How We Can Re-Imagine A Future Through fashion Through Ten Thousand Very Loving Beautiful

A bandaged, bruised figure struts down the runway and braces themself above the head like surrendering to a pair of headlights, their arms dangling chords of their cotton T-shirt like garlands as their gaze follows off the literal light, a projection echoing over the groan of live cello and violin strings.

A cast of characters amble to, dance with, and taunt this figure, the stoic focal point of the show: two femme models, topless albeit a boxy leather jacket and geometric structural sheer shrug, provoke and mock them; a haunting model in a cage crinoline gown stares in a mixture of apathy and disgust; two femme models in a voluminous babydoll dress and cascading beaded headpieces crawl this central figure and succumb to the floor with them when they cannot awaken them; and subsequently, the pièce de résistance, an almost ascetic character portrayed by a model in an iteration of a thobe garment with a county fair ribbon pinned to the chest casts their hand above the trio to, their distress, resurrect them. Finally, all of the models crowd the now prostrating figure in desperation.

The message is as “simple” as the grandiose concepts of the apocalypse, sacrifice, and religion, and it tells a story about utilizing fashion to time travel to the future that similarly transcends and lives past upcoming fashion seasons. I got the opportunity to attend Ethics, a New York City-based magazine and collective, which disrupted the norms of New York Fashion Week this September with its collective runway show titled “Ten Thousand Very Loving Beautiful”. The show showcased seven designers (CD1974, Shyebase, Janny, Braedy, Luxenburg, Leif Ausman, Zeliha Xára, and Laure McFather) and was held at the Joint NYC event space in Downtown Manhattan. Directed by Lily Moskowitz, Noelia Madison, and True, and sonically backed by string duo Downtown Music Technology, the show asked and answered where fashion, political futurisms, spirituality, and the psyche intersect on one collaborative runway festooned in plastics, as Dexter Morgan himself was going to close the show. The clothing remains as the testament of a runway show, which, in all but its message, is a one-of-one, truly ephemeral performance. The designers’ tasteful use of mixed materials, dramatic silhouettes for shrugs and jackets, use of leather, and low-rise trousers, à la McQueen’s bumster pants, cohesively cue a rigid, structural defiance told through design. When we think of the future as post-apocalyptic, we seldom imagine it as both the consequence and an influence of how we cope with structural decay and material destruction through the sartorial realm.

Fashion has long stood as a cumulative relic of history, speaking a language that communicates the relationships that gender, labor, race, utility, and colonialism have to production through the use of textile production, design innovation, and functionality. Seminal scholars and fashion historians like Shahida Bari, Kimberly Jenkins, Monica L. Miller, and Doris Langley Moore underscore fashion as a mode of human communication and as a veil between the raw human body and another human body, reflecting the multilayered aspects of the human underneath. Therefore, fashion as we know it, like all art forms, is innately political. There would be no opportunities for textile production and innovation without the relationship that the British Empire had with textile technologies in its South Asian and West African colonies. Later designers heralded for their monumental designs, such as Thierry Mugler, carry that influence by reflecting the milieu of queer theater. The combat boot or trench coat would not exist without combat or trenches, and “combat” as we know it would not exist without the mosaic histories of imperialism and socioeconomic implications of war. Furthermore, major red carpet fashion events, like the Met Gala, grow even more contentious as celebrities share a politicized message through their garments while activists protest the ramifications of a gala funded by an implicit celebrity class.

These contradictions of material conditions are explored and assessed through shows like Ten Thousand Very Loving Beautiful, named after True, which was inspired by the art book titled Endless Garment by archival artist collective Shanzhai Lyric, which features poetry strung together by Chinese English-text t-shirts and their occasionally absurdist mistranslated slogans. Ten Thousand Very Loving Beautiful envisions a future with confrontation instead of nihilism. In that way, the concept of “apocalypse” is more comforting, even affirming, than terrifying. Through interdisciplinary storytelling and elements of theater, the models narrate a story of many attempts at survival through the pieces that they don.

The models surrender to the central figure, hypnotized and succumbing to the flashing projector feedback, interrupted by allegories to religion, (failures) of sobriety, humiliation, and collaboration. When the artists imagine an apocalypse, in the midst of ongoing catalysts like , genocide, and economic collapse from the conditions of capitalism, we rarely imagine it as something we are actively living through now, a reality for the most subaltern people around the world. Within the scope of the world, there come subsequent and relational levels of protection from or exposure to both the spoils and evils of decay through time. Ten Thousand Very Loving Beautiful asks: what if the apocalypse is not in the distance, as something we prepare for on the brink of fantasization? Is it an apocalypse or a reality check? What if we are ready for it because we have our own ways of coping with it now?

The show’s themes also explore a response to the internet and its role in global multipolar collapse as one of its catalysts. Before the first model can fall to their knees and surrender to the reality of the rest of the show, an audio track narrates “a sound of feet shuffling against plastic...camera shutter opens and closes a thousand times in rapid succession” before the live strings bellow. Like a metaphysical rupture of the fourth wall, the track narrates the relationship the audience has with the models and their garments, like a preemptive form of surveillance. When discussing surviving a future presented with the many consequences of collapse, the internet is both a subject and culprit. The internet documents collapse, survival, and the following revolution all at once while being an omnipotent technological catalogue of our own capture and decline.

‍ The internet shapes the future of fashion through algorithmic input and the worldwide influence of globalization, which Ten Thousand Very Loving Beautiful can even show evidence of through its thobe-style garment for its Abrahamic iteration of a religious figure. Through the internet, silhouettes and trends within styling grow both more homogeneous and experimental. This is what makes Ten Thousand Very Loving Beautiful, per the vision of Shanzhai Lyric: the absurdity of the human condition through survival, time, and technology.

The show was a conversation with the present when we consider the apocalypse and was a sartorial avenue to question how fashion makes a statement about how we can travel through time. Maybe we are living through the future in the past and right now, and maybe it is one that is not pessimistic but is combated through revolution.