ONE OF THE FATHERS of modern psychology, the Austrian physician-turned-psychoanalyst Alfred W. Adler (1870–1937) was an influential figure in his nascent field; amongst many significant contributions, he developed theories around inferiority and superiority (often popularly misnamed ‘complexes’), exploring the ways in which individuals might compensate emotionally and psychologically for perceived physical deficits. Socialist in his political orientation, Adler rejected his peer Sigmund Freud’s emphasis on the central importance of his patients’ childhoods and libidos in favour of an holistic understanding of the interconnectedness between individuals and society, as well as the reciprocal ethical and moral obligations between them – what he termed ‘the social imbeddedness of the individual.’¹

One of his most persuasive and compelling investigations was around the power of fiction to influence fact, a dynamic articulated in his theory of ‘acting as if.’ Influenced by German philosopher Hans Vaihinger’s book The Philosophy of As If (1911), Adler explored the power of exercising mental fictions, a precursor to the later emergence of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.² A constructivist psychological approach, the Adlerian technique of ‘acting as if’ encourages the patient to act out desirable behaviour – for example, empathetic responses, or assertive decision-making – on a daily basis. By acting and thus feeling differently, and through receiving recalibrated responses from others to this externalised set of behaviours, the patient eventually actualises as a different person – the person imagined through the ‘final fictional goal.’ In Adler’s construct, acting as if is a necessary mindset to inhabit for social cohesion and the greater good of societies built through healthy, empathetic, goal-oriented individuals.

***

In 1879, when English gentleman’s outfitter Thomas Burberry trademarked his weatherproofed gabardine (the foundation for his eponymous clothing company founded two decades earlier), he was inspired by the lanolin-coated cotton worn by weathered shepherds on the Hampshire hills. During World War I, men of the officer class purchased Burberry trench coats (alongside those made by Aquascutum and others) that were carefully fitted by the sort of tailors with whom members of their social standing were already well acquainted; officers were historically sourced from the upper classes. And, as the war took its horrible, fatal toll on a generation comprised of all types of men sent to the front, the officer class was eventually necessarily replenished by new recruits from lower social classes. Their contingent status was reinforced by the stinging moniker bestowed on them by their established peers: ‘temporary gentlemen.’ The uniform, including the carefully tailored trench coat, became less precise in meaning, no longer a clear signifier of lineage, even if it did still denote military rank.³

In the immediate postwar years of frugality, rationing and reification of war heroes, trench coats found their way into civilian fashions, undergoing further metamorphoses as they – and, from the 1920s, their boldly recognisable checked lining and detailing – became syncretic canvases for country life, English tradition, outdoor pursuits and arriviste aspirations. By the early twenty-first century, when British soap actress Danniella Westbrook paired her infamous cocaine habit with head-to-toe Burberry check (going so far as to cover her infant daughter and pram in it, too, to the delight of sneering tabloid editors), the original significance of the garment and its spin-off items had morphed from genuine indicator of the elevated classes and the quality of its English manufacture to their complete erasure. Of course, this was not due to a significant change in the garment’s materiality, but rather down to repeated and varied performances – acting as if – that had decentred its codes and exposed its – and, more broadly, fashion’s – contingent authenticity.

This spiral into the realm of the ersatz was furthered by the proliferation of counterfeit copies that enshrined Burberry check – in particular, affordable accessories like the cap – as the sartorial preference of the ASBO⁴ generation of chavs, neds and scallies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Westbrook could afford (or had been dressed in) the ‘real deal,’ and thus her instrumentalisation of the Burberry label and its aesthetic was an attempt to counterfeit class and social standing – an electrifying transgression in hierarchy-obsessed British culture. The streetcorner co-option, on the other hand, set the stage for a much more instructive – and arguably more interesting – echo chamber around authenticity moving from low-to-high that continues to play out today.

In the early 2000s, at the tender age of thirty, Christopher Bailey was installed as design director at Burberry just as the counterfeit mania had reached its peak. Bailey eventually (and wildly successfully) recalibrated public perception of the brand by reining in its use of the check, introducing impressive runway shows and the limited edition Prorsum line and mining the brand’s history to create heritage items. In October 2017, when he announced he would exit the company he had helmed for over fifteen years, Bailey had made shareholders and consumers content by restoring a comforting vision of the trench coat as a luxury item. Yet, in the words of anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff, whose work interrogates notions of hegemony, such a pathway from authenticity to mass proliferation – and back, as Burberry has tracked – does not shore up infallible institutions; such journeys challenge ‘the conceit at the core of the culture of Western capitalism: that its signifiers can be fixed, that its editions can be limited, that it can franchise the platonic essence of its mass-produced modernity.’⁵ It is this play on signification, its power as performance and the ensuing ability to provoke such strong and simultaneous reactions of desire and discomfort that makes fashion so centrally important to cultural discourse and such a radical form of design. Bailey understood this as much. And so, as a parting shot – perhaps secure in his achievements, and with a knowing nod to the period of panic over counterfeits in which he was hired – he collaborated with Muscovite provocateur Gosha Rubchinskiy on an eight-piece collection that dripped Burberry check over bucket hats and trench coats, resurrecting the spectre of the football hooligan in the form of the currently uber-fetishised post-Soviet gopnik. As Bailey relinquished his post directing the Burberry troops, his final word on the brand’s heritage was recognition of the peculiar, contingent tension between confidently inhabiting status and acting as if.

