A model stumbled down the runway with drunk limbs, staring questioningly into the audience. She wore a virtual reality headset, with its display projected onto the warehouse walls. Everyone saw themselves in distorted black-and-white, as an artificial intelligence-generated voice warned the halls, saying, “Silence your phones. Oculus is watching.”
On April 25, USC’s Fashion Industry Association (FIA) opened its 20th annual fashion show “Oculus.” The show featured six USC and Los Angeles-based designers – Ly Ngo (Solely Studios), Eion Nunez (Worn Hardware), Dom Jocas (Clandestyn), Madeline Stecher (Ballerine Jewelry), Jaden Steinhoff and Charlie Segal (Sunshine Reigns), and Aubry Sloane Deetjen – with collections that reflect how fashion has evolved and respond to the current digital landscape.
FIA partnered with Iovine and Young Academy’s (IYA) fashion and extended reality professor Carsten Becker to integrate virtual reality, projection mapping, and augmented fashion technology into the showcase. He and his students were responsible for the pre-show virtual reality (VR) headset performance. They, and the FIA media team also made a television installation featuring distorted runway visualizations.
“Oculus embodies surveillance and our digitized world, examining how visibility, data and constant observation shape how we move through public and private spaces,” FIA co-president and IYA junior Abriana Stewart said.
As the fashion industry is becoming more and more oversaturated on social media, Desmond Chua, an attendee and junior majoring in architecture at the University of California, Davis, said he was excited to see the runway’s experimental, bold and tech-based looks.
Max Singer, a fashion designer and senior majoring in business administration at USC, said he was looking to find fresh inspiration in this year’s runway after taking a two-year hiatus from designing.
“[FIA] is a breeding ground for creativity and ideas,” Singer said. “It’s really inspiring from a designer’s perspective to see what other people are doing.”
FIA co-president Emily Chang said the show was planned as a three-act narrative. Act one reflects the calm before the storm, where society does not yet understand the dangers of AI. The second act is marked by the realization of what AI can do, and the finale is a culmination of the show’s theme.
The first arc featured designers Ngo and Nunez, who encompassed a world yet to be hyper-vigilant against the threat of digitization, according to Stewart. Solely Studios opened with a collection of beautifully suffocating creations, using lace to both drape over her models as well as bind their hands.
Ngo’s opening piece was unforgettable, as she juxtaposed a military jacket with lace armor, leaving little protection to her model soldier. This same collection featured a model seemingly free with her hands strong on her lace dress, only for her elbows to be bound behind her by the same fabric. Ngo’s pieces juxtapose motifs of strength, control and vulnerability, mirroring the show’s theme of technology being used as a tool to create and a violation of our privacy.
“WORN HARDWARE” then took audiences back to early America. The designer focused on themes of raw materials and hard labor, picturing his models with pick-axes, helmets, denim suspenders and distressed workers’ uniforms. A standout in his collection was his only female look, where his model was dressed in a canvas dress with a rosary around her neck. Pinned to her dress were sketches of oil mills on square canvas scraps.
Ballerine Jewerly, Clandestyn, and Sunshine Reigns followed with collections that represent the feeling of being watched, when the paranoia sets in.
“You have [then] this moment of catharsis and transcendence where you’re realizing that you’re being surveilled…and you try to fight back,” Stewart said, describing the succeeding collections.
Through exaggerated ballerina motifs – tutus cut above the hip, bows that trail to the floor and head-to-toe pink leotards – Stecher’s Ballerine Jewelry encapsulates the need to perform in today’s society. Each look was finished with the stacks of pearls weighing down the models’ necks, emblematic of the brand’s focus.
Jocas’ line Clandestyn takes a more explicit approach to countering today’s oppressive systems, drawing inspiration from how marginalized communities fight, and continue to fight for liberation. His collection is marked by uncomfortable symbols like bloodied hands and ski masks against a base of denim, puffer, and burlap fabric. Clandestyn closed with a model draped in different textures of black, as if a shadow moved among audiences without its person. Ending with darkness, the line warns of a world that does not act against injustice.
Steinhoff and Segal’s Sunshine Reigns followed with a mesh of disorienting looks, consisting of lived-in checkered pajamas, preppy yet untucked collared shirts and sunglasses with missing lenses. Even their more professional looks had a little laugh snuck in, as they paired a standard suit and tie with a sock monkey dangling on a cowboy hat.
Stewart described Steinhoff and Segal’s collection as simultaneously rebellious but also accepting of today’s capitalistic, digital-first society.
“We always are going to be observed by the ones in power, and we can just choose how we regulate our emotions and respond to that through our fashion,” Stewart said, commenting on Sunshine Reigns.
The show concluded with Deetjen’s “IF YOU’RE NEW HERE, YOU HAVE TO FIGHT” which placed the show in the context of a boxing match. Deetjen draws inspiration not only from wrestlers’ robes and gloves – as seen on her dress that reconstructs the athlete tracksuit silhouette – but also their injuries. As the music repeated the words “you have to give up,” her model walked out with eyes painted white and a gown with a sheer black spine etched onto its back, referencing x-rays of a boxer’s broken bones.
Deetjen’s collection ends with what may initially seem like a disconnect with the rest of the line, but perfectly encapsulates it as a whole. With the body of a stereotypical wrestler, her final model walked the stage in a black-green ballgown that accentuated his chest and hugged him by the waist. Deetjen turns feminine and masculine silhouettes on their heads as her collection dissects gender in a world of violence. Stewart and Chang said this collection was saved for the end as it embodied surveillance through and through.
“I feel this [show] is a great opportunity to allow smaller artists to be able to showcase their work on a bigger scale than if they went out and hosted their own fashion show,” Nunez said, reflecting after the show ended.
Before and after the show, guests browsed the different selection of vendors at the reception. The event featured small businesses and designers, alongside curated thrift selections. Stewart said the reception resembled FIA’s fashion fairs on campus that had ended two years ago due to changing campus restrictions. She explained that the fairs were a way to make the local fashion community more accessible to students and were missed by both vendors and students once they ended.
FIA handled AI with nuance in this year’s show, discussing how it can be both a tool and a threat to human expression. In using AI to generate the eerie voice behind each collection, FIA shows how technology can be used to strengthen art instead of replacing it. Simultaneously, the show’s narrative illustrated how blindly submitting to AI surveillance can result in revealing our vulnerabilities to capitalistic powers if we are not careful.
“Oculus” encourages audiences to carefully consider how AI affects us daily. Even in the fashion industry, avoiding AI completely may be impossible. It is important for us to know when to embrace it as an instrument and when to distance ourselves from it – these choices determine how much control AI really has over the world we create.
