11 February 2022

The graphic on the Fashion.at gym bag promotes the possibility of receiving news via RSS feed readers

Yesterday, Fashion.at's first gym bag arrived from a textile printer in Vienna. Backpacks or t-shirts with versions of the logo either printed, embroidered or made with simple stitches have been produced in the last decades since the magazine about fashion and culture was first published in 1996. But it's a premiere that Fashion.at printed a sujet developed from the magazine's logo on a sack.

The gym sack is a standard product from the textile printer's range of basics. The print was ordered online via an easy to use application for customizations. Before the online order, the sujet had to be adapted to the format, the height and width of the printable area. The original motif is currently used for responsive display ads which run worldwide for the promotion of the fashion.at/feeds/ and the communication of the possibility to receive news via RSS feed readers. With RSS, it's possible to design your own information stream with some selected sources like daily newspapers, magazines, or blogs and get out of your social media filter bubble or AI directed news streams. It's easy to find recommendations online for the best feed readers; one of them is for example feeder.co which has a browser extension and is in its basic version free.

The gym sack is a backpack which keeps your hands free. The idea of free hands fits the analog-like way to orchestrate the daily news consumption without AI sorting. It's in the users' hands which sources they trust. Users don't get news from sources without adding them before. RSS beginners will find out that around ten sources, each with several news per hour is probably too much. This is the disadvantage of not pre-sorted news streams. So, curated RSS news won't replace AI content delivery but it's an additional option to receive news from selected important media and for staying in touch with for example organizations you are interested in with the benefit of reducing email traffic caused by newsletters.

The original symbol for RSS can be found online in many variations. The basic symbol is a dot with two arcs - a white dot and two white arcs on orange. In many cases, the colors are reversed like at the gym bag sujet. The Fashion.at logo appears multiple times like speech bubbles (the messages) that dynamically propagate from the point towards through the arcs (through RSS).