags are tailored with trashy drawstrings seeping and cinching into sticky acid green. 

Extraordinary yet completely ordinary, you haven’t worn anything like this before. Dress it up, dress it down. Wear it on an image at home, or a pic around town.

The Trash Trench is a limited edition piece of digital fashion. It’s available for Dirt readers to wear for free by signing up before June 1st.

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