It is an impulse with great precedent. Histories are inherently palimpsestic, littered with strategies of appropriation that probe the limits of authenticity and truth. Ancient Greek sculptors copied from Ancient Egyptian precursors, and then had their works plundered and taken to Rome. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades are centred on the premise of annexation. Think, too, of Picasso’s raiding of so-called ethnographic collections in Paris, Richard Prince’s Marlboro Men, Barbara Kruger’s tussles with copyright law, École des Beaux-Arts plaster cast copyists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Roy Lichtenstein’s Ben-Day dot canvases and the international market for art forgery. It is clear that no one designs in a vacuum, that some of the most enduring artworks of the past two millennia have been the victim or product of ‘creative’ borrowing, and that these actions express and reveal power, agency and lack thereof. As the eminent art historian and cultural voice Thomas Crow reminded us two decades ago when interrogating conceptual art, ‘Almost every work of serious contemporary art recapitulates, on some explicit or implicit level, the historical sequence of objects to which it belongs. Consciousness of precedent has become very nearly the condition and definition of major artistic ambition.’⁶

As a consequence, art, architecture and design histories have developed a robust critical scholarship (from Jean Baudrillard’s theories of the hyperreal to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas) around questions of authenticity, the interplay between auratic original (Walter Benjamin) and mass-produced copy, and the notion of truth in disciplines that wrestle with their foundations in mimesis. Whether purloined in open homage, by stealth, by force or by other means, acts of translation and borrowing help us interrogate and reframe the myth of the lone genius and historic moments of discovery and examine notions of intellectual, cultural or political property in creative practises. Authenticity is not an a priori but a location that is inhabited – and shored up – by performance and public presentation. It is in the process of making a copy that the mechanisms, signs and strategies of authenticity imbued in the auratic original are revealed, offering insight into how such real-ness is performed.

***

In fashion, as in pretty much every other niche of design and the visual arts, knock-off goods are nothing new and, whether flagrant or subtle, they have often helped many of us access the identities we desire. Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel famously opined that ‘being copied is the ransom of success,’ and today the business of expiation on the fashion front runs a cool $600 billion profit worldwide.⁷ One of the many epicentres of counterfeit fashion (at least in old-school analog form) is the legendary Barras Market in Glasgow’s East End. An institution for over eight decades since its interwar founding, the site – shortened in Glaswegian parlance from its proper honorific, the Barrowland – sits next to the famed music hall of the same name; both monikers derive from the wheelbarrows from which the earliest traders sold their wares in the street.

On a recent dreich, grey December Saturday morning, where rain threatened but never quite made good on its promise to fall, the Barras was in full swing. Hawkers pitched their goods from stances in front of their stalls, all the better to entice the lacklustre crowds who were filing towards the newer, hipper craft and design market set up under cover, next to a bar-restaurant trading in oysters, cocktails and rapid gentrification. In May 2016, an undercover police operation saw over £30 million worth of counterfeit goods seized at the Barras, with the Scottish police heralding the action in the ensuing press coverage as a way to ensure the ‘regeneration’ of the area, now ‘free of criminality’⁸ – but a year later, tables, garages and dilapidated store fronts were still piled high with bric-a-brac, electronics, ceramics and boxes of goods straight off the back of a lorry.

Amongst the alleyways and courtyards, two men watched over one trestle table in particular and conducted a brisk trade. Their pitch was constantly mobbed with a steady crowd picking up plastic wrapped T-shirts and sweaters; the stallholders whispered prices to each customer in hushed tones so as not to undercut their next sale. A pair of Versace jeans with the stitching already unravelling was dispatched to a woman who had eyed them, rubbed their textile betwixt her fingers, and then cannily set them down and stepped away, only to be encouraged to open her purse for a knockdown price of twenty pounds. Two teenagers doing their Christmas shopping picked up Gucci shirts and haggled a two-for-one; a black Balmain sweater was stuffed into a blue shopping bag for an undisclosed price. Nike socks went, two packs for five pounds, at a nearby stall; next to them, white Apple earpods, unboxed, sold for a fiver a pair. I asked to take a picture and one of the stall owners stepped to the side; I could snap what I liked, he said, just not his face, as he was here illegally – his status on par with that of his merchandise. No one who walked away having made a purchase was under any illusion that they had scored a garment that genuinely came from its purported origin; and yet, each would be worn as such, the brand name logos an immediately recognisable currency.

At the Barras, the quickest sales were over the tracksuits – except that Gucci Gucci Louis Louis Fendi Fendi Prada, as the Kreayshawn song goes, were bumped for Kappa Kappa, Ellesse and Versace. Aside from a functional sports garment, the tracksuit has long been status attire (often extortionately expensive) in both subcultural and mainstream arenas. In fictitious settings, mafia men have made them their business attire (see, for example, half the cast of HBO’s The Sopranos). Banlieu graffiti kids wear them like a uniform in Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 cult classic La Haine. In film and TV, a generalised working class (satirised in the Little Britain character Vicky Pollard, and valorised by ‘Sporty Spice’ Mel C) wear tracksuits, using sports labels as personal and collective insignia. In the U.K., the two-piece ensemble has become shorthand for lager louts, football terrace hooligans (who favoured premium brand Stone Island) and streetcorner kids (pejoratively called chavs or neds), banned from certain schools and pubs in the era of the ASBO, when the ‘image of the hooded-youth gone feral on estates’ proliferated. This tough image was a badge of pride and fount of inspiration for those who felt an authentic connection with the street (see skate brand Palace, founded in 2009, and the Facebook group-turned-fashion label Wavey Garms, as well as rappers with their own lines like Jay-Z and Sean Combs). In turn, this became fodder for high-fashion brands to pedal clothing to those who wished to flirt with the aesthetics of the street corner without experiencing any drawbacks of the lifestyle, those ‘kids with privately funded accents dressing like they’re going for a fight in the dole queue.’⁹ This is no first: denim has been there before, as has the Mao jacket, plaid flannel shorts and almost every workwear brand (see: Carhartt, for example) now worn across brunch spots from Brooklyn to Tokyo. This counter-culture image of the tracksuit has become so literally fetishised that it has even found a place in pornography and sex work, where it stands in for ‘rough and hard masculinities, as opposed to the “cosmopolitan” and well-resourced gay man, so often portrayed through hegemonic forms of queer masculinity.’¹⁰

