Art Metropole

#16101

Swiper

Artist

Edwin Tran

Date

2024

Publisher

flāna flāna books

Format

Artists' Books

ISBN

9781069050809

Size

11.1 × 17.8 × 0.6 cm

Length

68 pp

Genre

Contemporary Art, Fashion

In the summer of 2023, after going out for drinks with a man named Joshua whom she met on Tinder, 25-year-old New York City resident Alexis Dougé spent the night with her date back at her Brooklyn apartment—only to find out the next morning that he had stolen her Tabis, a pair of luxury shoes by Maison Margiela. Alexis posted a series of videos on TikTok recounting the unlikely sequence of events, which immediately took social media by storm and sparked an Internet-wide craze for the newly dubbed “Tabi swiper.”

Swiper shines a spotlight on the lore surrounding Maison Margiela’s iconic split-toe silhouette, and its acquired status as a nonconformist symbol adopted by online fashion subcultures—temporarily thrust into the mainstream cultural consciousness as a result of Alexis’s encounter with the Tabi swiper. The publication aggregates found images and ephemera from the Internet, which are juxtaposed with edited transcripts of Alexis’s viral TikTok videos, along with an extensive compilation of tweets making light of the situation. Drawing upon the lineage of Internet-mediated communication, Swiper invites readers to partake in the fleeting digital dialogue which unfolded across social media, stylized in the form of early historical counterparts such as text-based chat clients and message boards.

Edited and designed by Edwin Tran.
Edwin Tran’s Swiper is a 2024 recipient of the Visual Artists: Creation grant from the Toronto Arts Council.