DECEMBER 16, 2025
4 MIN READ
Screens, Streets, and the Space Between
The Hybrid Aesthetic Redefining Fashion
At its core, transhumanism is a philosophical and technological project: the belief that the next chapter of human evolution might not be defined by natural selection, but by human-directed enhancement. Enhanced senses, extended cognition, bio-optimizing technologies — all are gestures toward an “upgraded humanism.” While critics argue about ethics and equity, designers and artists are already playing with its aesthetics.
But there’s another, eerier expression of this unease unfolding on runways and film sets. On some fashion stages today, makeup and prosthetics do not merely highlight cheekbones or dramatize eyes; they entangle the human body with technology in grotesque, arresting ways. Think of medals and gaming tech fused under skin, or an iPhone embedded into a chest, streaming glitchy signal like some electric lifeblood. These imagistic acts are not spectacle for spectacle’s sake. They are visual metaphors — visceral cues of a collective anxiety about what it means to be human when the life we inhabit feels increasingly defined by devices, interfaces, and digital presence.
Digital work by Frederik Heyman
This is not superficial play. Special effects makeup — long a tool for embodying fear in cinema — is now articulating a near-future cybernetic sensibility. Historically, SFX has dramatized decay, mutation, or alien otherness to confront deep social anxieties. Today, the anxiety is not about alien invasion but about integration: bodies that are not threatened by technology but gradually subsumed by it.
Transhumanism and this emerging aesthetic share a paradoxical quality: both promise a future more powerful than the present, yet both mirror cultural fears about loss — of autonomy, of identity, even of embodiment. This duality is what makes the current moment so compelling. It’s not simply that technologies like wearables, AR overlays, or biointerfaces are entering the body’s sphere; it’s that they are reshaping how we perceive ourselves. As our online identities accrue metrics — followers, badges, digital accomplishments — those intangible measures begin to feel as real as any physical attribute.
SFX make-up by echo seireeni
Where once the fashion body was about representation — how beauty and form are constructed and consumed — now it gestures toward extension: what bodies might become when they are no longer bounded by skin and bone alone. In digital fashion, designers use virtual tools and data not only to simulate garments but to imagine bodies that are phygital, simultaneously physical and algorithmic. Designers who once shaped cloth now collaborate with software, 3D spaces, and cyber-networks, effectively blurring the boundary between human and machine.
Perhaps the most striking sign that this is no longer speculative is how commonplace the language has become. “Internet of Bodies,” “phygital,” “bio-integration” — these terms circulate not only in tech think tanks but in editorial pitches and design talks. And soon, as the aesthetics on runways and in fashion films seep into broader visual culture, they will shape public imagination in ways that outpace scholarly debate.
Yet beneath the technophilia and the tech-infused skin lies a deeper question: what do we fear, and what do we hope for, when we imagine the human body remade? Transhumanism promises augmentation and extension. The SFX-rendered future, by contrast, often feels like a cautionary hallucination — a reminder of the tenuous line between enhancement and erasure. That tension is not a glitch; it’s the signal itself: a cultural transmission encoding our collective unease and aspiration.
In the end, fashion — that most dynamic register of cultural desires — might be the earliest, and most honest, translator of this emerging condition. It tells us that the body is no longer a fixed entity, but a narrative in motion: shaped by technology, reflected in screens, and understood as much through data as through touch. The transhuman turn is not somewhere ahead of us. It is already here — worn on skin, coded in media, and circulating through our imaginations as we continue to ask the same urgent question, reframed for the age of integration: What does it mean to be human when humanity itself is reconfigured?
Article written by Andrés Avella