***

Researchers at Chapel Hill, Harvard and Duke have recently posited that while engaging with counterfeits is usually underscored with the intention of signaling positive traits (the ‘acting as if’ encouraged by Adler), the situation often ends up producing a surprising chain reaction: ‘a link from wearing counterfeits, to feeling “fake” or inauthentic, to behaving unethically.’¹¹ The research scenarios asked participants to engage in a range of tasks while wearing sunglasses, some of which the wearers believed to be fakes. The self-reporting of success or failure in the tasks by those wearing what they believed to be counterfeit goods was significantly manipulated in comparison to the control subjects (this played out in other test scenarios with other counterfeit goods within the experiment) leading the researchers to conclude that wearing fakes ‘increases actual dishonesty and perceptions of other people’s dishonesty … would be driven by people’s feelings of inauthenticity – their counterfeit self.’¹²

Yet, it seems as if, in the contemporary moment, acting as if in search of the authentic, happy self has in many cases metamorphosed not through the physical counterfeit but in the virtual realm that helps us transcend our ‘deficits’ (defined differently by us, no doubt, than by Adler a century after his theory). We live in the age of the Instagramable goal-a-day meme, the neoliberal incantation of fake-it-til-you-make-it, and the (now contentious) Amy Cuddy TED Talk-endorsed one-minute power-pose (in which Cuddy proposed that one can become assertive by standing legs astride and chest puffed out).¹³ While it is not a new impulse (see: 1980s Wall Street Yuppiedom), this type of transformation has been electrified and accelerated by social media, wherein whole personalities can be constructed, filtered, edited and disseminated. Even while the current zeitgeist relentlessly schills artisanal, organic, authentic, handmade, crafted, made-with-love, ethical products to clothe ourselves and our lives, and even as we rejoice, repost and embrace these values, they are in the majority in contradistinction to our actual lived existence and experience where we consume led by desire and not thought for human or environmental consequence. There is a disconnect between what we post and what we are, between what we say and what we do. Adler’s positivist theories of reinvention were genuine in their quest for socialist cohesion; millennial social justice mediated from behind the isolating glow of a personal screen can never match up. We are counterfeit selves, but not always because of what we wear.

Playing with identity through fashion – either through a typology like the tracksuit, or through the counterfeit more generally – is at the root of the transactions that take place at the Barras trestle tables and other sites like them, as well as in runway collections. While carefully counted notes are handed over in the heart of the east end of Glasgow, it is such working-class, post-industrial sites that have become inspiration to the certain contemporary designers – not just Bailey and Rubchinskiy, but also Demna Gvasalia’s Vetements. They have appropriated the readymade uniforms the Barras clientele are looking to shed – the postal uniform, the maintenance workwear worn in earnest – and the aesthetics they have cultivated unironically. The uniform of the person delivering the mail or restocking the shelves at the local supermarket has been elevated to the runway. Adler’s theory of acting as if has come undone in this co-option of the blue-collar uniform as fashion. As film theorist Nita Rollins reminds us, ‘Fashion’s ravenous cycles of emulation of those persons with some kind of prowess, be it economic or, in the case of punks, ideological, maraud through history’s closets to counter the mutability of the body, to climb the social ranks.’¹⁴ In the case of fashion’s relationship with authenticity – of self, of social standing or of inherent signification – what we wear is a powerful and radical conundrum in that we do not climb up or down, but within a complicated and radically compelling web of our own weaving.

Michelle Millar Fisher is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a Curatorial Assistant in the Architecture + Design department at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she most recently co-curated Items: Is Fashion Modern?

Buy Vestoj: On Authenticity here.

1. Early in his career, in 1898, Adler’s commitment to workers and social justice manifested in scrutiny of the garment industry; he published the Medical Handbook for the Tailoring Trade, tracing illnesses and ailments specific to these particular workers. His aim was to demonstrate the structural nature of deprivation, material comfort and mental and physical health. J Richardson, ‘Work and the Life Meaning: The Relevance of Alfred Adler,’ in CrossCurrents 37, no. 4 (Winter 1987/8): 416–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24459369. ↩

2. See RE Watts, PR Peluso and TF Lewis, ‘Expanding the Acting As If Technique: An Adlerian/Constructive Integration’ in The Journal of Individual Psychology, Winter 2005. ↩

3. See the excellent exhibition didactics for ‘Trench Coat: From Field to Fashion’ that ran at the Winchester Discovery Center, Hampshire, October – December, 2014. ↩

4. The Anti-Social Behaviour Order was a civil order introduced in the UK in 1998 by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to curb petty misdemeanors. It was criticised for its demonisation of youth with few options and social resources. ↩

5. J and J Comaroff (eds.), ‘Law and disorder in the postcolony: an introduction,’ in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14. ↩

6. T Crow, ‘Unwritten histories of Conceptual Art: Against Visual Culture,’ in Thomas Crow, ed., Modern Art and in the Common Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. 564. ↩

7. R Elings, LD Keith and GP Wukoson, ‘Anti-counterfeiting in the fashion and luxury sectors: trends and strategies,’ in World Trademark Review, Anti-counterfeiting 2013 – A Global Guide. http://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/Intelligence/
   Anti-Counterfeiting/2013/Industry-insight/Anti-counterfeiting-in-the-fashion-and-luxury-sectors-trends-and-strategies ↩

8. BBC News, ‘Fake goods worth more than £30m seized in Barras crackdown.’ May 24, 2016. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-36359967 ↩

