If I Ran the Fashion World, People Would Probably Not Let Me Run the Fashion World

Here's my idea of fashion - Data Chic. As I defined it in a hazy-headed 4chan post on /fa/:

Data Chic: Beauty is semantic and linked. Aestheticism is determined by meaning; the visual representation of data as art and its integration with existing traditional methods of meaning-making, such as a cheongsam.

Permutations of a Data Chic pattern (QR Code) applied to Cheongsam:

Reminds me of houndstooth, only more meaningful (to me). But that's to be expected, as I am utterly lost in the world of fashion; it makes total sense that I'd try to forge ahead by trying to do something which seems meaningful to me. Result: probable disaster. Yet I am strangely attracted by the concept nonetheless. Certainly there are others that could do it better.

Chances are this will make it into a cyberpunk fiction of mine, although I already had one iteration of fashion that I thought worked really well in that milieu - Office Krieg. Office Krieg is, in my mind's eye, a sort of punk appropriation of totalitarian military (specifically 1930's and '40s Wermacht and Soviet) orthography to traditional office wear - as appropriate for any future where one's affiliation with a mega-zaibatsu is one's livelihood AND de-facto nationality, and intra/inter-office warfare is not always a metaphorical term. Typified by a woman in one of my short stories who dressed in a tight black leather skirt worn just above the knees, white dress blouse with a military cut, lapels and chest pockets, knee-high jack boots, and no jewelry other than perhaps a black wristwatch and black metal stud earrings.

Apparently in my worlds, everything is black and white! Of course that need not be; imagine the above cheongsams in any shade you like, and of course Office Krieg, while more limited by its heritage, is to be found in all the shades of the office (white, black, gray, heather, navy) and field (charcoal, taupe, khaki, tan, forest green).

The only thing left is to flesh out the sorts that would wear such things, and the world that would compel them to.