The Simurgh - in Search of Divine Symmetry
by Sasha Meret 

The Concept of Divine Symmetry (CDS) was accidentally released into our world by Nicholas Veh, a Transylvanian late bloomer whose sole connection with math was a peculiar way of memorizing long sequences of numbers like credit cards' or any other's related to banking. The anecdotic version of it is that on August 18th, 2003, upon tinkering with Deleuze's fold while trying to decide what to wear, he foolishly applied it to a quantic dilemma format and managed to duplicate a case of symmetrical nonexistence. Hiding every manifestation of mindfulness under the adjacent folds, he removed himself from the contextual space-time continuum and that was the last anybody has heard or seen of him. It is rumored that he'd most likely attained that perpetual wave status – the fashionistas' Grail. This theory is so obscure that Wikipedia didn't catch yet in its proficient claws. Could CDS be formulated mathematically? No one has done it yet, so this question is valid. It is also big. Some fashion glitterati could call it the "The Quantum dimension of Glitter," a kind of "Ur-theory" whose purity and elegance make it capture the "deep essence" of the Fashion world. This strange theoretical brainstorm is an offspring from an article in The Scientific American by George Musser - "The Emperor, Darth Vader ad the Ultimate, Ultimate Theory of Physics". You may not have guessed, but it focuses on the Darth Vader Theory, "known formally as 'N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills (SYM) theory'. The dark-lord comparison might lead you to believe the theory is irredeemably evil, but in fact theorists consider it their most sublime creation." Following their path, but against the grain, I am attempting to playfully apply Supersymmetry to Fashion. The idea is that Fashion as a viral phenomenon has its origin in a quantum dimension whose coordinates are not ordinary real numbers but a whole new class of concepts that can be thought of as the square roots of zero. (Yeah, that’s allowed in Fashion Quantum). Normally you can’t visualize it, let alone see it, but you can perceive Fashion indirectly: when you rotate an object from a quantum dimension into a ordinary dimension (like the space-time of human causes), the object changes what might have seemed to be its essential character – which was "nothing" – into "something" that ultimately manifests itself as 'matter" or a billion-worth business. In the same way a particle of force becomes a particle of matter, and vice versa. Thus supersymmetry shows that “fashion” and “matter” or "stuff" are not essential categories, but the same thing viewed differently. So in this manner a cloud of probabilities gathered from some obscure universe can materialize into a handful of glitter on a bizarre outfit that could baffle even an educated audience. The theory has the disadvantage of being unable to describe the real world; however, it is a theoretical physicists’ version of C. elegans, having a purity that makes it a convenient test-bed for conceptual experimentation. Wherefrom, The Simurgh project, or the search for Divine Symmetry. The unnerving thing about this theory is that fashion designers (maybe physicists, too) could think it exists even though nobody has ever written it down and I'm not even sure anybody could. In this, the Quantum Glitter Theory resembles that other creation of the mid-1990s: the M-theory, a theory whose existence seems to be implicit in string theory, even though physicists hem and haw when you ask what exactly it is. Both M-theory and the Quantum Glitter theory are physics' versions of an inchoate feeling you struggle to verbalize and the only word that comes to mind is FASHION. (Any connection to real math or physics is purely coincidental!) -Sasha Meret