In February 2017, I defended a thesis called Identity Decay – Artificial Worlds. Creation at the Time of Postmodernism.
It was about David Lynch and Thomas Pynchon, about dreams and paranoia, about women who don't fit and worlds that only pretend to be real. I made a fashion collection out of it, red patent, silk and laser-cut vinyl, and then, like most people do with their graduation work, I put it away.
The question itself was older than the thesis. I first wrote about postmodernism in film in high school, for my final exams, and it stayed my favorite subject all the way to my diploma.
Nine years later, I opened it again.
This week, I began writing here about artificial worlds as they look today: AI models, synthetic faces, images that were never photographed. Before going any further, I wanted to go back to the place where those questions first found me.
And I found, almost word for word, the map of everything I write about here. Five worlds, drawn long before I had a name for any of them.
Even the name of this section, Artificial Worlds, comes from the title of that thesis.
So I decided to write the thesis again. Not as a student trying to prove she has read enough, but as the woman I've become, who has lived a little more inside these questions.
I. INNER WORLD
The self is not something you find
David Lynch once said, in so many words, that the human mind is a labyrinth. A well without a bottom. None of us really knows ourselves completely.
At twenty-something, I found that thought thrilling. Today, I find it comforting.
In Lost Highway, a jazz musician sits in a prison cell and, without explanation, becomes someone else. A different man, a different life, the same woman played by the same actress under another name. Nobody in the film knows how it happened. Neither do we. Lynch never tells us which version is real, because that isn't the point. The point is that a person can contain more than one life.
Rimbaud wrote it more than a century earlier: I is another.
My thesis leaned on Zygmunt Bauman, who described modern identity as something we no longer inherit. We have to create it, and we never get to own it for good. It stays fluid, temporary, always in progress.
To explain it, my thesis even borrowed from writing about computer games, where a self is something you choose and put on. In 2017, that was a footnote. Today, we call it an avatar.
When I first read that, I took it as a warning. A description of a fragile, fragmented age.
Now I read it as freedom.
If the self isn't fixed, then neither are our wounds, our roles, our old stories. We are not a statue to be discovered. We are a work in progress, rewritten every time we choose differently.
The self is not something you find.
It's something you keep making.
II. OUTER WORLD
What we wear is a sentence
The second part of my thesis was about society, and about the women who don't quite belong to it.
My heroine was Audrey Horne from Twin Peaks. A girl balancing on the edge of what her world considered inappropriate, building a reality of her own. A reality that let her see more, and see through the hypocrisy of the town around her. She was brave, impulsive, hungry for more than others wanted. Strong, and yet alone. Everyone thought she was a little mad. Somehow, she was the only one who didn't lose her mind.
I designed my collection for her. For women who are something between a femme fatale, a businesswoman and a lost child, in a world that doesn't forgive difference.
The sociologist Georg Simmel believed that the way we treat fashion, whether we follow it, exaggerate it, lead it or reject it, shows exactly where we place ourselves in society. Clothes are never just clothes. They are a sentence we say before we speak.
So I took the most obedient garments I could think of, the tailored jacket and the pressed trouser, and made them disobey. Silk suit trousers built like jeans. A formal silhouette in shiny patent. Neither formal nor sporty. A garment that could be a mask hiding a misfit, or a manifesto declaring one.
Nothing was wasted. I cut the appliqués by laser from silk, vinyl and reclaimed leather, so that even the smallest offcuts could become part of a garment, and fabric left full of holes became pockets and a vinyl vest.
Graduate collection Identity Decay, 2017. Photo: Klaudyna Młynarska.
Gombrowicz wrote that we can only ever escape one form by running into another.
I still believe that. We never stand outside the language of appearances.
But we can choose what we say with it.
III. THE INVISIBLE
When the world seems to speak
In Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a woman named Oedipa Maas starts noticing a strange symbol: a muted post horn. On walls, on trash cans, in songs, in misprints on stamps. Slowly, ordinary California turns into a coded message. She can't shake the feeling that the world is trying to tell her something important.
In Twin Peaks, Agent Cooper solves a murder by following his dreams.
My thesis asked a question I couldn't answer then: are these characters guided by something greater, by an extraordinary intuition, or are they simply paranoid, seeing plots where there is only chance?
Postmodern art refuses to choose. It lets both be true.
I've lived with that question for nine years now, and here is what I've learned. The line between intuition and paranoia isn't drawn by the signs themselves. It's drawn by what they do to us.
Paranoia makes the world smaller. Every sign becomes a threat, every coincidence a trap.
Intuition makes the world larger. Every sign becomes an invitation.
There's a beautiful passage in my thesis, quoted from Ihab Hassan's reading of Joyce: in dreams, we use all the symbols of humanity, without restraint or limit.
That's what the invisible is to me now. Not a conspiracy hiding behind reality, but a language running underneath it. Symbols, dreams, the strange feeling of being guided.
For me, that feeling is not a metaphor. I have lived by intuition and by the voices of my guides for years. It is simply how I work. I don't believe in coincidence. I believe the universe stands behind every step, even the ones that only make sense years later.
Graduate collection Identity Decay, 2017. Photo: Klaudyna Młynarska.
The task isn't to decode everything.
It's to stay open without losing yourself.
IV. THE SOURCE
The hunger for something certain
Underneath all those labyrinths, my thesis kept returning to one very old human need.
We have always searched for the laws that govern the world. For a higher order, a first cause. As Olga Tokarczuk observed, writing about The Matrix and recalling Husserl, the search for certainty is one of the defining traits of Western culture. We doubt everything in the hope of finally arriving at something we cannot doubt.
