Welcome to Open Wardrobe열여라 옷장
Creating a digital and analog tapestry of meaning that weaves together you, your friends and your wider, wondrous world…
Open Wardrobe is a conversation that can be made with any international city.
Become an active agency with your world, all with Open Wardrobe.
“Open Wardrobe is a springboard for association. What [could] follow[s] is an exquisite interlinking of narratives + pastiche of human consciousness”
Twitter, Hopkins|Sydney
Open Wardrobe© is a global fashion archive that documents and indexes the global citizen’s ready-to-wear and bespoke dress and apparel. It is an interactive repository and mobile application for e-provenance and cross-cultural co-production of dress and taste. It taps into the fashion conversation of an international city, such as Sydney, Australia, and creates a new domain and cultural experiment. Open wardrobe blends gaming, organisation, social media and entertainment. Open Wardrobe is driven by the demand of retail, consumers and financial and insurance services.
“It is a proposition in modern programming languages that seeks to integrate the user experience of cultural metaphors with apparel. #style“
Hopkins|Sydney, Twitter
This is what makes Open Wardrobe unique in that you, the user, create and play with a contemporary invented mythology around the most hyped about fashion brand: you. You become your own living business entity in creative direction within the application, affording you the possibility of forming ‘schools’ with others users in similar style, similar lifestyles or professions, or attending similar events in your social calendar and you can use the so called ‘license board’ to track your interaction with brands and retail outlets. The more you invest and participate in this exercise means you could potentially become a Debonair or even a Tastemaker and become endorsed. Open Wardrobe ultimately gives you the opportunity to discover who you want to be within the world of H|S, allowing you to specialise in…
Branding, style consulting, modelling, fashion design, event management, fashion buying, visual merchandising, marketing, model management, fashion agency, retail, PR, fashion journalism and trend forecasting.
One, if not all, of these specialisations will be afforded to you if you invest in the journey that is the ‘license board’. You may think your an amateur, lacking artistic ability, commercial looks or unconnected socially and professionally and could never achieve a job such as these in the real world, but when you realise that you, the user, creates the community of Open Wardrobe anything becomes possible. Could such a specialisation within the application translate into the real working world? Who knows, it really is up to you.
Open Wardrobe is a tool to leverage your creative directing ability to transform your life for the better: divest your wardrobe, explore the roots of your individuality, encounter the fabric of your life while dressing with all the zen mindfulness of an e-samurai in today’s global fashion pandemic.
Q&A
Disciplinary areas?
Communication (Information and Media), Textiles and Fashion, Sociology, Commerce, Gamification, Social Informatics and the ‘Internet of Things’, Data Science and Visualisation, Language and Discourse
What do I intend to achieve, investigate or create?
I plan to create a smart phone application prototype that is the capstone to the research thesis for my prospective honours project and exemplifies and explores the concept and practice of my research.
How do you plan to do this?
I plan to study how to produce simple code for iPhone applications using the iOS Human Interface Guidelines produced by Apple Inc and get a small grant through my university.
Why is my project worth doing?
Fashion isn’t just a game, its a form of information exchange. It is the material with which we draw a representation of ourselves into the cultural context of our lives. But to what extent does it, or can it, leave an impression on our technological imprint? H | S is about tapping into a market that is slowly disintegrating traditional models of purchase motivation. Young people and the rising levels of unemployment mean they are free from immediate financial pressures. Marketers can no longer identify or target this group of young people because their purchasing habits are subtle and misunderstood. How do we tap into a conversation of people, young or old, who want to tell a story through fashion? That is the question Open Wardrobe seeks to interrogate.
What are your main sources?
First hand market research and literature reviews or heuristic analysis.
Check out the visual and theoretical concepts that are informing the progress of ‘Open Wardrobe’ here!
Using Open Wardrobe is meant to be fun, engaging, and encourage a sense of spontaneity, interest, while compelling you to dress for not exactly a political reason but a cultural reason – a cultural reason that is informed by the contemporary mythology that is H | S.
With Open Wardrobe users can engage in a dialogue of wardrobe management with your ‘school’ of users that draw affinity from one of the five families of H|S…
…identifying seasonal staples and brands, and even completely reinventing a users style. It is a communal experience which is manifested through a creative and visual medium that is the application.
Open Wardrobe is about examining the creation of your individual visual identity and how it correlates with the wider social context that is your world. Though the creation and styling of personal image we can install that image in environments such as cities but also at events through user generated street or editorial photography. Become your own creative director and fashion your life according to the principles of the Spring Driving and the world of Open Wardrobe.
Turn Bluetooth on and share with others at evening events or promotional events what you’re wearing and who designed it through Open Wardrobe – almost bypassing the whole media commentary that watches this space and creating a dialogue for yourself with your audience.
Other elements of Open Wardrobe? It’s social calendar organisation and the personal shopper function. The social calendar organisation tool is closely integrated with the map function, essentially giving users of Open Wardrobe the ability to accept invitations to events and browse through the Open Wardrobe of that event to gather a sense of appropriate style and taste for that function. Users can see the ‘Best Dressed List’ for individual locations or seasonal events through the application of Open Wardrobe and have licenses or permits available for the apparel or accessories that were worn by guests at that event, whether they be celebrity or Open Wardrobe tastemaker. By using this function users can garner a feel for what is appropriate attire, what is daring, what is controversial, what is considered beautiful or alluring in the past, and can also inform the user of the formality of the occasion as well as what is trending by users and media right now.
It is here that things get interesting. Dress codes become a form of cross cultural discussion and integration. Western dress codes mix with the archetypes of, say, Japanese or South Korean dress, opening or freeing up the discourse of fashion in these closely guarded and intriguing temples of style overseas.
Language and semantics is also a fun aspect of the application that is Open Wardrobe. Tagging your content becomes a crucial exercise in establishing the language of your style to your ‘school’ and also the community. By being creative, unconventional and absolutely spot on with regard to the description of the style or details of your apparel in the metadata you create for your wardrobe in photos adds fluidity, depth and clarity to the dialogue that is fashion in Open Wardrobe. Ideally the manifestation of culture will provide a backdrop to aid in the creation of possibly a whole new style and fashion language or lingo that is just waiting and begging to be leveraged, understood and subvert our day to day lives as well as the marketing experience to the ocean of demographics that is potentially Open Wardrobe. This language would be explored through a metadata search function which is still in a conceptual phase and would be closely guarded by the developer to sell to marketers. Ideally the lexicon that is fashion and culture would fall like pellets of rain down a visual interface – another possibility of the browser – which could be selected and joined to other key words by users to form a fresh experimental sequence of fashion just waiting to be explored and played with.
The personal shopper function you are given with Open Wardrobe rewards you with the ability to commission other tastemakers in the user community, giving everyone the ability to start an entrepreneurial enterprise in the domain of Open Wardrobe.
Anyone can be anything in Open Wardrobe – exclusivity no longer matters when you know the application and have fun using it!
Interested in finding out more about this application proposal and enterprise development narrative? Use the contact form here or get in touch, like and follow with H | S with any of the social media links provided in the sidebar!
H | S looks forward to hearing from you.