What Is This About?
There is something quite phenomenal about the quantity of things we share with people we do not know and have no idea about. Experiences that cross boundaries we did not know were there. One of those mundane and fundamental things is getting dressed. Whether in the morning (or in the afternoon, I don't discriminate with later sleepers) or for an occasion, all of us need, in one way or another, to get dressed. For a job interview, for a first date, for a flight, for groceries, or for a walk in the neighborhood. And when we do get dressed for those occasions, we often stop and ask ourselves, calculating and try to predict scenarios. Will this hoodie make me look suspicious while I walk the neighborhood? Will this suit make me look like I belong here? Can I wear this?
The Speculative Style Studio grew out of a simple observation that kept nagging at me during my various PhD research: we treat fashion as a personal choice, but it is intertwined and traversed by forces completely out of ourselves. The idea is: pick what you like, express yourself, done. Nothing groundbreaking, of course. But it kept nagging at me. Again and again. Conveniently, however, this line of thinking quite deliberately ignores the fact that the same garment reads completely differently depending on the body wearing it and the room it enters (yes, garments can enter rooms). A hoodie on a white teenager in a suburb is cozy. The same hoodie on a young black men is a threat—and deadly (think Ahmaud Arbery or Trayvon Martin). We all know this. We just don't do things or interact with things that make you sit with it.
That is, through various hoops and loops, what this project does. It is a digital dressing room—a speculative style studio. It is, in a lot of ways, designed to make you dress and think in some ways that can be uncomfortable, yet productive. You pick an avatar. You dress them in real clothing items submitted by real people (I like to hope my friends are real, at least), each with a story or a meaning attached. And then, an AI reads the combination and speculates about who this person might be—the subject, the who is up to interpretation whether you want to associate yourself with it or if you want to gift it to the avatar. It is not so much who they are, however, but rather who they might be perceived as. The gap between those things is where all the interesting, painful, political stuff lives.
I started building this because… Matter of fact, why did I start to build this? The reasons are blurred; they have mingled over the months and years of studying and researching. Perhaps I cannot state when and why this came to fruition, but I can confidently say that there was an underlying frustration. I study fashion, identity, blackness, and masculinity in an academic context, which means I spend a lot of time reading theory about bodies and power and semiotics and meaning and embodiment. All of this matters. Very much so. But it also lives behind paywalls and inside jargon (which I am very much guilty of) that most people will never encounter. At the same time, the actual lived experiences of getting dressed while Black, or queer, or fat, or visibly religious, or poor—that's happening every single day to millions of people who never signed up for a seminar on Foucault. I wanted to build something that meets people where they are: on a screen, with a few minutes to spare and willing to play.
The clothing items in this studio aren't pulled from a runway or a brand lookbook or the forecasting of trends. They are submitted by people I know and am very close to. They photographed pieces from their own closets and wrote short descriptions about what those items mean to them. All of them unique not by their looks, but by having contexts attached to them. This, in turn, allows speculations to take place, but also to re-contextualize how you can understand a garment you either have or have never seen before. These garments are all artifacts of living. And when you layer them onto different bodies and ask an AI to interpret the combination, what comes back is a mirror—not of the clothes, but of the assumptions we carry.
Why does this matter right now? Because, among other things, the politics of appearance have gotten considerably loud(er). There was a window, maybe mid-2010s, where a lot of people in North America convinced themselves that we had moved past the crude business of judging people by how they looked. You know: diversity campaigns, body positivity, representation in advertising. It felt kind of linear, didn't it?
There has been a regression, a move away from this, I would argue. It has been swift and disorienting. We are watching governments, including here in Quebec, where we like to pretend we are above it, retreat into culture-war postures that fixate on bodies and looks, and what they signify (look no further than Bill 21). Whose cultural expressions are "heritage" and whose are "ideology." Whether a hijab is oppressing or agency. Whether a drag queen's wardrobe is art or threat. These are no abstract debates. They are fights fought on the surface of people's bodies. Everyday fights on what you, or I, or your friend, or your colleague, decide to put on in the morning.
Fashion has always been fundamental for this, even when we pretend it is trivial. The Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 were not about fabric, they were about young Mexican-American and Black men daring to take up space with exaggerated silhouettes during wartime austerity. The outfit was the provocation. The violence was the response. Eighty years later, the mechanisms are the same: a body wears something that disrupts the visual order, and the system pushes back. The only thing that has changed is the speed at which the judgment travels. Now it happens in comment sections and algorithm-sorted feeds instead of street corners.
What can we actually learn from an exercise like this? More than you would think. When you sit with the studio and start swapping items across avatars, something clicks. You begin to notice your own pattern recognition—the instant narratives your brain constructs from a pair of shoes mixed with an accessory you've never seen before. And then you read the actual story behind the item, written by the person who wears it, and the gap between your assumption and their reality become tangible. That gap is the whole point. It's where bias lives. Not as ideology, but as reflex.
The speculations the AI generates are not meant to be authoritative or even to be necessarily accurate. They are meant to be provocative—to expose and express a specific way to read and 'understand' cultural scripts. When the AI reads a combination of thrifted workwear pants, a designer hoodie, and vintage sunglasses found on the street, and produces a character sketch that sounds plausible, the question is not whether the AI got it right. The question is why does it sound right to you or why does it sound wrong to you? What did you feel to come to those conclusions, and where do these assumptions come from in your own life?
This is why I refer to this as speculative. It is not predicting the future. It is using imagination as a diagnostic tool; holding up combinations of identity and appearance and asking, what world are we living in where this means that? The answer is always more uncomfortable and more interesting than we expect.
So play with it. Dress someone. Read the stories. Let the AI take a guess. And then ask yourself what you assumed before it told you anything at all.