Dirt | Substack

Welcome to the flat era of fashion. Flat is what happens when consumers buy clothing on the basis of how it looks in two dimensions, in an image to be shared on social media.

This was what personal style was to me in 2008: a cipher for something much broader, a glimpse into the lives of others.

Character is gone, because eccentricity is harder to duplicate and sell in bulk.

When we dress to be photographed, we increasingly dress to be distributed as an image, and thus transformed into a kind of ad.

Flat is in essence a process of homogenization. Today it doesn’t matter where an influencer lives, because she dresses like she’s from the internet, and that’s all that counts.