In the early 1960s, American social historian Daniel Boorstin wrote with striking prescience that a ‘thicket of unreality’ stands between us and the facts of life. The unreality is the image, proliferating, shallow, dazzling; the thicket, the sheer, defeating number of them, surrounding us and mediating our lives. As the mass media grew and consolidated, and advertising and PR industries reshaped human concepts of the noteworthy, Boorstin observed that we became more entranced by irreality: real occurrences were replaced by staged events, the mediated replacing unmediated in vitality, and heroes were replaced with celebrities, or ‘a person who is well-known for [their] well-knownness.’¹ He called this person a ‘human pseudo-event,’ someone famous for their image rather than their achievements. Pseudo-events are planned to look spontaneous, they promote and make money, they are dramatic (and therefore more exciting than ‘real news’), and they are planned to engage an audience, to provoke conversation. A human pseudo-event is the embodiment of these qualities, a person living their life with apparent spontaneity, each small errand becoming tiresome because of the clustering cameras that capture the carefully planned gym outfit, the nonchalant face turned to the paparazzi masking triumph at being important enough to warrant their lenses.

Celebrities who are famous for being famous often try to distance themselves from the shallowness of their fame by emphatically articulating what they want to be: an entrepreneur, a businesswoman, a DJ. They turn their hobbies into passions, to add depth to their persona and legitimise the attention trained on them. But they do not originate their own fascination: while they benefit from it, we too are implicated. Boorstin writes that we desire ‘heroes into which we pour our own purposelessness,’ looking to apparently notable people to divert us and amplify the events of our own lives, celebrities thereby functioning as ‘ourselves seen with a magnifying mirror.’²

Being images stripped of the complexity of human life, celebrities stand as shallow markers whose personae absorb our projections and who often, in the digital age, actively manipulate our expectations to serve their public image. Who they ‘really are’ is as unknowable as it is irrelevant: what they represent is sufficient in this economy.

Yet despite the futility of trying to divine through images what people are really like, we feel that authenticity is a quality that can be divined through media. A nebulous quality, authenticity; it is leaky and unreliable. Something can seem authentic if it is made of unpolished wood, or if it is heavy in the hand, or if it has the appearance of the handmade. A person can seem authentic if they write from the heart in an Instagram post, momentarily pulling back the curtain to reveal an unphotogenic experience, or an appearance that might impinge on the distanced, capable performance that social media seems to require.

Yet authenticity has the authority of an instinct: we feel we can divine it, and determine when it is absent. Certain celebrities are felt to be authentic, those who display characteristics or habits that humanise them, and return them to the realm in which the rest of us live, or who, seeming flawless, stand apart as a standard to which to aspire. Others are deemed inauthentic, suspect because of the means by which they achieved fame and cling to it with a deathly grip. All of these impressions are unreliable, being developed in response to the image, which themselves create a hyperreality that supersedes reality, and renders it obsolete. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, himself preoccupied with the real and the fake, declared as much when he wrote that the image ‘cannot imagine the real any longer, because it has become the real.’³ So too does the image of the celebrity become the celebrity, what they wear contributing to this myth-making, not just adorning their public appearances but by signifying the who and what they are.

In late 2016, two stories were told through a range of fashion and lifestyle websites that illustrate the shiftiness of authenticity in relation to the material. These two stories involve four women, all of them celebrities: Kendall Jenner and Paris Hilton, Jackie Kennedy and Natalie Portman. To explore the possibilities of these stories, and attempt to trace the complexities of authentic and inauthentic, is to start to map the ways that the real and the fake are two sides of the same coin.

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She appears in a silver dress, more sparkle than cloth, hanging in a deep cowl from spaghetti straps. Thigh-skimming, it is accessorised with a matching skinny silver rope that encircles her neck and the hands of guards steadying her as she steps out in vertiginous heels. She is Kendall Jenner, and she debuted this look to the public by posting two images on Instagram: one, a split-screen mirror image of two Kendall’s, gaze demurely lowered, captioned with the phrase ‘vintage Paris Hilton vibes;’ the other, a close-crop of her torso, the glittering dress rendering her body intelligible in the dark interior of the shot, her hand teasing her hem. The Internet recognised this dress: Kendall Jenner Totally Stole Paris Hilton’s 21^st Look! Kendall Jenner Channels Paris Hilton for 21^st Birthday Look, but Why?!

