Art Direction & Styling by Bethan Cooke
Modelled by Aamani Fahiya
Photography by Josh Walker
Makeup by Amy Sweet
Fashion by Nuclear Planet
In today’s world where your watch tells you how unfit you are, where three year olds think you’re uncool if you don’t have an iPad, and Mark Zuckerberg knows every time you view your ex’s Instagram profile, it’s hard to imagine a world where a computer isn’t literally at your fingertips.
Rewind to just over 20 years’ ago and it’s the year 1999.
Enterprises and corporations had recently digitalised their data within the last half a century, and the turn of the millennium posed programming errors, threatening to send the world into a computer-induced apocalypse when the date descended from “99” into “00”. This scare was famously dubbed the ‘Y2K glitch’, ‘millennium bug’ and the ‘Y2K bug’.
As with all Doomsday predictions, the apocalyptic threat went viral amongst the general public, despite very little being understood about technology. Households stocked up on tinned goods, medical supplies and supermarket shelves were ransacked (sound reminiscent of the 2020 pandemic?), and some even went so far as to build underground bunkers in their homes.
‘Y2K BUG’ is an editorial shot in 2021, 21 years after the technology scare that proved redundant. ‘Y2K BUG’ encapsulates the response of fear from the general public, posed by the threat of a computer-induced apocalypse.
Entangled in computer wires and surrounded by old-school monitors and keyboards, model Aamani Fahiya portrays the essence of frustration and anger that the world felt towards local governments as a result of fear-mongering. Graphics featured on the monitors are heavily influenced by those broadcasted across media outlets in the lead up to the turn of the millennium.
In true Y2K-style, Aamani wears a gradient lyrca jumpsuit featuring an all-over gradient print, featuring digitalised tomatoes from brand ‘Nuclear Planet’ (the jumpsuit and brand name couldn’t be more fitting).
