Online Fashion Systems,   

2025/2026 Syllabus

The Online Fashion Systems module explores how fashion operates within digital cultures, networks, and infrastructures. Framing aesthetic strategy as a critical and creative method, the course investigates how online systems shape meaning, identity, and value — and how practitioners can engage with, subvert, or reimagine these frameworks.

Through a mix of theory, practice, and experimentation, participants will engage with digital platforms, images, and interfaces as cultural materials. The module emphasizes digital agency and literacy, encouraging participants to see the internet not only as a medium but as a dynamic structure for connection, communication, and creation.

   
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01

DIGITAL AGENCY, LITERACY, DEPENDENCY?


17/10/2025
11:00 - 15:00
This session examines what it means to have digital literacy and agency in an increasingly commercialized and politicized internet. We trace the evolution of the web from its utopian, inclusive beginnings to its current landscape of surveillance, fragmentation, and marginal “alt” universes. Through this lens, we reflect on who the internet was built for, how access and knowledge have shifted, and how these changes influence creative and fashion practices. Participants will explore multiple ways to experience and interpret digital culture, considering their own positionality as “digital practitioners” and the tools and literacies they use to navigate online environments.


key ideas 
  • The internet’s timeline: Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web3.
  • Digital fragmentation and the rise of “alt” online universes.
  • The embodied computer user: inclusion, stereotypes, and power structures.
  • Defining digital literacy within various creative (/fashion) contexts.


please prepare    Present yourself through a simple network map of the digital platforms, tools, and communities you interact with regularly (including social media, research platforms and/or alternative spaces). Annotate how each platform deals with visibility, social connection, or influence. Think about how this map reflects (or masks!) your practice, interests, or values.


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PART of the Critical Fashion Practices MA programme at Artez University of the Arts.