Oh, the weekly screen time report Apple just j’adores to send. If you’re anything like me, who spends a quite frankly revolting amount of time with iPhone clutched in hand, it’s highly likely you dread that shady little alert popping up come Monday morning. Ten hours per day? I mean, sure. Just let me live, Steve Jobs!
Someone racking up even more screen time than most this season is likely to be Jonathan Anderson, who just dropped his latest collection for Loewe at Paris Fashion Week’s men’s shows this morning. Demonstrating his inimitable knack for the uncanny, the Northern Irish designer who, right now, can do no wrong, debuted a succession of looks that incorporated wearable screens.
Seen across voluminous car coats with sloping shoulders, iPad sized devices stitched to the chest played out scenes from the natural world, like birds in flight flocking across a gradient sunset, while unsettling masks that obscured the bottom half of models’ faces featured buzzing honeybees and fish swimming through vast expanses of water. ”Soon, the only place we might be able to see bees and rare flowers could be on a screen,” Anderson explained backstage, in reference to the climate crisis we’re currently facing and it’s ramifications for the animals of our planet.
A further coat was emblazoned with a sensual moving image of two people getting up-close and personal, their lips brushing as they seemingly prepared to move in for a snog – perhaps in reference to the genesis of the birds and bees dotted throughout the offering – while other looks, like pumped-up bombers and butter soft leather trenches were punctuated with empty phone cases and strung with headphone wires and charging cables.
As ever, Anderson’s SS23 collection was shot through with an undercurrent of uneasiness and a strange push-pull, as verdant patches of green grass sprouted from hems and seams, and covered the models’ feet as they walked. Elsewhere, cross-body bags blossomed with mushroom-y fungus, as if they’d laid lost on the forest floor for years on end. The designer was reminding us that, when us humans have been wiped out by machines – because it’s truly only a matter of time until Sophia turns against us – nature will once more be able to thrive without the destruction and chaos we’ve unleashed on the world.
Of course, it’s not the first time fashion has integrated screens onto clothes. At the AW18 Maison Margiela show, iPhones were clamped to models’ limbs, rendering them robot-like as they took their turn on the catwalk, while Louis Vuitton debuted a bag inbuilt with two flexible screens at its 2020 Cruise show. The cyborgs might be coming, but at this rate, it looks like we ourselves might be the ones morphing into them.