9. ‘Why Fashion’s Reappropriation of British Working Class Culture Isn’t a Bad Thing,’ Highsnobiety, January 28, 2016. https://hypebeast.com/2016/1/fashion-british-working-class ↩

10. M Whowell, ‘Male Sex Work: Exploring Regulation in England and Wales,’ in Journal of Law and Society 37, no. 1 (2010): 125–44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25622011 ↩

11. Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, ‘The Counterfeit Self: The Deceptive Costs of Faking It,’ in Psychological Science 21, no. 5 (May 2010), 712–20. Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Association for Psychological Science.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/41062274 ↩

12. Gino et al. 717. ↩

13. See: http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/
    dana_carney/power.poses.PS.2010.pdf ↩

14. N Rollins, ‘Greenaway-Gaultier: Old Masters, Fashion Slaves,’ in Cinema Journal 35, no. 1 (Autumn, 1995): 65–80. University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225808 ↩

OF ALL FORMS OF design, fashion is the most tactile. We wear it next to our skin. This makes digital representation a paradox. The pixels which model a garment online are not just distortions, as would be the case for most visual culture. They efface what makes clothing clothing: exchanging sweat for warmth, experience for stains, blisters for coolness.

They also grant new qualities. Jpg files can be cut up and restitched without sewing machines. Videos travel more quickly than container ships. It’s an opportunity and challenge for any emerging label, but particularly for those in China, where seventy-two percent of shoppers prefer to purchase clothes online, more than in any other country.¹ The country’s platforms for commerce and self-branding are, moreover, distinct and self-contained, even as global fashion grows increasingly borderless.

This September, Labelhood, the Shanghai-based design incubator, teamed up with Vestoj to host a roundtable on digital authenticity with three emerging labels, each of which carves a different niche within the Chinese fashion landscape. The below is an edited transcript of the discussion. We are publishing it in conjunction with our latest print issue, On Authenticity, out December 20.

With:

Yirantian Guo, designer of womenswear label Yirantian
Alve Lagercrantz, co-designer of womenswear label Sirloin
Yushan Li, co-designer at menswear label Pronounce
Mao Usami, co-designer of womenswear label Sirloin
Jun Zhou, co-designer at menswear label Pronounce

***

Alice Hines: I want to ask a very open-ended question. Do you think authenticity is a relevant concept for designers today? Is it something your labels are working towards? 

Mao Usami: I think [authenticity] is fading, or merging, or collapsing. Because high-street brands started to get the capacity to copy instantly what’s happening at Paris Fashion Week, while high-end brands still take three months for production. And now Gucci and Vetements are starting to borrow from high-street fashions. It’s a never-ending game, like cats chasing each other. For an emerging label, it makes it difficult to define your brand: is it high end, low end, mainstream, subculture? Everything is merged.

Yushan Li: Our brand Pronounce is based on rock wear. We reuse a lot of classic elements, borrowing from historical visuals. So it’s a similar discussion. If we take this element and incorporate it in our new collection, how do we make it authentic? There is a really blurry line between referencing classics and copying. Vetements, for instance, sometimes does one hundred percent the same as vintage, and sells it ten times more expensive. I don’t think that’s a good way. There are other smart ways, or humorous ways, to reference things but still be authentic.

Yirantian Guo: I think a lot about how there isn’t original clothing. A turtleneck already exists. So what a designer does is represent it using original details, or a seasonal concept, adapting the element to make it her own. That’s the originality. For example, you use buttons and colours and fabrics which fit your brand, and make the item suitable for your target group.

Alve Lagercrantz: I think [the Chinese e-commerce platform] Taobao has a lot to say about the future of authenticity. If you search ‘Armani jacket,’ you get one million versions of the same thing, with slight adjustments: golden buttons or silver buttons, big sleeves or short sleeves – all these modifications. And there’s a little bit of creativity put into every version of it. There is something strangely appealing about it.

Alice: The funny thing about that example is that there is an original, authentic Armani jacket.

Alve: Sure, but you don’t know which version is best. It’s maybe not the original. And that original Armani jacket, that also came from something, you know? I think about our place as designers within an ocean of images and garments, a kind of melting pot. Originality is about figuring out how to use those components and play with them.

Yushan: We personally don’t find any difficulties. Our building has a modem which allows us to access foreign websites, which we feel is essential, so we don’t feel the wall. It costs about 500 RMB per year. The only difficulty is the speed of the internet. So we have Instagram, and a website, of course; a WeChat official account; and we have Weibo, the Chinese Twitter. We don’t have Facebook. Our main goal is the Chinese market, but we travel everywhere to get inspirations.

Mao: I’m from Japan and Alve is from Sweden, and we are beginners on the Chinese market, so we don’t really know how to navigate these platforms yet. We met in London and came here to start our label, Sirloin. We have Instagram accounts, Facebook accounts, which we connect to with a VPN. And a website. We don’t have WeChat yet, or a platform for selling online.

Jun Zhou: In China, online stores are easier with KOL, who are key opinion leaders, basically famous people who help sell things. If you open your own account without one of them, it’s very difficult to promote it.

Alice: I read an interesting statistic about Internet celebrities in China, which is that they created an economy worth 58 billion RMB in 2016, more than the country’s cinema box office. That’s a huge amount. Is that something emerging labels like yours can — or want to — get a piece of?

Yirantian: I think in China it’s really complex. There are many different kinds of KOL. We sometimes call them superstars, or there’s also a word called ‘Wang Hong.’ Some have really good taste, others are really rich, and some are Wannabes, just pretending they are KOL.

What happened to my brand Yirantian was that a lot of Wang Hong started wearing our jewellery, all of the sudden. We don’t know why it started, and it wasn’t clothes, just jewellery. At the beginning, I didn’t even know they were Wang Hong. My friends would tell me, ‘Do you know they are really famous on Weibo?’ And they’re telling their followers how to do styling and makeup and all that.

