Is This the Future of Visual Merchandising?

 Emerging Media, Shopping  3 Responses »
Feb 142012
 

A lovely young woman sits with her purse in her lap and her phone in her hands. She coyly smiles, looks around, and yawns as she waits in a department store. If a stranger begins to pester her, she ignores him. This scenario is fairly ordinary. However, this is no ordinary young woman: this is an android mannequin responding to curious shoppers from the inside of a window display.

As part of a Valentine’s Day promotion, Tokyo department store Takashimaya will be displaying Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Geminoid-F android mannequin in its store window. The life-like mannequin has a set of 60 different facial expressions at its disposal to lure in and interact with passing shoppers. The robot is connected to a Kinect sensor complete with facial recognition software that allows for it to have a unique response to each person who passes by.  Continue reading »

Fashion: A Very Short Introduction by Rebecca Arnold

 Annotated Bibliography  1 Response »
Sep 202011
 

Arnold, Rebecca. Fashion: A Very Short Introduction. Cambridge: Oxford UP, 2009.

The title of this book is in no way misleading. It is, in fact, a very short introduction to the history of fashion. Arnold takes the reader on a helicopter ride through fashion’s past, present, and future, hovering far above specific instances to locate very broad patterns. Some of these include the rise of the designer, the intersections between art and fashion, the development of the fashion industry, the impact of globalization, etc.

For the most part, this book did exactly what it was designed to do. It painted the history of fashion in very broad strokes so that we were able to identify areas in which we would like to dig deeper. For each chapter, Arnold lists possible sources for further reading. Some that seem particularly interesting to our project are:

  • The journal Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, and Culture.
  • Paul Jobling, Fashion Spreads: Word and Image in Fashion Photography since 1980
  • Annie Phizacklea, Unpacking the Fashion Industry: Gender, Racism, and Class in Production.
  • Rebecca Arnold, Fashion, Desire, and Anxiety: Image and Morality in the Twentieth Century.
  • Hazel Clark and Eugenia Paulicelli, eds. The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity, and Globalization.

Though the book could only ever deal with any issue on a superficial level, I was able to tease out a few items of interest to the intersection of fashion and emerging media. Continue reading »