In the cyberdelic daze of 1995, I was part of a group of San Francisco riot nrrrds and fashion designers, including my now wife Kelly Sparks, who staged what was likely the first fashion show transmitted over the Internet. My dear friend Ani Phyo produced the whole shebang, called Fiber, with experimental video house Dimension7 at their SoMa warehouse space. Eric Paulos streamed the show onto the Internet in real-time via CU-See-Me over the Mbone. Michael Dates made some deeply weird installation art. See the full list of credits here. As it was San Francisco in the early 1990s, the entire thing was woven into a ravey multimedia trip with DJs, live psychedelic video mixing, and plenty of, er, entheogenic energy. Above, a news report from the scene directed by Jennifer Paige.
From the original press release penned by yours truly:
On Saturday, October 14, 1995, a party called Fiber will weave together the digital technology of today with the fashion designs of tomorrow in a presentation of new work by Bay Area artists. Fiber shifts away from the traditional fashion show paradigm by showcasing the garments in the sensory-overloading environment they were created to be worn in. Models are replaced with dancers, runways with podiums. Transmedia artists, laser technicians, DJs, and musicians are working with the fashion designers to create a pure thoughtspace celebrating creativity, collaboration and global communication via the Internet. A team of videographers will shoot the festivities, mix the images with surreal prerecorded footage, textual messages, and computer animation produced on-the-fly, and project the visual blends as hypnotic electric wallpaper. The entire psychedelic spectacle will be transmitted onto both a World Wide Web page and over the Internet in real time for viewing with CU-SeeMe desktop videoconferencing software. The Fiber Collective embraces computers and the Internet as empowering tools enabling individuals to generate and distribute their own media content without the need for deep-pocketed middlemen. The process is the product.