The images that these celebrity news sites ran side-by-side prompted the quick back and forth that close imitations invite: where are the similarities and where the differences? The same swooping neckline teasing the curve of breasts, two necks wrapped in silver; one woman with loose dark hair, one with cropped blonde pulled up in tufts by butterfly clips. The front of Kendall’s dress is shorter than the back; Paris’s is the reverse. Kendall Jenner’s 21^st birthday dress recalls Paris Hilton’s birthday dress most deliberately: she had it made to order by Lebanese couture label LaBourjoisie, after providing them with images of Paris. To answer Yahoo! Celebrity’s interrogative ‘But Why?!,’⁴ Kendall here assumes the role of fashion in the post-modern era, which Efrat Tsëelon argues (after Baudrillard) is ‘ruled by artifice for the sake of artifice,’ a pastiche of seasons, styles and historical periods that produces ‘theatrical sociality [which] delights in itself, [… a] signification without a message.’⁵

Which is the more authentic dress, which the original? Is it Hilton’s, for being made and worn first, and providing the model for Jenner’s? Jenner’s is also an original: it is one-of-a-kind, handmade out of thousands of Swarovski crystals, and itself proliferated a sequence of imitations, some of which Jenner promoted on her blog. These are pale imitations, bearing only a few markers of the original(s): being silver in colour, say, or having a cowl neck feature.

Baudrillard writes that the unique object is simply that which is the emblem of all the others that follow it, the model for the series. ‘Every object claims model status,’ he writes, becoming special to the consumer through their choice of buying it.⁶ For the girl who buys Miss Selfridge’s $61 version of Kendall’s dress, hers is an original: it is material, it has weight, it might make her feel Kendall Jenner-esque, living her very own Instagram story. Are these feelings inauthentic?

We should not perceive series and model as two ends of a binary, with the ‘model being viewed as a sort of essence which – once divided and multiplied […] by virtue of the concept of ‘mass’ – gives birth to the series.’⁷ Rather, there is continual movement between series and model: ‘the model is everywhere discernible in the series.’⁸ The differences between the series object (the Miss Selfridge dress, or Kendall in the dress) and the model (Paris’ dress) distinguish them from each other, calling the model to mind and establishing a relationship between all three objects as signs. Each object in the series carries the germ of the model, its likeness. This understanding complicates the idea of imitation, simultaneously imbuing all of these dresses with connotations of the first – Paris’ – and the second – Kendall’s – and the proliferating third’s – the Miss Selfridge version. They symbolically invoke one another, just as Kendall’s imitation of Paris symbolically casts her in the echo of Hilton’s celebrity.

2002, the year when Paris wore her silver, was also the year before ‘The Simple Life’ began, the reality TV series on Fox that transformed the notorious socialite into a household name (this series followed quick on the heels of the sex tape leaked without her consent). The sequence of events is difficult to remember in looking back, as Hilton, the quintessential ‘It Girl’ of the ‘Noughties’, came to symbolise the whole era’s shallow glamour and the domestification of celebrity that opened the way to the utter saturation of the contemporary moment. At her 21^st birthday party, by donning this dress, Kendall symbolically placed herself in the lineage of Paris’ influence, another wealthy socialite who passed through reality TV notoriety to carve a career. Here, it is not only the dresses that are series and model: Kendall positions herself in relation to Paris, conjuring the atmosphere of her celebrity to consolidate her own.

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In early December, shortly after Kendall Jenner’s party, a series of interviews with Madeleine Fontaine, the costume designer for the film Jackie (2016), were published across a range of media sites, presumably an extension of the film’s promotional push towards the Oscars. In depicting the First Lady in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, the film not only portrays her grief, but also her attempts to control how JFK should be memorialised. Author Wayne Koestenbaum has called Jackie Kennedy ‘an entrepreneur of appearances,’⁹ closely controlling her image and that of her family throughout her life. Indeed, in reflecting on the research she conducted for the film, Fontaine herself observed that in every photograph the family were ‘never surprised, always perfect-looking, young and beautiful – [producing] the strong idealised images imprinted in our memories.’¹⁰

In designing the wardrobe for the film, Fontaine contributed to the extension of this image of perfection, recreating key looks from Jackie Kennedy’s life including what is arguably her most famous outfit, the pink suit worn on the day of JFK’s assassination.

