THE HYPER-BAROQUE SELF

Purple #45 S/S 2026 (The New Glamour Issue) Essay by Aleph Molinari From the baroque excesses of 17th-century art to the algorithmic self-optimization of social media, this text traces how digital capitalism has turned glamour into a compulsive performance of a staged self, severing us from the embodied experience of inhabiting the world. The way out, is not a new image but a new paradigm: the grotesque, the anti-aesthetic, the analog, and our reflection through the other, not screens.