In March 2021, Dolce and Gabbana (D&G) showed its women's fall/winter 21 collection in a windowless, audienceless, mirrored fantasia of flashing lights glancing off reflective surfaces. The video showed models sweeping down the runway in shiny metallic garb, glossy white robots rolling along beside them. One “MC” robot seemed to be running the show, strobing lights, and pulsing the music with dramatic sweeps of its humanoid hands. The COVID-19 pandemic may have nixed the customary live show, but not the futuristic exuberance of the presentation. Ostensibly informed by “robotics research and Artificial Intelligence,” D&G's Instagram (@dolcegabbana, 3/1/21) claimed that this collection was “an attempt to reveal how technology and craftsmanship, two apparently different worlds” can come together. By eliding the notion that technology is craftmanship, the post invokes a rift in signification that has far-reaching consequences.

The idea that high fashion and high tech are mutually exclusive has a long history. Fashion, traditionally associated with the feminine, is a luxury world of silk, fur, and leather. The “hand” of a fabric, its feel to the touch, is just as important as how it drapes or looks on the body. The notion of “handmade” is also highly valued, evoking images of patient seamstresses painstakingly beading a one-of-a-kind creation. As the organizers of the 2016 Manus x Machina show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aptly pointed out, the “oppositional relationship” of the “hand/machine dichotomy” (Bolton and Cope, 2016, p. 9) has governed the culture of fashion since the birth of haute couture in the mid-19th century.

While the curators of the Machina show ultimately asserted that this dichotomy is false, its semiotic power remains. The apparently “different worlds” of machine technology versus human-centered craft is deeply felt in the culture of fashion, profoundly shaping its practices. The symbolic resonance of this dichotomy runs deep, in part because it dovetails so seamlessly with broader divides cleaving the culture at large— the traditional oppositions of soft and hard sciences; nature and culture; emotion and reason; female and male.