SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2022

“#GEN” reimagines how future Chinese clothing may be produced under the influence of social media and socio-cultural interference. Today’s Chinese youths need to navigate complex cultural landscapes in balancing contemporary and traditional ideologies. Their longing for unique self-expression is reflected in their use of social media and their choice of clothes. However, neither social media nor fashion is a value-free area. While online posts are constantly filtered, the emergence of many prevalent clothing like domestic streetwear and school uniform are also influenced socially and culturally. This indicates that Chinese youth identity and socio-cultural intervention interlace with each other in both the virtual and the physical world. “#GEN” is a wearable technology project that extracts emotional data from an individual’s personal story, visualizes this data through software that simulates both intrinsic and extrinsic filtering process, and uses the generated pattern to make customized clothing. Through their interactions with the project, participants may think critically about the makeup of their identity and witness creative effects that socio-cultural factors would cause in the process.