At Whakatō, a garment doesn’t actually begin with the garment.
That sounds like a branding copy, I know. But it kept bothering me the more I sat with it. Because the moment of choosing a fabric feels loaded, like the decision has already been made somewhere and I’m just participating in it. The fabrics in our system start as a plant-derived fibre. Traceable, restrained, all the right words. The kind of thing that, on paper, should resolve the question. It doesn’t. Because the fabric doesn’t stay a fabric for long. It becomes a garment, then an outfit, then an image, then a post, then a flicker in someone else’s feed, half-seen, half-registered, already replaced by the next thing.
And that got me thinking. We talk about “synthetic” like it’s just polyester or nylon. A material problem. Something you can swap out and fix. But synthetic feels bigger than that. More like a condition you step into without noticing. A way of producing surfaces that read instantly, while whatever sits underneath becomes harder to access, even for yourself.
We talk about “synthetic” like it’s just polyester or nylon. A material problem. Something you can swap out and fix.
If you’re still reading, this is where I start to drift a bit, but stay with me. I started thinking about when clothing stopped feeling like something you lived with, and started behaving more like something you cycled through. Social media probably deserves some of the blame, but not in the obvious way. It changed what we see. And also changed what gets rewarded. Visibility became the reward. And once that happens, dressed to wear something out cross-fades into dressed to be seen in it once, maybe twice, before it starts to feel like repetition. And repetition, online, feels a lot like disappearance. Fast fashion arrived at exactly the right moment and expanded that instinct until it became easy to act on, over and over again. So a wardrobe quietly turned into a stream moving through in sequence, each piece arriving, performing, and then giving way to the next. And I don’t think we fully registered when that shift happened.
Here’s the part that clicked for me, a little uncomfortably. The same systems that made it easier to be seen also made it easier to be alone. Not alone in the dramatic sense. Just structurally alone. Spending more time by yourself, but not necessarily with yourself. Filling that space with scrolling, with content, with this constant low-level simulation of being around other people. More like social surrogacy. It looks like connection from a distance. Up close, it feels thinner. And from a systems perspective, it kind of makes sense. It’s easier to model individuals than communities. Easier to predict/optimize/keep engaged. A group has friction. A person can be smoothed out. So you end up with this quiet alignment. More visibility/individuality/isolation at the same time (and its called a feature instead of failure).
You get these new forms of company showing up. AI chats, digital personas, systems that respond to you instantly, politely, endlessly. I get the appeal. Really. There’s no awkwardness, no misreading, no emotional risk in the same way. You say something, it comes back shaped correctly. But something about that started to feel off to me. Because real relationships are messy. They stall, they contradict, they require you to sit in moments where things don’t resolve cleanly. That friction does something to you. It builds a tolerance for other people actually being different from you. If you remove that, and everything starts responding in a way that’s tuned to you, there’s less friction and less rehearsal involved in how you relate. And over time, I wonder if the synthetic just becomes easier (not better) to deal with than the real.
Capitalistic systems responsible for this social unraveling is now profiting from the loneliness it helped create.
Anddd if you’re still here, this is where it widens out. Again. There’s an economic loop sitting underneath all of this that’s almost too neat. The same systems that contribute to people feeling isolated also produce the tools that respond to that isolation. Engagement goes up when emotional need goes up. Emotional need goes up when stable forms of connection start to thin out. So the system feeds itself in a very efficient (and maybe conspiratorial) way. And that's the bitter irony of it. Capitalistic systems responsible for this social unraveling is now profiting from the loneliness it helped create.
I started noticing it in language too, which felt like a stretch at first, but the more I paid attention, the harder it was to unsee. Everything is getting smoother. I'm not saying worse or better. Just more even. Sentences land correctly. Ideas are well-balanced. Fewer rough edges, fewer strange turns of phrase, fewer little signals that tell you where someone is from or how they think when they’re not editing themselves. It’s like language is being gently averaged. And that sounds harmless until you realize what drops out in the process. The specific, the local, the slightly off, the what-ifs. The things that don’t scale well for large language models. We absorb that without noticing. I do it too. Probably here, in this exact moment.
So identity, or how you think of yourself, how you express it (even how you diagnose it nowadays), starts forming inside a narrower set of options. No one instructs a limit. Some ways of speaking, showing up, and being understood sit closer to what is readily available than others. Over time, that ease starts to register as truth.
We’ve gotten very good at producing something that feels like authenticity. Warmth, relatability, coherence. The signals are repeated, and absorbed through cultural osmosis. You see it in viral empathy. In virtue signalling. Even in something like the protein propaganda. A set of ideas repeated often enough that they begin to feel like baseline reality. I've been noticing and having this dialogue with myself about these performative tendencies. My takeaway is that performing a dance doesn't make you less of a dancer obviously but it does make you more of a performer than dancer. So maybe your choreography will be more directed for performance rather than the art it is. Is it a bad thing? I don't know. Good? I don't know.
I keep coming back to textiles, because they don’t let you get away with abstraction for too long. A fabric carries its history whether you acknowledge it or not. The fibre, the process, the way it was handled, it all shows up eventually, in how it wears/holds/fails. Nothing is just a surface. And I think the same is true for everything else I just spiralled through.
Attention systems, economic systems, language systems, all leave traces. In how we dress/talk/relate/expect from each other. Most of the time, those traces feel natural. That’s what makes them hard to question. So maybe the work isn’t to reject any of this outright. That feels unrealistic. Maybe it’s just to notice. To catch the moments where something feels obvious and ask why. To recognize when ease might actually be design. To see where the synthetic has already blended into what we’re calling authentic.
Anyway. That’s as far as I’ve gotten with it. If you made it this far, you probably see it too. Or you’re about to.
Thoughts? Questions? Ideas? Contact us here.
Himanshi x
