Projekttitel
Virtually Dressed: Towards an Anthropomedial Theory of Digital Fashion (Arbeitstitel)
Projektbeschreibung
The dissertation at hand deals with the relatively recent phenomenon of digital fashion, that is, the visual presentation of non-physical garments through digital media technologies. As such, digital fashion is not made of physical textiles. Instead, it refers to data sets that can be rendered as digital garments through 3D software to be superimposed on existing photographs. This phenomenon rose in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic and has been heralded as the solution to the fashion industry’s environmental problems. Because digital fashion does not involve textile production, it is frequently portrayed as immaterial and, therefore, sustainable. This dissertation challenges the narrative of immateriality and asks how digital fashion can be understood as material. It argues that rather than a leap into the immaterial, digital fashion is marked by a shift in materiality. The materiality of digital fashion is then two-fold: On the one hand, it is dependent on material media technologies that produce the phenomenon in the first place. On the other hand, digital fashion presents itself as an aesthetic phenomenon that excessively displays simulated materials.
Situated between fashion studies and media studies, this dissertation employs the theoretical framework of media anthropology. At its core lies the concept of anthropomediality, the irreducible entanglement of humans and media. In this line of thought, there is no such thing as a primordial human who is only later shaped by media and technology. On the contrary, it is the relatedness of humans and media that produces pluralized human modes of existence. Through the lens of media anthropology, I argue that (digital) fashion must be understood as a material-discursive phenomenon; it refers both to the social construction of meaning and to material things. Drawing on the media anthropological notion of media as the in-between, the intermediary including its material manifestations and the encompassing milieu, I also construct a perspective on fashion that sees the phenomenon not as a surface but as an interface.
Focusing on the unfolding of digital fashion on Instagram between 2018 and 2024, I analyze several media anthropological (and often media archaeological) entanglements that arise from the phenomenon. This includes the structural similarity between textiles and digital images, the simulation of textiles through the history of computer graphics, media-archaeological perspectives on digital fashion and the (post-)cinematic, and the bodies, both on and off screen, that interact with digital fashion. If digital fashion, a phenomenon that seems so engrossed in popular definitions of media, can be understood as medial in a media anthropological sense, it has consequences for the relationship between fashion (studies) and media (studies). It is then increasingly inadequate to think of fashion’s medialities exclusively as the remediation of fashion through various fashion media – fashion magazines, fashion blogs, and the like. Instead, fashion is always-already medial, just as it always-already addresses anthropological questions. As such, this dissertation highlights the potential fashion studies and media studies, especially media philosophy, hold for one another.
Vita
Dr. Charlotte Brachtendorf is a fashion and media scholar with an interest in the mediality and materiality of (digital) fashion. She is currently a research assistant for cultural studies in fashion and textiles at Paderborn University. As a member of the research training group „Media Anthropology“ at the Bauhaus-University Weimar, she completed her PhD dissertation on the materiality of digital fashion in 2025.
Previously, she graduated with an M.A. in Fashion Critical Studies (Fashion Communication) from Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London) and with an M.A. in Media Cultural Studies from the University of Freiburg (Germany). During this time, she studied at both Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan) and Jesus College, University of Oxford (UK). Charlotte Brachtendorf also holds a B.A. in Information Design from the Stuttgart Media University (Germany), including a study abroad at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). From 2012 to 2019, Charlotte Brachtendorf was a scholarship holder at Cusanuswerk (Catholic church and German state scholarship for academic excellence). Additionally, she has been a recipient of the Baden-Württemberg scholarship in 2016 and 2017.
Publikationen
- “Materializing Digital Fashion,” In: WETWARE Magazine 3 (2025), pp. 52–58.
- “Possible Fashion Images: Operative Ekphrasis and the Reduction of Fashion Through Multimodal AI,” In: Image: Journal for Interdisciplinary Image Sciences 42, no. 2 (2025), pp. 155–168, https://doi.org/10.1453/1614-0885-2-2025-16663.
- “Zwischen Ästhetik und Funktion: begriffstheoretische Perspektiven auf digitale Mode,” In: Annali Sezione Germanica 34 (2024), pp. 221–246, https://serena.sharepress.it/index.php/aiongerm/article/view/12474.
- Together with Helga Behrmann & Judith Brachem: “Materialitäten virtueller Mode: das Fallbeispiel The Fabricant,” In: Jahrbuch Netzwerk Mode Textil (2023), pp. 95–103, https://doi.org/10.53193/221421485G.
- “Lil Miquela in the Folds of Fashion: (Ad-)Dressing Virtual Influencers,” In: Fashion, Style and Popular Culture 9, no. 4 (2022), pp. 483–499, https://doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00157_1.
