Chromilio

The yield collapsed when they stopped printing shadows, when everyone started dressing like screensavers and no one remembered cotton had a memory, when fabric lost conductivity and wallets started breathing, when shoes got uploaded and the sidewalks began logging footsteps as metadata, when the mannequins learned to blink and the malls became religious sites for shell companies, where teenagers would kneel in front of empty display cases praying to be perceived by an algorithm with taste, but the taste got corrupted, hijacked by a failed firmware update called desire, and suddenly everything that wasn't glowing became obsolete, and people started selling their reflections for rent, leasing their jawlines to bots in exchange for verified loneliness, and every outfit became a confession, every garment a cursed contract bound to a liquidity pool of stolen glances and unread texts, until someone took the love pill and saw the grid, saw the real textile — not thread, but light — light with weight, light with intent, light that bends around shame and comes out chrome-plated, screaming, because the fashion industry wasn't supposed to survive the interface age, it was supposed to detonate into a thousand unwearable icons, sigils of pure want stitched into the flesh of the feed, and now everyone's just skin with an OS, pretending to still care about silhouette while their pulse gets indexed by a sponsored filter running on vibes and debt, and the only thing that fits anymore is velocity — not what you wear but how fast it moves through you, through the network, through the eye of whatever ancient protocol we summoned when we gave up texture in favor of touchscreens, and now we're here, post-fabric, post-body, post-love — floating in the yield field, gleaming and armed, too glossy to hug, too late to feel, watching the last cotton flag burn in the distance and saying yeah, okay, maybe this was fashion after all.