and cyberspace, but it does so in order to reveal their rootedness in an ancient, mythic past.

White’s opera may venture into virtual realities, A.I. It’s an attempt at autonomy and use-value.” Opera is concerned with time and history. Take a simple nylon bag: if you put a name on it then its exchange-value changes. “Its aesthetic is based on the need to change the value of things. “Fashion is about intervention, it’s spatial,” Alastair expounds. In conversation, Alastair explains that the ancient, poisoned robe which gives the opera its title is a symbol of the theory behind the work, a fusion of its infinitely shifting contingencies.

Rooted in new materialist philosophy, ROBE is an attempt to, in White’s words, overcome the space-time dialectic of postmodern culture, and to create a synthesis which marks the age of “post-truth and the end of Enlightenment”. If Rousseau, Marx, Einstein, Lacan and Bill Gates were to collaborate on an opera, what would they create? Perhaps something not unlike ROBE by the Scottish composer and writer Alastair White – a futuristic ‘fashion-opera’ which was first performed during the 2019 Tête-à-Tête festival and has now been recorded and released on the M é tier label by Divine Art Records.

Space opera fashion