Immaterial Girls

Way beyond filters and Facetune, meet the virtual influencers and CGI supermodels ruling fashion’s digital frontier.

- Divya Bala

As a child, I had an imaginary friend. I named her Neri after the Ocean Girl character. She would tell me all about the flickering, confectionery hues of the coral, the clicks and coos of the dolphins, and the salty depths—it was a world I knew only through her. In older years, my interest in the fanciful began to dovetail with that of the wider cultural landscape: Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, (“I look how you wanna look, I f**k how you wanna f**k, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not,” he explains to his imaginer); Gorillaz and their cartoon counterparts; James Cameron’s Avatar; the human-like robot hosts in Westworld; and “friendships” with Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. It seems many of us fantasise on some level about the alternative possibilities of our identities. We Facetune, we filter; there’s nary an image we see that isn’t in some way edited. Isn’t it understandable, then, that the next step is visuals that are unabashedly virtual?