A challenge on Taobao is that some things are real, some things are fake. For our online platform, we only sell jewellery and T-shirts. And at the boutiques we collaborate with, they will sell some of our garments but not depth. So with the Wang Hong, it increased our sales and brand awareness, but at the same time, it also created a problem with fakes. Because if one Wang Hong buys your product, the followers will copy her. Like on Taobao, they would write ‘Korean designer brand,’ and we’d see our images, but it’s not our product. And the price is much lower, and it sells a lot.

In the beginning, I was really sad. Maybe I’m fragile. These things aren’t good quality and they impact how people see our brand. You don’t have a channel to protect your own things. But I can also take it as an accomplishment, that the product I make is very suitable to the market.

Alice: What do the rest of you think about this phenomenon?

Yushan: I think it’s Chinese following American culture. Also, one interesting thing I just thought of is that, in earlier times, people were probably still copying in this way. They’d take your products but you’d never hear about it. Now that we’re in an age of full sharing and very fast communication, people send you a screenshot or tag you. So you see the copies, and you think that it’s happening more, but actually probably it happened before. It’s just the rate of communication which changed.

We’ve also found people using our photography. Not in the sense of copying our designs, but using our image as their profile picture, for instance, maybe without credit. We take it as an honour. We’re happy to see that, although we would prefer to be credited. I think that’s the character of sharing and community, in our social media generation.

Alice: I have a quote that I thought would be interesting to get your opinions on, by the French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard. He wrote, ‘We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.’ This was in 1981, before digital media. Do you find it harder to create something meaningful, in a world where everyone is constantly being exposed to so many different images?

Yushan: I think everything has its meaning. Meaning has different layers and levels. It might be good, bad, influential, pointless, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have meaning.

Alve: When Alber Elbaz quit [Lanvin], he said something about, ‘When I started my job I was a couturier. Then I became creative director. And now we’re image-makers.’ We showed our first collection season last season, and soon realised we are pretty old school. If we were more clever, we might have put more of our budget on images. It’s definitely true that classical designing is becoming less important, and new brands focus on creating images. At the same time, especially for young brands, only doing clever marketing strategy is not really enough. Because to be visible in this ocean of images, you also need to be really personal.

Jun: In my opinion, I think images, the story, is more important than the product today. Everyone can design a good product, but not a good image. If the brand has a good image, if its meaning travels, that’s why I want to buy the products. It’s what distinguishes it. Louis Vuitton has a good shirt. Dolce & Gabbana does too. So why do you buy one and not the other?

Yirantian: I think more people have the ability to make good designs today – I mean designs that look good on the surface. But maybe they are copies. If you want to do a really good, unique brand, not that many people have the ability.

Alice: Is image-making a euphemism for marketing here?

Yushan: No, because it can be about self-expression too. For example, on our social media, we post random things, for atmosphere. Fashion can sometimes be too purpose-driven, especially in China, and we are kind of against that. I think it’s typical of Chinese people’s business minds, to make things always about goals and outcomes. Sometimes we really hate that, because it can kill the creativity or possibilities of inspiring stuff.

Alice: Is one necessarily better than the other, though? I often see ads for fashion brands in European fashion magazines that try to look like fine art or photography, but they always manage to sneak the bag in, hiding in the corner. It’s almost like they’re ashamed. Isn’t it better to be straightforward?

Alve: We’re doing a project now on ‘Tuhao,’ which is sort of like Chinese Nouveau Riche. It’s a culture of using objects as symbols, of showing off with products. I agree that in Europe, it’s a little bit ugly to put a bag front and centre on Instagram. Labels try to hide it a bit. While in China, you can just get to it. You don’t necessarily need a story – it’s a nice logo, a nice shape.

Online shops are much more product driven than [physical] shops, in my opinion. I think there are a lot of brands that can survive with just good, interesting, great products, completely without branding. Because when you shop on an online shop, you have millions of products and you pick the one that is the nicest. You don’t care about image. You just buy it, a nice T-shirt.

Yushan: On the other hand, there are also digital tricks. You can present two T-shirts, one is really good, one is really bad, but perhaps they look the same online. You don’t feel it, you don’t touch it, you don’t wear it, so you don’t know. It’s kind of a… digital black hole.

Alice: Can we talk about cultural appropriation? I think this is very much connected to digital media and meme culture, and in America, people are now hyper-aware of this phenomenon. How does that conversation play out in China?

Yushan: One example is that hip-hop became really popular this summer in China. I think it’s because there’s a gap, a lag, since the internet platforms here are different, between what’s going on inside China and the outside world. So lots of designers begin doing hip-hop, but they don’t always compliment it. They’re just using it, in a really bad, old, boring way. It’s a fake hip-hop style. It’s meme culture, but a rubbish way of doing it. In general though, I think there shouldn’t be a limitation on using other cultures. All cultures are shared. But it depends on the sensitivity of the designer, to do it in a good or bad way.

Mao: Whether something is perceived as appropriation or not is really context based. I recently read two articles, for instance, about the appropriation of Japanese culture in America. One was written by a Western writer, and they were focusing on a shoot American Vogue did in Tokyo, where the magazine cast a white model to wear a kimono. There was a big argument happening in America among the whites, but in Japanese news, everyone was saying, ‘Why not?’ These are beautiful pictures, it’s not disturbing anything about Japanese culture.

The second article was heavily discussed in Japan but not not America. The Washington Post posted an article about cherry blossom season in New York, and there was a picture of an Asian woman wearing a traditional costume under a tree, and article explains it’s a Japanese lady in America, who is wearing a kimono and enjoying her culture in a far-away place. But for Japanese eyes, she was obviously Korean, and wearing a Korean uniform, not a Japanese one. It was a huge argument in Japan, that never crossed over to America at all. That was quite funny for me.

