Relay Column: Is It Fashion to Dress Up an Avatar? The Subtle Role of the Body (Shinji Matsunaga)

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PROFILE

Shinji Matsunaga

Associate professor at the Kyoto University Faculty of Letter, specializing in Media Cultural Studies. His specialty is aesthetics and game studies. His works include "ビデオゲームの美学" (literally: "Video Game Aesthetics," 2018, Keio University Press), translated works include Jesper Juul's "Half-real" (2016, New Games Order), Nelson Goodman's "Languages of Art" (2017, Keio University Press), and Miguel Sicart's "Play Matters" (2019, Film Art Society).

Fashion is About Decorating Our Own Bodies

Whether it's fashion, interior design, or website design, the idea that something is "stylish" when it is decorated to look nice, using material, is the same. Clothing adorns the body, interior design adorns the room, and web design adorns the structure of a web page with clothes, furniture, and CSS, respectively.

In such a culture where "being stylish" is valued, are there any unique features of fashion? The first answer that comes to mind would be that fashion is unique in that it decorates one's own body. The main points emphasized by this "own body" phrase are believed to be roughly divided into two.

The first is that you cannot choose your body as the material for being stylish. You can move to a room with better conditions, and you can change the structure of a web page as you like (at least within the range of required features). In contrast, your body, while it allows for some degree of processing, cannot fundamentally be altered or exchanged. As a result, there is a restriction in fashion that you must use the unique material given in a non-selectable form to be stylish.

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