WE NEED THE RAPTURE: FASHION ENTERS THE TECHNOCRATIC AGE
Raise your hand if you remember Lil’ Miquela, the ethnically ambiguous and hotly debated AR influencer who amassed an enormous following by serving her audience exactly what they searched for… without them knowing it? Yes, she was clearly a render, but she captivated us because of how well she delivered on internet fame. Unknowable but oddly transparent, a creator and creative, relatable and quirky. We couldn’t get enough. In fact, in 2018, I styled her in a collaborative story with Isamaya Ffrench for GARAGE Magazine. The concept was simple: if you’re simply a generation of what humans have always wanted their celebrities to be, maybe the question is not so much “where did she come from?” but, rather, “how long has she been here?”
She was a modern celebrity we could control and project upon without the guilt of subscribing to the social contract of decency in fandom. She was the virtual manifestation of a concept of celebrity.
When I read the news today that H&M was rolling out their new marketing strategy– the use of AI replicas of their IRL models- the pop-cultural references of how this all would end in abject disaster started rolling in. Black Mirror. M3GAN… I thought best to go to the source. I asked AI to write me a scene where this all played out. This is what it gave me:
