Are We Alright?
Discussing Aesthetics, Functions, and Cost of Fashion Experience. Plus, a Retrospective of Immersive Creative Retreat
I’m giving it to you straight up: the past few weeks have been very challenging for me. It is that time of the year where seasonal depression hits me head-on, and I’m struggling to keep myself together day by day. Usually I would have spring gardening activities to remedy this, but due to some personal circumstances, I have to significantly cut down on gardening activities this year. As a result, low energy, relentless allergies, and seemingly endless brain fog assault me. It’s the uneasy feeling of knowing your body needs rest in a state of burnout, but you think you cannot afford to stop, even for a moment.
In that regard, no other title of this issue is more apt. Writing for this issue was a battle with myself, and at the end I just focused on a couple things I really wanted to focus on. My past self would want to keep this less-than-ideal mental state a secret, away from any kind of public view, let alone announcement. But with age, I learn that the more I embrace it, the easier it gets.
Before you try to reach out and give kind words of support, I’m letting you know that I am getting better. I am fortunate to have a daily therapist that keeps me grateful day in and day out, and she keeps me from drowning. She and I had a platonic relationship at first, but recently she let me groom her several times a day. Her name is Maine, and she is my feral outdoor Cat in Residence. And yes that’s her picture stretching on the pebbled concrete floor outside. So thank you Maine, my love, for being the lovely cat that you are.
Thanks to her, I can let go of the fact that this newsletter is longer than usual, and most likely get truncated in your email. That said, you can click on “View entire message” at the bottom of your email message to see the full version on Substack platform. More importantly, readers, take good care of your mental health. I know it’s easier said than done, but please be kind to yourself.
Here are topics for this month:
After the 2023 Met Gala: Exploring Aesthetics, Functions, and Cost of Fashion Experience
Retrospective on April Creative Retreat: Bringing People Together in Virtual Reality
Exploring Aesthetics, Functions, and Cost of Fashion Experience
The first Monday of May has always been famous for the annual Met Gala, an annual fundraising event for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute in New York City. This year, it marked the opening of the Costume Institute exhibition “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” (May 5th - July 16th, 2023). A visionary yet divisive figure of fashion greats, Lagerfeld was the creative director of Chanel from 1983 until 2019. He also worked with luxury brands such as Balmain, Chloé, Fendi, and his own namesake brand.
In line with the exhibition, the Met Gala 2023’s theme is “In Honor of Karl.” The red carpet styles range from Lagerfeld’s black-and-white signature style, classic Chanel tweeds, to high-fashion opulent looks. My two most favorite looks are Sara Choi’s and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, both in Thom Browne ensembles.
Is there a battle between aesthetics and functions?
Year after year, the Met Gala red carpet debacles have served as cannon fodders for people to make fun of. The divide between aesthetic-heavy fashion lovers and functional apparel wearers is repeated yearly with individual hot takes in various social media outlets. On Twitter, Derek Guy sums it best:
When our daily experience with fashion revolves mostly around utilitarian functions and convenience, our aesthetic expressions are far from what these high fashion events represent. Limited presentations like Met Gala make it easy to classify high fashion garments as flashy, impractical, and expensive garments that only the rich can afford. The overexposure of aesthetic choices and artistic statements triumph over practical design choices, such as dress pockets.
However, there is no real conflict between aesthetics and functions. People exist in various points along the aesthetic expression and utilitarian spectrum. Our daily clothes are more utilitarian by design, but it doesn’t mean aesthetics need to be sacrificed in the name of functionality. Would you buy a totally utilitarian garment in a color you personally dislike? What if it’s also made with more sustainable materials and fairly priced? Perhaps you will still say no to both questions.
If anything, your fashion choices are more or less dictated by your lifestyle. You may be a busy parent who purchases clothes from Costco because it’s convenient to do groceries and shop clothes at the same time. Because of this, you may find it difficult to relate to some people who spend their lunchtime browsing for clothes online, or others who have personal stylists making purchasing decisions for them. It’s alright! We all have different lifestyle choices, and therefore, different aesthetic and functional expressions in our garments.
So if you don’t “get” Met Gala fashion extravaganza, that’s alright. No big deal, and certainly not worth fighting about. What I don’t get is how the US can go through almost two dozen mass shooting events in one week(!) without urgent reformative actions. Now THAT is haunting.
How about the cost, though?
YES! Another factor that fueled the so-called aesthetics v. functions perspective is the heaven-and-earth cost difference between what those Met Gala A-list attendees wear and what we wear on a daily basis.
Couture garments are made for a specific group of clientele who can afford getting those special, opulent garments made as vehicles of their self expression. But to dispute the cost of couture garments as excessive? That is something I strongly disagree with. Those garments are expensive because it takes a lot of human labor to produce.
Moreover, it’s crucial to note that making clothes IS labor intensive, high fashion or otherwise. Human labor can be easily overlooked in the sustainable fashion realm, which until recently, tends to pinhole itself in material innovations and overall carbon impact. Textile innovations are important and we need much more momentum to not produce oil-based textiles ever again, but paying garment workers fairly is an issue of fashion past, present, and future.
Case in point: can you imagine spending 5,000 hours creating Guo Pei’s “Legend of the Dragon” outfit (dress, headpiece, earrings, and shoes) in 2012? And can you imagine what kind of expert craftsmanship you need to wield to execute this couture project successfully?
I was able to see this ensemble up close during Guo Pei’s exhibition at de Young Museum last summer, and it was magnificent. Some garments included ‘hours to create’ data points, an essential piece of information to tether the magnificence of the garment aesthetics to the people who made them happen in the first place.
Most of us cannot imagine how much work is required to make a simple t-shirt, let alone a couture dress! These skillful workers are more likely to be paid fairly, a distant cry from garment factory workers who constantly have to battle for fair wages and living conditions.
To that point, think about it. Do we think that because a couture dress costs $30k USD, it’s alright to get a fast fashion dress for $30 USD or less, ethical considerations be damned?
The more high quality a garment is - from material sourcing, textile creation and finish, garment design choices, to human labor, the more expensive it is to make. So with fair pricing in mind, how much should clothes cost?
Despite periodical assessments that robots can make clothes, ALL items of clothing need humans to produce them. Lakyn Thee Stylist conveniently breaks down what goes into pricing a garment, and minimum prices of what clothes should cost:
What do you think about these figures? Are they in line with your expectations, too low, or too high? Depending on where you live, your lifestyle means and priorities, the answers vary.
And for independent makers and designers, the prices are definitely going to go up. I’m inspired by makers like Veronica Velveteen, an independent marker in England who wants to normalize cost breakdown in making clothes:
I admire independent designers and makers who are able to offer their wonderful designs and high quality products for sale to the public. Costing your creations is not an easy feat, especially when there are so many mass-produced clothes with questionable quality and standards.
Speaking of independent makers, how much do you think my garments would cost?
Take two of my garments, recently shared on Instagram. One is a petticoat made out of pieced embroidered tulle remnants, broken tulle skirt, and crinoline scraps. Focusing on finishing the garment neatly, it took me over 40 hours of labor to create. Assuming $25 hourly rate and written off material cost, the cost of making the petticoat is at least $1,000.
The other is a couple of West Elm curtains refashioned into a slip-on, convertible dress with anchored inseam waist pockets. The process takes me more than 20 hours from start to finish. Using the same assumption as the above, the cost of making this one is $500.
I will leave it to you to decide whether that’s considered fair pricing. Leave a comment, please! I would love to know your thoughts.
And do you notice something? The petticoat is heavy on the aesthetics, whilst the linen dress is heavier on functions. That said, both aesthetics AND function exist in both garments, just on different levels. Et voilà, we come full circle.
Retrospective on April Creative Retreat: Bringing People Together in Virtual Reality
For the second and final topic for this month, I’d like to do a retrospective on “Layered Stories” creative retreat. Last month, we had the inaugural session with 10 participants, excluding no-shows. We met up in a private Mozilla Hubs virtual room in avatar form, and spent 1.5+ hours exploring various gallery rooms, responding to prompts and creating our own artistic expressions privately, and participating in impromptu “Show and Tell” afterwards via screen sharing.
Leading up to the retreat
To be perfectly honest, coming to this new adventure of layering and storytelling, I was both excited and nervous. Excited because I believe in this more authentic, open-source way of storytelling and engaging with people. Nervous because of the sudden fall from grace of metaverse during the atmospheric rise of generative AI. In the midst of editing the virtual scene in Blender and accumulating more skills in 3D scene making and modeling, I was feeling uneasy reading news about Meta’s metaverse division layoff and Disney’s metaverse divestment. Will all this be worth it? Will we be alright?
To infuse more anxiety to the brain, the fashion and luxury-oriented Decentraland’s Metaverse Fashion Week this year felt terribly lackluster. I was there, running around in a generic avatar form in a sparse virtual world full of impressive virtual façades yet oddly empty, warehouse-like interior if not for the mannequins dressed in wearables you could purchase with crypto. The hourly fashion shows were gimmicky at best, and confusing at worst. Deciding that I wasn’t part of the target demographic (i.e. people who decked their avatars in custom wearables, hunting relentlessly for the free drops somewhere, sometime), I lost interest almost immediately.
Last but not least, the whole UI/UX thinking felt non-existent. What’s the point of having a brilliantly curving, narrow sky walkway if your avatars could easily fall to the ground mid-run? It felt rather ridiculous, and I felt worse after I visited the 3-day event at the end of March.
However, several impromptu discussions with close friends followed suit, and it was becoming clear that all the above things are external noises at best. What Kimberly and I were (and still are) creating and curating have focused objectives, forms, and narratives. The creativity we poured into making this novel experience came straight from our hearts, and we genuinely wanted to make a really enjoyable experience for the retreat participants.
So I fought those disheartening thoughts aside and continued working with the focus on delivering a good user experience rather than creating a shiny dope new virtual scene. To be honest, my virtual scene building skills are not that good yet, and I could not afford the time required to create something I’d be really proud of and comfortable sharing. During the virtual scene preparation period, the Mozilla Hubs Discord community once again was an incredible resource to get advice on troubleshooting any issues and improving quality of scene edits.
During the retreat
I’m really happy to say that what happened during the retreat was nothing short of magical. Figuring out the last piece of lightmap edit for the virtual scene at the last minute (15 minutes before the retreat started) was thrilling, but the last missing piece of the puzzle was in place when retreat participants started to spawn their avatars.
Magic happened afterwards. I could not adequately put it into words. The participants - many of them never experienced virtual reality before* - eagerly observed each gallery space, listened to our narratives and responded to our creative prompts, “flew” up close to some objects, and did their own creative exercises in their own physical spaces.
*The participants had the opportunity to access a “practice room” a few days before the retreat. It was an identical virtual space layout, but empty. Instead, it was filled with pinned texts of tutorial snippets, ranging from basic movements to how to fly.
After the retreat
The real icing on the cake happened at the end, where we had a candid “Show and Tell” session for people who still hung out afterwards. Some of us turned our camera on and shared the screen, which then put on a media frame in the main hall for everyone to see. Whether we shared our real faces or not, the feedback was really positive and encouraging.
Listening to them warmed my heart, and convinced me that when we designed these immersive experiences with people first in mind, the potentials are endlessly exciting. Fantastical scenes are cool, but good user experience and interaction is golden. The honeymoon period of metaverse was over, yet the technology itself is barely out of its infancy phase.
What worked
Sharing a practice space along with a pre-retreat note (Kimberly is awesome for this) a few days before the retreat so participants can prepare themselves in their own timing.
Close collaboration between Kimberly and I, each genuinely trusting the other to get things done. While I focused on all things related to the virtual scene making, Kimberly focused on written communication and social media promotions.
Selective presentation of higher resolution artworks. Making everything high resolution would have burdened the overall size of the virtual scene. Kimberly and I made smart decisions to select only a few that needed to be higher resolution than the rest, while still keeping overall scene optimization top of mind.
Creating an invisible media frame to broadcast our screen. The Show and Tell session after the retreat could be done neatly and professionally thanks to it!
The eager participants. Ranging from people in their 30s to 60s, everyone was eager to experience Kimberly’s Creative Retreat in this new format. I’m so humbled and grateful!
What could be added / improved
Speaker zone area. Due to proximity-based audio setting of Mozilla Hubs, people’s audio volume increases or decreases depending on the distance between their avatars. A dedicated speaker zone on each gallery space would ensure that all participants could hear the prompt giver (Kimberly or I) regardless of where they are in the space.
Sometimes when people were off expressing their own art in-between prompts, the room fell deadly silent. I would consider adding relaxing nature sounds as background noise.
A few things we plan for next “Layered Stories” session
A more open exploration in response to creative prompts
Instead of having a set location to gather, we would create a prompt that would encourage you to explore the gallery space on your own. That way, it would be more open-ended, and a participant’s experience might be completely different than another’s!Addition of past participants’ artworks
With the participant’s permission, Kimberly and I would layer their stories into the scene!Brand new 3D model of textile art
I planned to add this in the first session, but Kimberly convinced me not to force it. She was right; I was exhausted and running out of time!
Most importantly, Kimberly and I will continue to gather feedback in each iteration to find which aspects to improve next. So please be on the lookout when we have our next “Layered Stories” session this summer!
That’s all for this month, everyone. Please take good care of yourself, be kind, and Happy Mother’s Day!
Thank you for reading; until next time,
Mira Musank