Fashion victims

Making the invisible visible in the world of mobile communication. The ubiquitous presence of mobile communication devices - and the fashion in which they are adopted by different cultures - is not only redefining the way people communicate but also the way they more generally behave. Mobile communication devices, particularly mobile phones, introduce a digital space overlapping the physical space of the body: the birth of this hybrid space brings along a number of social consequences, most of which still invisible, hard to map and to explain. Adopting a critical approach in creating wearable probes apt to explore and illustrate this space is here proposed as a valuable strategy in order to make the invisible visible in the world of mobile communication. In Fashion Victims we chose clothing as the medium for making this invisible world visible; we have designed a collection of garments that react (respond and change) according to the surrounding mobile phone calls. We want to see what would happen if our clothes - everyday objects that we carry on our person - were able to display this presence. The metaphor we have decided to use for visualizing mobile communication comes directly from nature: clothes, as a second skin, react to the environment and change in color. Here, as more and more phone calls are conducted in their surroundings, the clothes progressively and permanently change color. Fashion Victims subverts the expected behavior of an everyday object to create and raise awareness about the subject of mobile communication. By producing a physical result with every call, the mobile phone is revealed in all of its pervasiveness and intrusiveness: its tendency to violate the private space we potentially have within the public context. http://www.fashionvictims.org.