Out of any fashion metaphor, in ‘Stockmarket Skirt‘ the stock exchange determines the dress characteristics. This installation by the media artist Nancy Paterson stages ‘Judy’, a manikin with a dress whose hem changes dynamically, accordingly to the Stock Exchange’s trends. The ‘skirt’ at issue changes its length accordingly to the Yahoo Inc.’s quotation’s, i.e. their rise or fall. The values are updated from the net every five seconds and then processed through a customized Perl script. The results are turned into electric impulses that activate a mechanism, similar to the stage’s curtains’ one, able to raise or lower the the dress’ hem. The data trend is visualized on five monitors that surround Judy, and the skirt’s movement is supervised by a webcam connected to the Patterson’s website. The project’s basic principle is the ‘Wall Street Lore’, formulated by Morris and Gauss: the better the market the nuder the legs. During periods of economical depression the women’s dress hem are lowered and the colors disappears, while during the economic growth trend, skirt and trousers are short and multicoloured. The artist thinks that her work can be interpreted from a twofold perspective. The first is a ‘Cyberfeminist Fashion Statement’, that states how is much more simpler to get rid of the gender roles in a virtual environment. In the real world women are considered as objects and consumers, whereas men, hidden behind the technology, determines the economy, rather than suffering it. The second perspective is to bring out the the internet interactive potential. The user is not a passive voyeur because he can buy shares online, varying the skirt’s length. If the feminist interpretations belongs to the Cultural Studies’ tradition (strong in the Canadian school where Paterson studied), the interactive one is so common for the contemporary media artists. But the installation is a truly original one in the fashion exhibition’s context, so eager of interactive contents. A good example is Jerwood: Fashion, Film and Fiction, but here the only interactivity is about trying the dresses. The Stock Market Skirt can’t be dressed because of its mechanical structure and the lack of a wireless connection between the computer and the motors. But if the project will be developed with this focus it’d give the term ‘interactive fashion’ a real sense.

Valentina Culatti