Alice: So those conversations totally missed each other, even though the subject is cultural exchange. I’m curious on a related note if you all feel pressure to represent your own culture, or nation, through your designs?

Yirantian: I think for me, it’s not important. Many Chinese designers today have studied abroad and know a lot about Western culture. It’s becoming less important where you are born and where you are from. Instead it’s about what you do and what you present. 

Yushan: I kind of hate the concept of representing your country, actually. The reason we picked our name, ‘Pronounce,’ is because you don’t know where it’s from, or what it represents. You don’t know what we’re about until you see our clothes.

Alve: We are in a funny position with this topic. Neither of us are from China, but for Sirloin’s first collection, we were inspired by elements of Chinese life that we’ve seen around us since we moved. And quite a lot of people picked up on it, and we’ve become sort of strange ambassadors for China, and Chinese culture, although it was not really a conscious decision by us. We are, in a way, tourists.

Alice: It’s interesting to me that none of you fully embrace the idea of representing Chinese design, although Labelhood is an incubator for Chinese designers, and in that way, even this roundtable is a bit of a nationalistic project. Do you see the irony here?

Yushan: I think eventually you end up representing your country whether you like it or not. The more successful you get, the less you are able to avoid it.

Alice Hines is Vestoj’s online editor and a writer in New York.

Sarah Meyohas is a French-American artist. The images are taken from her film Cloud of Petals, documenting a performance in which 10,000 roses were hand-plucked and digitized in the atrium of Bell Labs, the New Jersey corporate site where digital information networks were invented.

Thanks to Tasha Liu and Labelhood for facilitating this event.

Buy Vestoj: On Authenticity here.

1. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/retail-consumer/total-retail/total-retail-categories.html ↩

A PR chaos quickly ensued. On Twitter, regular users and ‘sneakerheads’ alike shared photos and videos as they burned or tossed in the bin their pair of New Balance.⁶ Meanwhile, rival brand Reebok cynically seized the opportunity and offered to send replacement shoes to many outraged customers.⁷ Shortly thereafter, New Balance disassociated itself from far-right ideology with a statement that divorced its concern for local manufacturing from white supremacist agendas. Unfazed, Anglin followed up on his first post by saying that whether or not the company identified as Republican is irrelevant and suggesting that the brand make him an official spokesperson:

If I were in the marketing department of New Balance, I would take it a step further and offer me, Andrew Anglin, publisher of the America’s most-trusted Republican news outlet, a product endorsement deal. I’m in great shape, have ripped abs and would look fantastic on a billboard that reads ‘Official shoes of the Republican Party: New Balance stands with the White race.’⁸ 

The social media outrage caused by Anglin’s endorsement of New Balance, on the other hand, was an inadequate response inasmuch as it was mostly directed at the company rather than at Anglin and the political views he represents. Boycott may be appropriate in the case of companies who do business with certain political figures, as in the case of the Grab Your Wallet campaign,⁹ but it is misguided in the case of brand appropriation, which does not require direct affiliation on the part of the brand. Furthermore, by focusing on the PR scandal not only did most mainstream media outlets give free PR to Anglin and his site – neo-Nazi groups and public figures regularly use grandiose statements, racist hashtags and ‘trolling tactics’ to build their ‘brand’¹⁰ – but they also failed to address the dynamics of neo-Nazi’s appropriation of a mainstream footwear brand with a global distribution.

This instance of appropriation is not an isolated case. In a recently defunct blog, an American neo-Nazi sympathiser proposed that far-right groups appropriate Adidas with the aim of turning ‘something that the everyday person wears’ into ‘a symbol of our movement.’¹¹ And it is not just footwear brands that are being appropriated. Cartoonist Matt Furie’s character Pepe the Frog went from ‘inoffensive Internet meme’ to being ‘hijacked by hatemongers’ from the so-called alt-right.¹² Food is not safe either: fast food chain Wendy’s was celebrated on The Daily Stormer after Pepe the Frog accidentally made an appearance on the company’s social media account¹³ and even milk has been appropriated as a symbol of racial superiority.¹⁴ These instances show that white supremacists seek recognition by associating themselves with mainstream symbols and material goods. They seek visibility by appearing ordinary and, thus, paradoxically invisible.

As the case of New Balance shows, this desire to hack the mainstream manifests itself in sartorial terms too. If traditionally skinheads donned a specific subcultural uniform consisting of ‘tight trousers, T-shirt imprinted with neo-Nazi slogans and massive Doc Martens boots laced to the knees,’¹⁵ Anglin’s posts made it clear that this is no longer the case. While this may be a new phenomenon in the U.S. it is not the case in Europe. As early as 1993 it was observed that ‘German neo-Nazi skinheads are changing their style. They are growing their hair and increasingly swapping jackboots and bomber jackets for “normal clothes,” such as ‘jeans, running shoes and parkas.’¹⁶ A 2014 article in Rolling Stone even documented the rise of Nazi hipsters or ‘nipsters,’ who sport tote bags, Converse shoes, skinny jeans and beards, appropriate reggae and dance the Harlem Shake.¹⁷

In this sense, the appropriation of New Balance certainly overlaps with attempts by the far-right to look less threatening and appear more palatable to broader audiences, as the case of alt-right demagogue Richard Spencer’s suit-and-tie image attests.¹⁸ Like a suit, a uniform of jeans, T-shirt, New Balance trainers and sporty jacket relies on invisibility. The person (usually a white man) who wears it is virtually indistinguishable from a non-far-right guy in a casual everyday garb, just like a nipster may be impossible to distinguish from a regular hipster. Invisibility as a strategy also overlaps with three elements that have been to an extent addressed by the media but not necessarily linked with neo-Nazi ‘style’: whiteness, the discourse around technology and masculinity.