The original pink suit is widely believed to be an authorised replica of a Chanel design, made to order in America by dressmaking business Chez Ninon who used materials ordered from Paris. Kennedy had a proclivity for Parisian couture, and during JFK’s presidential campaign she and her mother-in-law were revealed to be private customers of couturiers such as Dior, Chanel, Lanvin, Givenchy, and Balenciaga. Lest this preference be turned into political ammunition to undermine her husband’s commitment to the country (such is the symbolic power of consumption), after the election Jackie Kennedy worked with U.S. designer Oleg Cassini and establishments like Chez Ninon to formulate what fashion theorist Stella Bruzzi has called ‘her armoury of gleaming formal clothes.’¹¹

To aid the recreation of the iconic pink suit for Jackie, Chanel sent Fontaine buttons, the chain customarily stitched into the hem of Chanel suits, and a label ‘in case the jacket should be seen on a chair or on the floor.’¹² These details, like the relics placed inside the walls of a church to consecrate it, confer authenticity on the costume suit, anointing it with the legitimising touch of Chanel.

There is an echo here of what Baudrillard writes of antiques, that they are imbued with power and status because of their claim to authenticity, ‘beating a path back to the origins’ (of Kennedy, of Chanel) and a lost time.¹³ Though indirect, the link between Chanel and Kennedy that is invoked by this collaboration on the costume suit is charged with the iconic quality of both. The original pink suit, enclosed from view until 2103 in the National Archives, is charged with the power and status Baudrillard describes. In its absence, the costume suit stands in, authenticated by Chanel’s contribution and its close resemblance to Kennedy’s suit, remembered through endlessly reproduced photographs of a bereaved Jackie standing by her husband’s coffin, her skirt still stained with his viscera.

The pink suit, which Bruzzi has called ‘the defining signifier of the assassination,’ has been endlessly reproduced and represented in films like Jackie and JFK (1991), televised miniseries, and music videos, such as Lana Del Rey’s ‘National Anthem’ (2012).¹⁴ Bruzzi writes that re-enacting a person or past events ‘entails both acknowledging that the gap between past and present is unbridgeable, while simultaneously bringing the dead past “back to life.”’¹⁵ These recreations ‘approximate’ the original event, never becoming synonymous with it, but calling attention to it and to the gap between what occurred and what is portrayed. As with Kendall Jenner’s dress, our eyes oscillate between original and replica, seeking proof of authenticity in the original and the trace of inspiration in what has followed. Differences in detail become important, reinforcing the distinction between original and re-enactment, reifying the one whilst holding the other in relation to it, a system of signs assuming their proper places.

But what do we make of a replica of a replica that bears the touch of authenticity that the original may never have had? Jackie Kennedy’s pink suit was made in New York, imitating Chanel; the replica of this suit bore finishing touches that an original Chanel suit sold in the 1960s would have borne. In fact, Fontaine told New York magazine’s The Cut that the costume so closely imitated the original that Chanel requested one for their archives. Which suit, then, is more authentic? Both speak of fame, both claim a connection to Chanel, both image their wearer in the glamorous armour of the First Lady. The second invokes the first, yes, but also so perfectly replicates it that it functions as a mirror twin, missing only the value conferred by having been the actual suit worn by the actual Jackie. Instead, the costume suit has now absorbed Natalie Portman’s own fame, an object perhaps destined for an afterlife on display as an original, handmade costume worn in her Oscar-nominated performance, in addition to joining another archive, that of Chanel in Paris.

Here we see the fantasy of authenticity writ large: as Baudrillard writes, it is ‘sublime, and […] always located somewhere short of reality.’¹⁶ In trying to trace the authentic in relationship to celebrity, dress and the image, we find ourselves in a hall of mirrors. Elements of real and replica loop back on one another, call to each other, their significance magnified by a multitude of signs. The proliferation of these signs, and the meanings with which they clad celebrities and contribute to the myth of their public image are intrinsic to the material garments that symbolically ‘speak.’ How useful, then, it is to invoke authenticity at all when we speak of celebrity, the image, and dress is questionable. Eluding any efforts to pin it down, the real retreats, disappearing behind a multitude of images, materialities, and signs into the flash of a vanishing point.

