In World 62, clothes are sold via Teletext and visual imagery is illegal. Citizens have only text descriptions of the clothes they buy and consequently less clothes are bought and sold as people have to initially consent to read about the clothes and take time to process their thoughts about them.
Inevitably there is a black market for imagery in World 62, where photographs and drawings of clothes are traded. Fashion magazines have found ways to subvert the imagery laws by using text as a tool for creating visual imagery and communicating brand identity.
This exhibit is from Textility, one of World 62’s most popular magazines. The cover shows how fashion media employ text (this one in the form of repeated letters) as a visual to represent texture and pattern. The page from an editorial piece inside Textility shows emotive text being used to describe a single garment from a collection.
This Exploration was contributed by Wendy Ward and Jana Melkumova-Reynolds (located in the UK), developed from a World contributed by Talia Hussain, using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the authors and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.
Does this World remind you of something?
I am keen to hear about any historical or contemporary real-world examples – whether individual practices, subcultures or mainstream activities – that this fiction brings to mind.
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