Screen Test #3: Zippers ASMR
An ASMR Study on the Zipper Featuring Saint Laurent, Dsquared2, Loewe, and More
Shot at our headquarters in Montreal and inspired by the videos of Andy Warhol, the SSENSE “Screen Test” series is a way to evaluate the camera-readiness of our products.For this season, SSENSE has invited photographer Rebecca Storm to create a series of Screen Tests inspired by the ASMR video genre. Short for “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response,” ASMR videos explore objects as objects, especially the spine-tingling sensations evoked by the sounds of crinkling paper, brushing hair, and hushed whispers. They occupy the grey terrain between the digital and the bodily, broadcasting Internet-induced head massages to hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers.Featuring styles from Saint Laurent, Loewe, Dsquared2, and Kara, Storm directs our attention to the unmistakable sound of the zipper, a design feature that evokes security, relaxation, and sexuality.
Thom Browne’s Pet Passion A Dachshund-Shaped Bag Reveals Menswear’s Secret Canine DNA Sleek and alarmingly slender, the dachshund has been a men’s style muse for decades. Its presence has a power that has been harnessed by a select group, which counts Andy Warhol, E.B. White, David Hockney, and Thom Browne as card-carrying dachshund owners. Imagine this: The four men are sitting around a table at the legendary Bemelman’s Bar in New York. It’s late, they’ve outlasted the other patrons, with empty martini glasses as an explanation for their boisterous laughter. 
Alexander McQueen’s Brutal Gravity A Platform Sneaker by the London-Based Brand Closes the Spectrum Between Beauty, Brutality, and the Everyday The big, blunt lines of brutalism are dominating modern design. And now in everyday life, we find ourselves being gravitationally attracted to the presence of weight and bulk. This can be seen in our increasingly modular cars, that look forced rather than sculpted into existence, or in rough-hewn spaces like the new Tate Modern building where you can consume art safely within its bunker-like brickwork. 
This Bag Is Your Emoji Fendi’s Expressive Monsters Reiterate That There Is No Such Thing as a Guilty Pleasure in Fashion Fendi ’s Monster Eyes backpack reveals that “creature” is a portmanteau of “create” and “culture.” The bag builds off the emoji, the wordless tongue now dominating today’s social interactions. These smiling cats, melancholic leaves, and salacious eggplants standardly react to the human experience without having to really feel the sentiments at play. This dissociative rhetoric has become the building block of global communication, primed for informal propositions turned Insta-trends turned fashion phenomena.