Rosie Findlay is a writer living in London. She is also Course Leader for MA Fashion Cultures at London College of Fashion.

1. D J Boorstin, The Image (or what happened to the American Dream), Penguin, 1961, p.15 ↩

2. Ibid, p. 70 ↩

3. J Baudrillard, ‘Objects, Images and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Illusion’, in Jean Baudrillard, Art and Artefact, edited by N Zurbrugg, Sage, 1997, p. 12 ↩

4. O Fleming, ‘Who is the real Paris Hilton?’, Harpers Bazaar website, December 13, 2016. http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a19291/paris-hilton-interview/. Accessed 10 July, 2017 ↩

5. E Tsëelon, ‘Jean Baudrillard: Post-Modern Fashion as the End of Meaning’, in Thinking Through Fashion: a guide to key theorists, edited by A Rocamora and A Smelik, I. B. Tauris, 2016, p. 224 ↩

6. J Baudrillard, The System of Objects, Verso, 1996, p.141 ↩

7. Ibid, p. 143 ↩

8. Ibid, p. 144 ↩

9. R La Ferla, ‘Jackie Kennedy: The First Instagram Lady’, The New York Times website, November 30, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/fashion/jackie-kennedy-first-lady-natalie-portman.html. Accessed 10 July, 2017 ↩

10. S Chan, ‘”Jackie” Costume Designer on Dressing Natalie Portman as the Former First Lady’, Hollywood Reporter website, 28 November, 2016. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jackie-costume-designer-dressing-natalie-portman-as-first-lady-950069. Accessed 10 July, 2017 ↩

11. S Bruzzi, ‘The Pink Suit’, in Fashion Cultures Revisited, edited by P Church Gibson and S Bruzzi, Routledge, 2013, p. 236 ↩

12. R La Ferla, ‘Jackie Kennedy: The First Instagram Lady’, The New York Times website, November 30, 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/30/fashion/jackie-kennedy-first-lady-natalie-portman.html. Accessed 10 July, 2017 ↩

13. J Baudrillard, The System of Objects, Verso, 1996, p.76 ↩

14. S Bruzzi, ‘The Pink Suit’, in Fashion Cultures Revisited, edited by P Church Gibson and S Bruzzi, Routledge, 2013, p. 247 ↩

15. Ibid, p. 240 ↩

16. J Baudrillard, The System of Objects, Verso, 1996, p. 79 ↩

By the time the philosopher Walter Benjamin embarked upon the Arcades Project in 1927, the nineteenth-century shopping arcades at the centre of his magnum opus had all but disappeared from Parisian life. That was Benjamin’s contention; the arcade, an architectural phenomenon made possible by the latest technological innovations, had become a relic of modern life. With mass-industrialisation in the early nineteenth-century came glass and iron, materials that irreversibly changed the urban landscape into a space of spectacle and consumerism, a space that city-dwellers could experience at their leisure. Modernisation transformed the city, and the arcades embodied a culture of capital that came with it. But just as quickly as the glass and iron passageways appeared throughout the city, they would be rendered redundant by newer, more exciting innovations. As the art historian and critic, T. J. Clark, wrote in his review of the first English translation of Arcades Project in 1999, the arcades ‘were old-fashioned almost as soon as they declared themselves the latest thing.’¹ Along came the department store, and then, as the twentieth century progressed, the mall.

