Digital Versus Analogue, With Style
Esquire Singapore|May 2019

Fashion has existed before the Internet, but our fashion editor, Eugene Lim, wonders if its current iteration can survive without the World Wide Web.

Digital Versus Analogue, With Style

Have you ever stopped to ponder what goes on inside your wonderful mind when you’re about to purchase an item? Well, the good folks from Stanford, MIT and Carnegie Mellon did. In a research study that they conducted in 2007 when the subject was shown a desirable item to purchase, the pleasure centre of the brain showed a significant increase in brain activity. When the price of the item was revealed to them, the insula, which is the part of the brain associated with processing pain, went into rapid-fire mode.

Now to simplify all that scientific mumbo jumbo, the process of purchasing a desirable item boils down to an internal battle in our mind—is the pleasure of owning said item worth the pain of paying that amount for it?

What does that have to do with fashion’s relationship with the Internet? As with all things that deal with pleasure and obsession, the Internet is a wonderful accelerant. With fashion being so intertwined with the Internet, can it survive a return to the dark ages?

This story is from the May 2019 edition of Esquire Singapore.

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This story is from the May 2019 edition of Esquire Singapore.

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