The Labour of Looking Good
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The Labour of Looking Good is a postdigital fashion essay that exposes the hidden work demanded of both consumers and designers in the contemporary luxury system—emotional labour, somatic discipline, identity maintenance, styling logistics, and the rhetorical inflation of marketing hyperbole. Against this extractive economy, the essay introduces 1000 Truths, a new ontology of fashion that behaves like music rather than merchandise: digital garments created through browser mechanics, cursor gestures, seed variation, diffusion noise, and posthuman sensorial logic. Fashion becomes perception instead of performance, intimacy instead of aspiration, and beauty without burden. Through the concepts of browserwear, thoughtwear, and the egoless posthuman entity, the piece reframes digital fashion as a non-extractive, somatic, time-based aesthetic—offering a radical alternative to the waste, anxiety, and ego-driven structures of traditional fashion. It positions 1000 Truths as a future-facing craft practice and a new paradigm in fashion theory, returning beauty to the beholder and freeing both body and designer from the labour of looking good.
Author: Li, Rosanna
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7108322882
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