In the twenty years since Clark’s review, today’s shopping destinations face the threat of their own extinction. At the turn of the millennium, the expansion of internet shopping was already posing a threat or, at best, an alternative, to physical retail space. The idea was floated in Rem Koolhaas’ mammoth Harvard School of Design Guide to Shopping in 2001 that, perhaps, e-commerce could alleviate the problems retail faced at that moment, when retail space was becoming oversaturated and new space was running low.² For the most part, however, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have proven to be a bleak time for the physical shopping experience. The exponential growth of online shopping, alongside unprecedented technological advances that have made consumerism possible not only at the click of the mouse, but at the tap of a finger, has been devastating for brick-and-mortar retail. And even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, a change in consumer behaviour was affecting the sustainable future of shopping spaces, with a trend in spending on services overtaking that of goods by the end of the second decade.³ Over the past couple of years, department stores on both sides of the Atlantic have faced closure, shopping centre chains in the UK have fallen into administration, and the great British high street has been on the brink of collapse. The retail decline was not caused by Covid-19, merely sped up by it.

What, then, does this mean for physical shopping spaces? It’s a question that resounds through the (digital) pages of newspapers, business and fashion journals.⁴ With the emergence of pop-up stores, Instagram-savvy brands have identified a possible solution. The millennial pink in-store experience cultivated by beauty brands like Glossier is one such example of how the retail sector has cottoned on to consumer shifts towards the service industry.⁵

It’s clear, as Amanda Hess wrote for The New York Times in late 2019, that, in the post-shopping mall era, the ‘retail imagination has been transposed to Instagram, and shuttered storefronts have been infiltrated by “pop-up experiences” primed to monetise the selfie.’⁶ But the pop-up phenomenon is more a material manifestation of contemporary culture, than evidence of a permanent solution for physical shopping spaces.

As the retail crisis creates a growing retail wasteland, an alternative kind of shopping experience (one that isn’t quite so temporary) emerges. Koolhaas’ Guide to Shopping suggests that the reuse of ‘existing typologies’ could alleviate the looming retail crisis if e-commerce didn’t.⁷ And, sure: opening in 2018, Coal Drops Yard, in London’s King’s Cross’s recently-redeveloped Granary Square, is a high-end shopping destination combining two parallel nineteenth-century warehouses under one semi-covered arc-like structure, designed by Thomas Heatherwick (it’s worth noting that Heatherwick is responsible for the Vessel, a kebab-shaped ‘interactive sculpture’ in New York’s Hudson Yards – a $25bn private housing and shopping complex in the Lower West Side that opened in 2019). But reusing existing infrastructure isn’t such a recent phenomenon; in the 1990s, the former Birds’ Custard factory in another British city, Birmingham, was redeveloped into the Custard Factory, a space for creative start-ups and independent stores.

At both Coal Drops Yard and Custard Factory, the connection to an industrial past is central to their image construction: the former boasts that innovation and creativity is built into its Victorian heritage; the latter cultivates a hipster-y charm that stands in stark opposition to the overtly-commercial Bullring shopping centre just down the road. Embedded within these spaces is a connection to the past and a lucrative, aestheticised placemaking that emphasises authenticity – an especially important factor in a digital, social media-driven age. There’s an attractiveness attached to ‘authenticity,’ something that has prevailed since old factory spaces in dilapidated areas of cities, like New York, were made into cool loft apartments for a generation of bohemian creatives in the 1980s. As urban sociologist Sharon Zukin observes, ‘No longer is seediness ugly, it is now a sign of authenticity.’⁸

As the service industry has taken over goods, the parameters of conspicuous consumption have also shifted. The ‘lifestyle experience’ is how architectural theorist, Brian Lonsway, describes the subtle aesthetic choices used to complement the interests of target consumers.⁹ And for spaces like Coal Drops Yard and Custard Factory, where a creative, ‘edgy’ lifestyle is cultivated through its authentic-slash-heritage infrastructure, digital technology has been as essential as the buildings themselves. Photos of the public art murals and graffiti at Custard Factory often appear on the official Instagram account, encouraging users to experience the space’s ‘authenticity,’ which, in turn, is used to market its attractiveness. Meanwhile, the branding and marketing for Coal Drops Yard has been painstakingly strategised to be the opposite of ‘cookie-cutter’ malls;¹⁰ posts tagged by users on Instagram mimic this official strategy of celebrating quirky angles, carefully positioned coffees, and posed shots with the space’s nineteenth-century infrastructure in the background. One tagged photo sees the user pose with the brands of clothing he’s wearing also tagged, and the caption ‘Industrial Realness.’

In Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, internet culture specialists, Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, note that, ‘Locations become recognised for their aesthetic potential.’¹¹ Aestheticised placemaking at both Coal Drops Yard and Custard Factory provokes users to take, and share, carefully stylised images of the space on social media, whilst also identifying with the lifestyle that these shopping destinations market. Undoubtedly, as visually cultivated as these spaces are on social media, they are also pleasant to wander around in real life (that is, if you’re the intended customer and not seen as a threat to the chilled-out atmosphere).¹² And that photogenic quality is something that predates Instagram; as the architectural historian, Beatriz Colomina, argued in Privacy and Publicity, in the twentieth century, modern architecture has been fundamentally shaped by mass media.¹³ More recently, fellow architectural historian, Claire Zimmerman, has made this idea more explicit, stating that photographic practices are embodied within the architectural framework of buildings themselves. She takes up Reyner Banham’s concept of ‘imageability’ – that buildings should ‘perform like an image’ and thus be ‘retained like an image.’¹⁴ Today, as shopping destinations like Coal Drops Yard and Custard Factory incorporate the visual literacy of social media into their brand identity, perhaps the term now is Instagrammable; the Instagrammable shopping centre.

There’s a nuance to the Instagrammable shopping centre that sets it apart from the pop-up store. The visual cues provoking users to ‘create content’ aren’t quite so overt; think, the way the upper glass facade of Coal Drops Yard catches the afternoon sun, or how a string of fairy lights glisten in the evening at Custard Factory, rather than, say, a giant Adidas shoebox pop-up. To the digital theorist, Lev Manovich, the term ‘Instagrammable’ describes a specific style of Instagram image, one that shares the abstract characteristics of the New Vision photography of the early twentieth century.¹⁵ The movement’s ambition to view the world through the distorted lens of mechanical technology is mirrored in the images created through Instagram today. Of course, Instagram is more vernacular than an artistic movement, and a shopping centre is used by more than just those who want to capture its image.

What fascinated Benjamin about the Parisian arcades was the hunch that this nineteenth-century invention was a visual embodiment of history in the making, at the moment of its becoming and disappearing. Under the enchantment of the ‘phantasmagoria of capitalist culture,’ we are caught up in the magic of the arcade, of the department store, of the mall. The historian Bernd Witte sees Benjamin as being concerned that history, in a commodity-based society is unable to ‘generate anything qualitatively new, [but] perpetuates itself as a fashionable renewal of a corrupt and forever unchanging world condition.’¹⁶ All this is to say, the Instagrammable shopping centre has neither sprung up from nowhere, nor is it likely to save the retail sector from the real crisis it faces. But, in this moment of extreme change, the Instagrammable shopping centre presents a good indication of where we were, and where we may now be headed.

Ellen Madeleine Brown is a British writer and Courtauld Institute of Art graduate.

1. T. J. Clark, ‘Reservations of the Marvellous,’ London Review of Books, 2 June 1999: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n12/tj-clark/reservations-of-the-marvellous ↩

2. Juan Palo-Cascado, ‘e-urope,’ The Harvard School of Design Guide to Shopping, ed. by Rem Koolhaas and others, Taschen, 2001, pp. 366-369. ↩

3. Austan Goolsbee, ‘Never Mind the Internet. Here’s What’s Killing Malls,’ The New York Times, 13 Feb 2020: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/not-internet-really-killing-malls.html ↩

4. See: https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/professional/what-will-stores-look-like-post-pandemic: https://hbr.org/2020/06/what-will-the-retail-experience-of-the-future-look-like ↩

5. Rebecca Liu, ‘Inside the millennial church of Glossier—the beauty brand that wants to be your best friend,’ Prospect, 15 January, 2020: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/london-glossier-pop-up-shop-rebecca-liu ↩

6. Amanda Hess, ‘Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall’, The New York Times, 27 December 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/arts/american-dream-mall-opening.html ↩

7. Palo-Cascado, Guide to Shopping, p. 369. ↩

8. Sharon Zukin, ‘Consuming Authenticity: From outposts of difference to means of exclusion,’ in Cultural Studies, 22.5, 2008, pp. 724-748. ↩

