The GLITCH: UTOPIA/FEAR 2027 runway show explores how contemporary technologies — generative AI, facial recognition, ambient surveillance, recommendation algorithms, cryptocurrency, and online betting — utilize the aesthetics of bodies and garments to shape how they are understood and made desirable. In particular, UTOPIA/FEAR examines how these technologies appropriate fashion and garments to evoke bodily anxieties and fantasies of optimization, beauty, safety, control, and transcendence. Drawing on the practice of useful art, the GLITCH show flips the gaze back by repurposing those same aesthetic conventions. It will use experimental fashion garments to first reveal, and then interrogate, how technological systems borrow cultural ideals of gender, sexiness, embodiment, and intimacy to normalize their power and acceptance. The 2027 runway presentation will be supported by year-round designer programming, digital and physical garment archiving, and small-scale exhibitions.

We aim to bring designers and the public together in San Francisco to examine how fashion is often utilized to aestheticize and legitimize technology — and how fashion can, in turn, expose, contest, and reshape the power those technologies carry. We support Bay Area designers — especially early-career artists — in developing ambitious garments and producing fashion work that need not be constrained by commercial or retail viability, allowing garments to function instead as vehicles for artistic experimentation and cultural critique. GLITCH reasserts fashion’s and the runway’s ability to act as a public forum in San Francisco, creating space for experimental fashion to become an ideological counterweight to the technological forces reshaping our garments, bodies, and everyday lives.

GLITCH is a member of Intersection for the Arts.

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