The History of the Visible Self: From Icons to Instagram

What This Project Is About and How to Navigate It

"The History of the Visible Self: From Icons to Instagram" is a series of texts about how, over several centuries, we have traveled from people with a "label above their head" to people with an avatar for the camera.

The project draws on art history, textile development, books about fashion, and research on how vision works. But at the center are not things or trends, but the question: what does clothing do to our sense of self?

👉 If you want to read a short version with just the final conclusions, you can skip directly to the project's concluding text — it brings all the centuries together into one line.

We look at paintings, fabrics, and dress codes not as "fashion of the past," but as a mechanism that slowly rewired the psyche.

Project Structure: Centuries and Themes

Each text is structured the same way:

• what new things painting learned to do;
• how paints and fabrics changed;
• what this set in motion in dress codes (especially women's);
• and what psychological knot was ultimately tied.