hi everyone~

so recently, spanky from dotdotcurve has come under a bit of fire on instagram over allegations that his recent merch is AI generated. spanky, if u see this just know that we are fans of ur music and we dont care if ur personally using AI or not <3

but with this discussion happening in the scene, we thought it would be a good time to explain why we specifically (as a brand), do not use AI generated art on our clothing

(quick edit: spanky made a statement officially refuting the AI allegations but we werent trying to make a call out anyway, we just wanted to add our thoughts on AI art while it was a hot topic, pun absolutely intended)

yes, AI generated art is bad for artists, but that’s not actually the reason we don’t use it. 

it’s because the artists we hire are genuinely amazing at what they do and their quality of work simply CANNOT be replicated by AI.

yes, we have experimented with AI art generation before and the truth is that it’s completely awful for our purposes because all it does is make rough amalgamations of pre-existing art. its totally incapable of coming up with with any designs that are actually original. 

let me explain further, specifically in relation to scene fashion

while most ppl think of ‘scene’ as a product of the late 2000s, the truth is that it never truly disappeared and both the culture and fashion have changed over the years. 

if u dont believe me, go check out the scene queens from the myspace/stickcam days and compare the make-up, hair, outfit colour theory to the scenefluencers on instagram now. liek, obviously the normies can’t tell, but if u follow us then u probably love emo and scene fashion so u dont need us to explain to u how the look and culture has evolved from the underage metalcore gig and band tee era of the late 2000s, to the late myspace and Tumblr era ‘scemo’ look and beyond. 

anyway, the point is that while we take a lot of inspiration from the past, we also wanna take things in a new direction, both in a business and fashion sense. and this wouldn’t be possible if not for spacehey itself, which is in many ways a much better website than myspace ever was (nostalgia aside). 

liek, do u know how bad online security was back then? businesses like us didn’t (and couldn’t) exist on myspace because the online infrastructure wasn’t there to support it. 2FA wasn’t even a thing. sorry im rambling~

ANYWAY, so while we borrow a lot from the y2k era, we genuinely believe that we r doing something new and exciting by creating a fashion collective that operates on a non-algorithm based platform.

and this same concept applies to our designs - even more so. 

so here’s our actual process for hiring artists: we look for talented alt designers, then we give them a general concept and get them to interpret it with their own unique style, thus ensuring each one of our designs is totally original (and gorgeous). we think this is a better way of doing things than most companies, because all our designs come straight from the heart, instead of being micromanaged by a dumb marketing team based on what some algorithm says people want

not only is that against our philosophy as a brand, but we feel it goes against the values of the culture we represent. liek, there was no algorithm to suggest that putting fry screaming and autotune vocals over crunk beats would be popular, but brokencyde did it and it WORKED. there was no algorithm to suggest that adding synth elements into metalcore would be popular, but attack attack did it and it WORKED. that’s what REAL ART is all about, u get what im sayin? 

so a big thank you to Scen3Qu33n✧˖° and franko.ink, because the work you two do is so unique that there’s simply no way we could ever replace you with AI (or with any other designer for that matter). 

and we apply the same philosophy to the models we hire. Like, how amazing is Justin Moon’s fit here? 

we didn’t just hire him coz he’s hawt (I mean that in a professional way not a thirsty way, lol) but because the fits he comes up with are so awsm that we were like, yes, we want this for our brand! even if we generated a photorealistic AI model, we would never get a fit that looks this damn good. 

so ye, hopefully u understand our philosophy around originality and how it relates to AI generation in our designs. 

despite us being a new brand and having such a small following, companies with much bigger names and much more capital (not gonna say who at this point) have already started ripping off aspects of our business model and our designs (some of which were publicly viewable for months before we actually launched our social media). all these ‘marketing experts’ actually do is look for trends in algorithms and run meta ads, so keep stealing our ideas, we dont care, u couldn’t come up with a single original idea even if ur life depended on it ;)

so stay tuned for what we’re doing in 2025, coz all of the new designs and we’re releasing and all the new promotions we’re doing are gonna blow your thigh-highs off

xoxo