- “Auf Tuchfühlung mit dem Tod,” Review of: M. Haller, T. Helmers & S. Mallon (eds.) (2020): Der Tod und das Ding: Textile Materialitäten im Kontext von Vergänglichkeit. In: Annual Review of Death and Society 2 (2023), pp. 187–190.
Vorträge
- “AI Generated Fashion Images: Recontextualizing the Notion of Style”, The Anthropocenic Styles of Fashion: Ethics and Aesthetics (Villa Vigoni, Italien, 11/2025)
- “Dressing the Image: Materiality in Digital Fashion”, Jahrestagung Netzwerk Mode Textil, Nachwuchskolleg (Berlin, 05/2025)
- “On Fire! Anthropomedialität zum Anziehen”, Begehung des DFG-geförderten Graduiertenkollegs Medienanthropologie (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, 02/2024)
- “Medialität und Materialität: Mode(theorien) in den Medienwissenschaften”, Aktuelle Felder der Relevanz: Positionen zu Kleidung, Mode und Textilien, Jahrestagung des Netzwerk Mode Textil (Berlin, 05/2023)
- “The Way It Moves: Digital Fashion and the Cinematic”, Digital Fashion Symposium, Parsons Paris & London College of Fashion (Paris, 04/2023)
- Materializing Digital Fashion”, Earth, Water, Air, Fire: The Four Elements of Fashion (Università Iuav di Venezia, 03/2023)
- “Materialitäten digitaler Mode: Das Fallbeispiel The Fabricant” gemeinsam mit Helga Behrmann und Judith Brachem, Jour Fixe Netzwerk Mode Textil (online, 06/2022)
- “Fashioning the In-Between: Everyday Aesthetics in Contemporary Tokyo Street Style”, Sartorial Society Series 5: The Places and Spaces of Dress (online, 05/2022)
- “Material Dress and Immaterial Fashion? On the Entanglement of Dress and Fashion”, Defining the Contours of Dress Studies, Dress and Body Association (online, 11/2021)
- “Body and Mind in Digital Fashion”, Virtually (Un-)Dressed: Researching the Body in the Digital Age, Dress and Body Association (online, 11/2020)
- “Fashioning Virtual Influencers”, Critical Fashion Studies Conference, University of Melbourne (02/2020)
- “Virtual Influencers”, MA Fashion Communication Evening, Central Saint Martins (London, 10/2019)
- “Japanese Aesthetics in Tokyo Street Style”, Practice Based Fashion Theory, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (10/2018)
Lehre
Paderborn University:
- Mode und Zeit (spring term 2026)
- Digitale Mode (spring term 2026
- Japanische Mode: Innovation und Orientalismus (fall term 2025/26)
- Mode/Film: Geschichte, Theorie und Methodologie (fall term 2025/26 and spring term 2024)
- Orientierung im Studium/Einführung in die Techniken wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens (fall term 2025/26 and 2023/24)
- Dress to Oppress? Wie Mode Klasse und Geschlecht sichtbar macht (together with Marla Baier, M.A., guest session in the class „Körper und Geschlecht“ taught by Oxana Eremin, M.A. (fall term 2025/26)
- (Anti-)Mode: Streetstyle und Subkulturen (spring term 2025)
- Mode wissenschaftlich reflektieren (spring term 2025)
- Thinking Through Fashion: Einführung in die Modetheorie (spring term 2024)
- Streetstyle, Subkultur und Authentizität (fall term 2023/24)
- Modedarstellungen zwischen Text und Bild (fall term 2023/24)
- Digital Fashion: Mode und Materialität (fall term 2022/23)
Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London:
- Seminar session on digital methods for M.A. Fashion Communication: Histories and Theories (fall term 2025/26, 2024/25 and 2023/24)
- Evening lecture on (Digital) Fashion Through The Lens of New Materialisms (fall term 2021/22)
Bauhaus-University Weimar:
- Digital Fashion: Glitch & Moiré-Textilien (guest session in the class „Digitale Ästhetik“ taught by Dr. Charlotte Bolwin, spring term 2023)
- Nach dem Journal des Luxus und der Moden: Zeitgenössische Modemedien (guest session in the class „Medien der Mode und des Luxus“ taught by Prof. Dr. Jörg Paulus, spring term 2023)
- How the Female Body Became Political in the 70s and 80s: Examining Film and Fashion as Bodily Media (together with Dr. Hannah Peuker at the International Bauhaus Spring School, fall term 2021/22)
Memberships:
- Netzwerk Mode Textil e.V. (since 2018)
- Dress and Body Association (since 2021)
- Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaften (since 2025)
- Fashion Studies Alliance (since 2025)
- Association of Internet Researchers (since 2025)