In his famous 1997 study of whiteness in Western cultures Richard Dyer argues that white people have historically represented themselves as ‘the norm.’ In doing so, whiteness and normativity become synonyms. This equation renders whiteness invisible, which means that all the variations of non-whiteness are constructed as visible others.¹⁹ The appropriation of mainstream brands, in this sense, uses sartorial invisibility – the fact that white supremacists could visually ‘pass’ as moderates or liberals – to paradoxically build what Spencer calls ‘white identity politics.’²⁰ To this end German Nazi-hipster Patrick Schroeder ‘conducts seminars showing neo-Nazis how they can dress less threateningly and argues that anybody from hip-hop fans to hipsters in skinny jeans should be able to join the scene without changing the way they look.’²¹ Style is then either thought of exclusively as a tool to assimilate or paradoxically discounted altogether as irrelevant to one’s political beliefs. For white supremacists ditching the skinhead image means leaving behind their status as subculture, which defines itself in opposition to the mainstream, to reaffirm whiteness as the mainstream. In the process whiteness would be rendered invisible and its dominance reiterated because in Western cultures invisibility, as Dyer points out, is indeed the privilege accorded only to those in power.

Invisibility as a mode of operating under the radar and not ‘outing’ oneself also resonates with the so-called Alt-Right’s fixation with technological discourses and imagery. That white supremacists are social media-savvy trolling experts who operate online to expand and reinforce their network is well-documented.²² But technology is also celebrated in Alt-Right aesthetics for its potential ‘to conquer and to reaffirm inegalitarianism,’²³ which goes hand in hand with the reaffirmation of white dominance. As merchandise from The Daily Stormer attests, neo-Nazi aesthetic taste includes eighties comics and sci-fi content [which] offer normative gender roles, hyper-masculine futurist heroes, hypersexualised women and a variety of visions of humans transcending their bodily limits via technological innovation.’²⁴ The transhumanism represented in popular films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix is also celebrated.²⁵ That the latter was directed by two transwomen is strategically ignored, but its hacking ethos finds an expression in practises such as ‘Operation Google,’ which is used to bypass the algorithms set up by search engines to identify and block content that is deemed discriminatory. This strategy entails replacing racist epithets with the names of the very same companies that implement anti-discriminatory policies – Google, Skype, Yahoo and Bing are some examples – on forums like 4chan and /pol/ so as to avoid flagging and deletion.²⁶ Operation Google thus hacks the very system it aims to bypass. It renders racism, homophobia, transphobia and white supremacism undetectable, that is invisible to algorithms, on the most used search engines in the world. In this sense, one could see the appropriation of New Balance trainers and the company logo as its sartorial equivalent: Operation New Balance is a way to hack the wardrobes of as many consumers as possible.

Last but not least, the popularity of eighties comics and sci-fi imagery in Alt-Right aesthetics and the choice of appropriating a brand of trainers have one more thing in common: both unabashedly celebrate masculinity. This is not to say that sneaker culture is inherently misogynist, but rather that it offers men the possibility to reclaim adornment and fashionability while retaining associations with a traditionally male-dominated cultural realm like sport.²⁷ In virtue of that sneaker culture becomes a preferential site for the projection of the idea of a dominant, physically strong and ready-for-action masculinity that perfectly embodies the fascist belief in ‘permanent warfare’ as well as its obsession with ‘sexual politics’ and gender symbolism.²⁸ But whereas ‘sneakerheads’ are likely to make bold statements with vibrant or limited edition trainers, sobriety is key to uphold standards of neo-Nazi masculinity. As one of the commenters on Anglin’s post writes, New Balance ‘are gorgeous, nothing extremely colourful and gay as hell, just plain grey.’²⁹ Once again, value is placed on avoiding visibility and distinction.

Invisibility as strategy thus brings together many of the key elements of neo-Nazi ideology and aesthetics. Social media outrage in the guise of brand boycotts and shoe burning will not prevent further attempts from the far-right to hack, infiltrate and colonise our political imaginary as well as our wardrobes. Rather, what we need to make visible and to examine are the invisible processes by which we can potentially become victims, allies and vehicles of such unacceptable ideologies.

Alex Esculapio is a writer and PhD student at the University of Brighton, UK.

1. http://www.dailystormer.com/your-uniform-new-balance-just-became-the-shoes-of-white-people/ ↩

2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-balance-faces-social-media-backlash-after-welcoming-trump-1478823102 ↩

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/business/statement-on-trump-puts-new-balance-shoe-company-in-cross-hairs.html ↩

4. http://www.dailystormer.com/your-uniform-new-balance-just-became-the-shoes-of-white-people/ ↩

5. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-gibson1aug01-transripit-story.html ↩

6. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/business/statement-on-trump-puts-new-balance-shoe-company-in-cross-hairs.html ↩

7. http://www.esquire.com/style/news/a50877/reebok-replace-new-balance-trump-comments/ ↩

8. http://www.dailystormer.com/the-daily-stormer-fully-endorses-new-balance-whether-it-is-a-republican-company-or-not/ ↩

9. https://grabyourwallet.org/ ↩

10. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump ↩

11. https://jobewatson14.wordpress.com/2016/10/01/altright-brand-appropriation/ ↩

12. https://newrepublic.com/article/137545/perversion-pepe-frog ↩

13. http://forward.com/news/359129/did-wendys-become-the-accidental-neo-nazi-happy-meal/ ↩

14. http://www.avclub.com/article/milk-chugging-alt-right-trolls-shut-down-shia-labe-250242 ↩

