Swiper by Edwin Tran

Published April 1, 2025

Contributed by Edwin Tran

Swiper is an artist’s book chronicling an unlikely sequence of events that unfolded in the summer of 2023: After going out for drinks with a man named Joshua whom she met on Tinder, 25-year-old New York City resident Alexis Dougé spent the night with her date back at her Brooklyn apartment – only to find out the next morning that he had stolen her pair of tabi. Alexis posted a series of videos on TikTok recounting the situation, which immediately took social media by storm and sparked an Internet-wide craze for the newly dubbed “tabi swiper.”

The publication documents the story’s viral reception across social media, stylized in the visual language of early means of Internet-mediated communication such as text-based chat clients and message boards, while shining a spotlight on the Internet lore surrounding Maison Margiela’s iconic split-toe silhouette.

Swiper is set in Courier, drawing upon the history of monospaced typefaces commonly observed throughout early Internet chat clients and message boards, as well as Martin Margiela’s use of the typeface across written materials during his tenure at his eponymous fashion house. Selected messages are reproduced using San Francisco and a spread with news flashes has texts rendered in Arial. The embossed cover title is set in Garamond Premier.

Swiper is a 2024 recipient of the Visual Artists: Creation grant from the Toronto Arts Council. Published by flāna flāna books in 2024, counting 68 pages and measuring 4.375×7 inch, ISBN 978-1-0690508-0-9.

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