Postmodernism suspected there might be nothing to arrive at. Only layers, mirrors and boxes inside boxes.
But hidden inside my thesis was another idea, one that I barely noticed back then and that now feels like the quiet seed of this whole site. Hassan wrote that in Joyce's dream-world, cause and effect fold into each other, and eternity and the present moment meet in what he called an Infinite Now, much as they do in mystical traditions. He also wrote that the creative process, like the Holy Spirit, moves through every form of expression and unites them.
I didn't know it then, but I had already written down the name of this blog.
Notes on Eternity.
The source, for me, isn't a final answer at the end of a long argument. It's the place where creation happens. The moment when something that did not exist begins to exist, through a sentence, a sketch, a seam.
Every time we create, we touch it.
V. ARTIFICIAL WORLDS
The copy without an original
And then there was Baudrillard.
His idea of the simulacrum was the heart of my thesis: an image that no longer imitates reality, because it has replaced it. Signs that no longer point to anything real, but behave as if they were. Disneyland, he said. The social life of photography. Pop culture as a whole. A world doubled by its own reflection, until we can no longer tell which side of the mirror we're standing on.
In 2017, this felt like theory.
In 2026, it's a Tuesday.
We scroll through faces softened by filters, holidays staged for an audience, lives edited into highlights. We talk to machines that answer like people. We are surrounded by images that look more real than reality and point to nothing at all.
In Lost Highway, Fred refuses to own a video camera. He likes to remember things his own way, he says, not necessarily the way they happened. In 2017, it was the confession of a jealous man. Today, it is the brief behind every beauty filter.
What I didn't know, standing in front of the committee that February, was that within months the copy without an original would get a face. First, a photographer in London created Shudu, a digital model who would soon be called the world's first digital supermodel. That fall, researchers at Nvidia published portraits of people who had never existed, generated by a machine that had studied thousands of photographs of real faces. By the end of the year, a new word had appeared online: deepfake.
I quoted Baudrillard in a thesis about films and novels. Within a few years, his theory had become a production tool. Today a fashion campaign can show a woman who was never born, and the only sign that she isn't real may be a line of small print in the corner. I wrote about that earlier this week, in The Synthetic Campaign.
There is one more detail I only understood now. For the photo shoot of that collection, I cast real twin sisters. Instead of the usual flash, we worked with continuous film lights, filtered through vinyl I had laser-cut myself, until the whole set glowed red like a room from a Lynch film. One sister wore a blazer of natural silk, the other a top of synthetic vinyl. The same face in two materials, one grown, one made. It was my answer to Rimbaud's I is another, and to Mulholland Drive, where by the end you can no longer tell which woman is which. Back then, it was a visual idea about doubling and identity. Today, fashion brands create digital twins of models, copies that can work while the original sleeps.
Mine were both born.
Graduate collection Identity Decay, 2017. Photo: Klaudyna Młynarska. Models: Klaudia and Sonia Żogała.
So what did my younger self conclude, after a whole thesis spent wandering through these artificial worlds?
I went back and found it. After all the films and books, I wrote that the only authentic thing in postmodernism, the only thing we cannot doubt, are the emotions we actually feel. The characters' emotions. And our own.
I had forgotten I'd written that.
But it's exactly what I believe now.
In a world that can copy anything, what you feel is still yours. It can't be filtered, generated or faked from the inside. It's the one compass that keeps working when the map stops making sense.
A machine can generate a face that moves us. It cannot be moved.
My thesis ended with one more piece of advice, almost hidden in a paragraph about paranoia: don't let yourself be overwhelmed by the density of it all. Keep believing that something else, something different, can still happen.
I couldn't have written a better brief for my own life.
Epilogue
People often hide their early work. They're embarrassed by how much they didn't know.
I'm surprised by how much I did.
Looking back, I can see that I might have become who I am today a little sooner. But I've stopped arguing with the timing of my life. Everything happens for a reason, even the long way around.
I was often misunderstood back then. The head of my department questioned my work openly. He felt that what I was doing had nothing to do with fashion.
I couldn't disagree more.
Nine years later, the argument has settled itself. Synthetic models appear in Vogue. Fashion brands build digital twins of real people. Faces that were never born sell clothes to people who were. The questions I was told had nothing to do with fashion have become some of its most urgent ones.
Ever since I was a child, I've been fascinated by people and by the processes that shape a society. That's why, in my first year, I chose sociology as my leading humanities subject, and I kept studying it for the next four years, right up to my diploma. To me, nothing in the modern world can be understood without sociology, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Fashion least of all. It's one of the most human things we make. And now that machines can make images, understanding people is the one part of design they cannot take over.
As I understood it, this was exactly the idea behind our school. Its founder, Piotr Voelkel, believed that design should grow out of an understanding of people, and I still think that's the truest description of what design is and why it exists.
I remember my supervisor, Dr. Anita Basińska, with so much warmth. At times, she felt like one of the very few people in the world who truly understood me, and who knew how much the humanities shape our lives. I liked and respected her enormously. She let me be myself, and I'm still grateful for that.
Because I am many layers at once. I've never only thought about how to make an object. I think about how to build a better world and how to help others, and everything I create today is my attempt to bring those needs into form.
Everything I write about now, identity, the invisible, the source, artificial worlds, fashion as a language, was already there.
Questions are welcome. Dialogue, always. But I no longer let anyone dismiss the vision itself.
Everything is connected. Everything is energy. We are all one.
One drop, yet the whole ocean.
For the greater good.
xx, Laura
If this note stayed with you, you might also like The Synthetic Campaign, on AI, authorship and where synthetic images belong in fashion.
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