9. Brian Lonsway, Making Leisure Work: Architecture and the Experience Economy, Routledge, 2009, pp. 159-161. ↩

10. See https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/19-25-november-2018/coal-drops-yard-branding-its-not-just-fancy-shops-its-a-public-space/ ↩

11. Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin, Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures, Polity, 2020, p. 72. ↩

12. See https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jul/24/revealed-pseudo-public-space-pops-london-investigation-map ↩

13. Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, reprint, MIT Press, 1996, pp. 13-14. ↩

14. Claire Zimmerman, Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), pp. 6-7; pp. 288-9. ↩

15. Lev Manovich, Instagram and Contemporary Image (2017), p. 122: http://manovich.net/content/04-projects/152-instagram-and-contemporary-image/instagram_book_manovich_2017.pdf ↩

16. Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. by James Rolleston, 2nd edn, Wayne State University Press, 1997, p. 186. ↩

In the months leading up to my maternity leave I had been trying to piece together a more formal style than I had attempted before – things that required ironing, things that cost more than I could justify spending. I was starting to feel a need to look like an Instagram feed of Row-era Olsen Twins, or Phoebe Philo’s Celine. I urgently wanted things that a woman with a taste for structured neutrals would wear with nonchalance because she had her shit together. That year I had received a promotion that I’d long fought for, and felt both guilt about leaving work to have a baby, and fear that I would risk losing what I’d gained, that I would set myself back and things would come undone. Dressing with expensive formality might let me leave an image of myself behind, when I finally exited the building, of someone who still belonged there. And in the meantime, it would perhaps, on a surface level at least, help me to feel a little less fractured – present a unified façade – as I moved towards a new understanding of myself. This felt increasingly important as my pregnancy advanced. My body was evolving week by week, unfolding with its own rhythm that was grossly foreign. I had no continuity, I felt like a physical incarnation of time unfurling. In the office I was a countdown to when I would disappear from work and become someone else. I wanted to wear labels that suggested quiet power, a measure of success. I wanted sharp, clean lines to enclose the growing bulge of my stomach that gave away another persona I was moving towards, an impossible to conceal identity announcement.

It felt as if I was at all times inadvertently showing something too intimate and too beyond my control for the work setting. I became conscious of the way in which pregnant stomachs are walking reminders of birth. Those with experience would often, on seeing my stomach, gleefully tell me their personal horror story. However, you don’t need to have much first-hand experience of it (beyond your own entry to the world) for birth to conjure visceral imagery – heaving nakedness, secretion and pain, a nebulous disturbance. It felt like my new subtext, and gave me the sense of an erosion between my private self and the professional. I couldn’t escape the feeling of being exposed in the midst of a monumental change that I didn’t yet even have a grasp of myself. I wanted the order and construction of fashion to smooth over the primalness of pregnancy, to camouflage or distract.

To be pregnant, and then to be a mother, is to be reliant on others – to greater and lesser degrees dependent, like almost everything, on access to money, although family and community can play a vital role of support here too. I was reliant on the information and care of each different midwife I saw throughout my pregnancy. Then I was reliant on doctors, nurses, more midwives and the neonatal care team to keep me and my baby alive. I was reliant on my employer and the government to provide maternity leave, I was reliant on my boyfriend to provide income when I couldn’t, though many mothers, my own included, are reliant on government support instead. The extreme individualism of late capitalism both ensures this dependency, and does not make space for it having any value, any sense of positivity. It is simply a drain on resources. As I lost my privacy and sense of self-governance, I was no longer able to feel like an autonomous woman, and I craved the aesthetics of a woman who did.