15. S John, ‘Carnaby Street: A mixture of trendy shops and neo-nazis,’ Toronto Star, Aug 5, 1989. ↩

16. A Tomforde, ‘Neo-Nazis in Germany ditch ‘skinhead and boots’ image,’ The Guardian, Nov 18, 1993. ↩

17. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/heil-hipster-the-young-neo-nazis-trying-to-put-a-stylish-face-on-hate-20140623 ↩

18. See for instance http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/the_hatemonger_next_door/ and http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/11/how-the-alt-right-uses-style-as-a-propaganda-tool.html ↩

19. Richard, Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture, New York and London: Routledge, 1997. ↩

20. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/richard-spencer-trump-alt-right-white-nationalist ↩

21. http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/heil-hipster-the-young-neo-nazis-trying-to-put-a-stylish-face-on-hate-20140623 ↩

22. See for instance http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump ↩

23. http://baltimore-art.com/2017/02/11/the-aesthetics-of-the-alt-right/ ↩

24. Ibid. ↩

25. Ibid. ↩

26. https://ageofshitlords.com/4chan-pol-launching-operation-google/ ↩

27. Y Kawamura, Sneakers: Fashion, Gender, and Subculture, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. ↩

28. http://baltimore-art.com/2017/02/11/the-aesthetics-of-the-alt-right/ ↩

29. http://www.dailystormer.com/your-uniform-new-balance-just-became-the-shoes-of-white-people/ ↩

Bryanboy is a pin-up boy for the fashion blogger: hailing from Manila, the capital of The Philippines, the 27-year-old has become an ostentatious mainstay of the fashion weeks, appearing on the front row among a cohort which includes Susie Bubble, Scott Schuman, Tavi Gevinson, Garance Doré and Tommy Ton, all of whom are now almost veterans of the blogosphere. Each of these figurehead bloggers have their signature and highly-cultivated appearance, taste and language that has garnered their loyal followers. Bryanboy presents a character of luxury leisure and fashion consumption typical of bloggers, but his standout characteristic is the ‘Bryanboy pose’, which he enacts enthusiastically with the latest season bags he features on his blog. The pose consists of one arm outstretched, with the other hand on hip, as if to say: ‘look what I’ve got!’ in a clear gesture of branding. In 2008, in honour of the pose and the blogger, and in an act of pop-cultural homage typical of the designer, Marc Jacobs named a style of bag after Bryanboy: the ‘BB ostrich’ bag, for his autumn/winter 2008 collection.¹ This reflected Bryanboy’s status as an enduring figure of the blogosphere, and cemented the pose as an iconic image on the digital landscape.

Before Jacobs’ eponymous ‘BB ostrich’ bag, the Bryanboy pose emerged from a playful internet narrative to something more commercially complex when in 2006 the luxury brand Fendi appeared to appropriate the pose for their spring/summer advertising campaign. The images featured model Angela Lindvall in a position that was strikingly familiar to the Bryanboy pose. Bryanboy fans immediately adopted the gesture and an array of amateur copies ensued; these were gladly received and promoted by the blogger. In a response post to the Fendi campaign Bryanboy wrote ‘NOTHING CAN BEAT THE ORIGINAL, THE LEGENDARY AND THE INFAMOUS BRYANBOY POSE.’ Which he followed up with: ‘I LOOOOOVE FENDI!!!!!!!’² Since this outburst, many of the blogger’s posts on the subject, as well as images of Bryanboy himself in the pose, have mysteriously been removed from the blog. Whether or not Fendi did actively appropriate the blogger, the interaction sheds light on an interesting dynamic between the popularity of the ‘blogger pose’ with fashion followers and broader issues of cultural appropriation.

A quick Google search of the term ‘blogger pose’ will inevitably raise any number of demonstrations on mastering the art of posing for street-style photographers for the blog context. There are how-to Youtube tutorials and step-by-step guides that instruct a model on how to get the right nonchalant stance of the street-style blogger. In a top ten list of these poses, blogger Cocorosa lists some of the popular figures and their signature poses.³ For instance, there’s chicmuse (Denni Elias) with her side-swept hair and hand-on-hip pose, or the pigeon-toed, direct stance popular on Scott Schuman’s The Sartorialist, among numerous others. These aesthetics, borne out of the blogging and street-style landscape, have become a clearly recognisable cultural phenomenon. But, as fashion academic and writer Minh-Ha T. Pham contends, the Bryanboy pose represents something more complex than the cliché vanity of fashion bloggers; it reflects an inversion of cultural appropriation. Pham argues that ‘fashion blogs have created a global platform on which Asian bodies and labours are incredibly visible and also commanding’ and that ‘Fendi’s dodgy corporate practices render invisible Yambao’s racially and sexually minoritised body…In effect ‘whitening’ the Bryanboy pose.’⁴

A defining phenomenon of the digital landscape and the cohort of celebrity bloggers, is the ‘blogger pose’. Personified by leading figures of this industry, such as Scott Schuman, Denni Elias and Garance Doré, the culture of posing has been which has been widely adopted and adapted by the mainstream. The case of the Bryanboy pose, as Minha-Ha T. Pham argues, presents a deeper, more culturally complex interaction between blogger and brand, raising issues of cultural appropriation in fashion commerce. Although the intentions behind the Fendi advertisement remain uncertain, perhaps the cultural repercussions aren’t as severe as Pham might suggest, but certainly the incident sheds light on the ever-evolving dynamic exchange between blogger, brand and follower.

Laura Gardner is the former Online Editor for Vestoj and a writer in Melbourne.

1. http://www.bryanboy.com/bryanboy_le_superstar_fab/2006/05/resurrection.html ↩

2. http://www.bryanboy.com/bryanboy_le_superstar_fab/2008/06/marc-jacobs-bb-bag.html ↩

3. http://mypreciousconfessions.blogspot.com.au/2011/11/top-10-fashion-blogger-poses.html ↩

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dz-w5ecvBU ↩