JOANNA WALSH is a writer. Author of twelve books (several co-written with AI that she has coded), she is also an artist and arts activist. From 2023 to 2025, she wrote the monthly fashion column “Theory of Style.”
In her new philosophical history of the internet, Spike’s contributor and former columnist examines how and why creativity became the price of digital existence.
In her last monthly dispatch for Spike, Joanna Walsh asks what’s next for the way we dress. Is it automated, fatally co-opted, or plain too janky to fail?
Dusky purple was widely hyped to be the hue of 2025 – only to be passed over for a tiresome brown. Why would fashion prefer comfort to change?
If no outfit is truly politically neutral, what does one wear for actual resistance?
As fashion continuously cycles between excess and access, who are the industry’s real “insiders”?
Does the fashion show’s linear, modernist form still have a home in the rhizomatic 21st century?
In a culture of eternal returns, how can we channel the buyer’s remorse of the January sales into something more creative?
In an always-optimized world, can “futility wear” offer the solution to utility itself?
If the personal is ultimately political, and fashion sways between self-expression and sameness, what does it really mean to have “personal style”?
When does a fashion item become a trophy? If luxury is just aspirational consumption, then nobody can claim the prize.
Are we feeling nostalgia yet for nostalgia? Autumn’s fashion obsession with novelty may just veil our comfort fix.
What are we looking for in authenticity if faking is our contemporary condition? In a hyperreality without originals, nobody knows your Birkin is a fake.
People used to wear suits on the plane. Now, everyone wears sweatpants and athleisure. What does this have to say about our permanent sense of displacement?
Author, artist, and Spike columnist Joanna Walsh rejects a prestigious German fellowship, in light of the widespread cancellation of academics and cultural workers protesting the genocide in Gaza.
Damage can be an accident, a deliberate style, or a divertissement for the wealthy. So what makes a garment unwearable, and when does a flaw become a subject of desire?
Is “old” in? In an era of Eclectic Grandpas, “elderly” can mean much more than #eccentric, even if aging in the flesh remains unfashionable.
If aesthetics has become the feeling of something rather than an actual something, can we romanticize the intellectualism of Dark Academia while breaking free from its retrograde politics?
If frumpiness is everything fashion doesn’t want to be, what is “post-frump” and how can it save style?
Is luxury just a signifier of wealth, or can it exist without class? As with any fashion phenomenon, what appears like a matter of economy turns out to be a question of gender, too.
Can style be eternal and yet evolve, or are we just addicted to prediction? Joanna Walsh explains why skinny jeans are both in and out, and why it’s impossible to wear what’s actually in fashion.
How can a mid-life autism diagnosis serve as a prompt to stop “masking” and start “dressing?”
Weaving together Phoebe Philo’s solo debut, mythology’s silent women, and Walter Benjamin’s possible take on TikTok.
Why do we dream of a fashion that suits everyone on every occasion? This month, a primer on tactics for bucking social structures larger than your wardrobe.
Does desiring to emulate mean accepting one’s artificial self? And what is truly the difference between looking and being “like”?
How do clothes “become” us? And if the goal is to look effortlessly like ourselves, is style equal to subtraction? A look at what to lose when choosing minimalism.
What do we lack if we lack clothes? An inquiry into whether it’s possible to have style undressed.
We feel either too big or too small for our clothes, overworked by the imperative to make us “fit”: Is this body dysmorphia, or just the dysphoria of late capitalism?
The accelerationism of fast fashion is playing with desire and the seasons themselves, projecting us into an elsewhere that we’ll never venture into.
The first installment of a new monthly column ponders why we yearn for ten-piece wardrobes and call on Derrida to help get us dressed.
Low-res, badly angled, pixilated, over-exposed: Joanna Walsh advocates images that reveal effort and failure – a real body of work, the human in the pixel.
