The Suspension of Time: Viscosity and the Semiotic Fantasy of Eternal Youth
Asbjorg Dunker
The presentation explores how contemporary beauty culture transforms the ancient desire for eternal youth into a viscous semiotic system, one in which time appears slowed, thickened, or suspended. Audience members will learn how the shift from “fighting aging” to “maintaining youthfulness” creates a cultural illusion of temporal control. The talk reveals how advertising rhetoric, self-care ideology, and consumer rituals collaborate to produce a symbolic experience of extended presentness. Participants will understand why the myth of agelessness persists even when its promises remain unfulfilled: it is sticky, affective, and continually renewed through daily routines. The takeaway is a deeper understanding of how viscosity helps explain cultural fantasies that are neither fully believed nor entirely abandoned.
Asbjorg Dunker
Asbjorg is a stylist, consultant, educator, and practice-based researcher whose work sits at the intersection of fashion, visual culture, embodied semiotics, and lived experience.
Her work challenges traditional semiotic approaches to fashion that treat clothing as a system of fixed signs. Instead, she explores how meaning emerges through the body—through how garments are experienced, felt, and negotiated in real time.
Drawing on long-term practice working directly with clients, she identifies the styling encounter—particularly in changing rooms and one-to-one consultations—as a key site where individuals negotiate the relationship between internal perception, embodied experience, and external presentation. She refers to this process as embodied semiotics, where meaning is not inherent in the garment, but produced through interaction.
Over the past 15 years, Asbjorg has also taught fashion styling, visual culture, and communication at UK universities, extending her practice into pedagogy and mentoring emerging practitioners.
Alongside her consultancy and teaching, she contributes to public discourse on fashion, politics, and society through media appearances and writing.