What Wigs Can Teach Us About Irreversible Self Commodification Words: Nadia Trudel | Images collages from Tomihiro Kono It’s all relatively innocent, yet as facial recognition technology leads to criminal charges, secret public bathroom cameras torment, and the whims of strangers land civilians in deepfake pornography, anonymity finds a sense of urgency. Until I figure out how to become a lighthouse keeper, I can’t exactly scrub my extensive digital presence or abandon the city, really, I don’t want to. I must confess my reasons for writing professionally, posting thirst traps, or performing elaborate karaoke numbers are not purely artistic— so, fine, I’m an attention seeker! What’s a girl to do? ___STEADY_PAYWALL___ Well, what about wigs? There’s an inherent mystery to wigs and everything they hide, and they might be the answer to our current cultural identity crisis. Wigs can conceal balding, damage, vanity, a K-Pop idol’s comeback dye job, a popstar’s real self. No one understands that better than Tomihiro Kono, the iconic wig artist testing the possibilities of hair. The mystery of Kono’s wigs is less ‘Is that her real hair?’ and more ‘Who is that? What is that?’ This became especially evident to Kono’s frequent collaborator and partner, the visual artist Sayaka Maruyama. While editing photos for Kono’s latest book Space Creatures, she discovered that some of the wigs made faces undetectable to facial recognition systems. The book presents wigs created from 2022-2025 as selectable identities, alien organisms on display which blur the lines between human and inhuman, individual and system. “Classically, transformation is a before and after narrative. The ugly duckling becomes the swan. The end. This makes it difficult for many to understand folks whose gender identities or sexual orientations seem to be ever changing.” Kono explains in the book “This may be because the wig