Editorial

Analogue | END. AW18 Editorial .03

Troubled by the intensity of these dreams, and desperate to satisfy his obsession with Mars, Quaid visits a facility called Rekall which specialises in memory implantation designed to offer you the inter-planetary vacation of your dreams for a fraction of the price of the real thing. Determined to experience the planet that has been plaguing his dreams, Quaid opts to undergo this false memory procedure at Rekall. During the implantation process, an undetermined sensory trigger recovers fragments in Quaid's memory and his dreams of the red planet begin to make sense.

Douglas Quaid isn't Douglas Quaid.

The audience grips the arms of their chairs as Schwarzenegger's character sets out to discover his true identity: Carl Hauser, a rogue secret agent whose memory was erased by a covert government agency after he uncovered damning proof of corruption at the top of the Martian regime.

What happens to Quaid at Rekall is one of science fiction's most potent examples of the Proust Effect: a sensory experience which ignites a specific neural pathway to awaken visceral memories lying dormant in our psyche. A ubiquitous aspect of the human experience, our senses play an indelible role in connecting us to our past. Each passing sound or smell or taste can lay claim to the curious ability to transport us to a particular moment in our memory, like the hippocampus' equivalent of copying and pasting a file path into Finder to pull up the requisite files.

For millennials, perhaps the most universal example of this sensory nostalgia is hearing the jarring sequence of dial-up broadband. That discordant remix of the traditional dial tone has become the Proustian icon of an entire generation. An instantly identifiable relic from a time before phone lines and internet connection could coexist, this 30-second soundbite looped inconspicuously in the background, quietly becoming the inadvertent soundtrack of our youth.

Exploring the Proust Effect brought on by pre-digital technologies, END. presents Analogue: a nostalgia-heavy editorial inspired by the bygone era of Windows 95 and floppy disk backup systems. When disposable cameras and Sony Walkmans were the coveted technology-du-jour, and the latest MMORPG existed on a cartridge you had to blow into to clear out the dust. Shone through END.'s distinctive lens, Analogue pays tribute to the transitionary time that echoes in the collective millennial memory, when tapes gave way to CDs gave way to iPods and making a mixtape swapped from the careful art of tape-to-tape recording to the viral minefield of peer-to-peer file sharing on questionable platforms like LimeWire and Kazaa.

Featuring a careful distillation of emerging and established labels, each putting a tech-heavy spin on 90s nostalgia this season, END. frames two decades of unprecedented technological development by shooting this season's grails in retrograde style. Combining the latest drops from ADER error, Givenchy, Cav Empt, NAPA by Martine Rose, and more, END. rediscovers analogue-era style with graphic 32-bit prints, louche silhouettes, and retro sportswear detailing.

Analogue reinvents the hand-me-down style codes that raised a generation. Analogue remembers when DVD killed the VHS star.

Check out Applied Utility | END. AW18 Editorial .01 and New Milan | END. AW18 Editorial .02

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writerEuan Smart
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