I didn’t want to buy maternity wear, both because it felt like a waste of money and because it heightened the otherness of impending motherhood, but at a certain point practicality demanded I get a few pieces. I found the infantile aspect to dressing in later pregnancy was particularly off-putting – trousers and shorts with stretchy elastic bands around the waist, and needing rather than choosing shoes that are easy to slip on when bending becomes a logistical issue. It seemed to me a tactile example of the way that childishness seems to cling to the mother herself, an association of helplessness and naivete transferred to her due to her proximity to it. Aesthetically, there seemed to be either a soft, cutesy femininity in muted tones and flowing shapes, or the ‘boom-here-it-is’ of body-hugging, slightly sexy designs. Some kind of body armour felt more appropriate to me, because to be pregnant is to inhabit a suddenly more vulnerable body. This is not the way pregnancy is presented, but it was, for me, the underlying state of the experience and left me constantly uneasy. I lived it with a heightened awareness of proximity to loss – anyone who has experienced a miscarriage knows the fragility of expectation. Pregnant bodies are more susceptible to illness, with a weakened immune system and regular medications now off limits. And I found that once mundane choices became loaded – food was able to cause harm, the air I exposed myself – taking the tube to work for example – had additional possibilities for damage. Pregnant bodies are waiting for birth, which puts the body at great risk, there are any number of ways it can go wrong for mother and child. But not all pregnant bodies are equally vulnerable, and being white middle-class affords me greater safety and security than pregnant women of colour, particularly black women.

Vulnerability can be cushioned by resources and access, and motherhood and money are bound up together in the way all life milestones are today, but perhaps in a more discernible way than others. The lead up to having a child is tied to finances, many who plan to become parents feel a pressure to reach a certain level of success before they can have kids. And motherhood is a highly marketable category, there are an endless array of things you might be persuaded to buy in order to do it ‘correctly,’ safely, providing for a child in the best way possible. This creates a visible gap between those who can have all of this, and those who can’t. My own preoccupation with the money element of motherhood is driven at least in part by an awareness of its lack in early childhood, being born to a young single mother. Though ostensibly the only real damage I suffered – I was never without any necessity – is the preoccupation itself. It’s not unconnected that during pregnancy I wanted to dress in expensive labels.

Dressing the part of a Professional Woman commensurate with this particular life stage was, I think, an attempt to minimise the vulnerability I felt to a change in perception in how I was viewed. It felt clear to me that opting to downplay my role of mother, and instead, tooling up my work persona would help me to control the way I was seen. I would present my work self as my essential self, and regulate the rest to the background in the way that parenthood naturally exists for men – it sits in a place that will never impinge on the rest of him. On the work stage, pulling off the performance that your essential self is the one you present there is for most women an economic necessity. Social media, though, has made room for an alternative outlet for motherhood in which some are able to parlay it into their branded self, making it an asset. This can work for a certain subset of women in the fashion and lifestyle industry – high profile, quite a bit of money, looks good on Instagram – who present it as a seamless addition to their working life, but the working life is always tweaked, changed in a way to reflect this development. In fashion and related media she needs to have reached a high level of professional success, she needs access to a sense of exclusivity, to trigger aspiration in order to make motherhood an asset. She becomes a shiny showcase of the Working Mother, and trades in wider cultural relevance for the siloed experience of public motherhood. She also gives up more privacy.

When the collision of motherhood and work happened for me, my total lack of control was played out dramatically, my body would not follow the basic prescribed timeline. Five weeks before my due date, on a train into work I noticed liquid running down my legs. At first just a trickle, but by the time I got off the train at Liverpool Street Station, among the morning rush, my socks were soaked, my shoes full of amniotic fluid. I took another train into the hospital, changed into a hospital gown and in between scans and tests I emailed my boss to say I wouldn’t be coming into work. It’s been nearly one year since that day, and in that time I’ve been navigating motherhood as privately as possible, which has been very possible since the pandemic has shut much of ordinary life down. My need for seclusion has been both a reaction to the exposure I felt during pregnancy, and driven by an attempt to form an understanding of this new dimension of myself, what I’ve lost and what I’ve gained and what has remained. I’ve worn the same things again and again – old, baggy comfortable T-shirts and sweatshirts and worn-in jeans, and I’ve not bought anything new for myself. This has served purposes – comfort, ease, not needing any thought or planning, shaping myself outwardly as little as possible, an escape from consumption, and perhaps a return to some kind of softness. I don’t know what I’ll wear when I return to work soon, or what I’ll feel the need to project. My body is becoming my own again but motherhood still feels to me like treading at the border of chaos, though now with a heavy responsibility to someone else to stop things from unravelling. I’m not sure how I will move between motherhood and work and how the rest of me fits into these spaces, but I feel open to being in flux as it seems the only way to maintain myself. Motherhood has adjusted my sense of time, everything feels more immediate, more fragmented. As Rachel Cusk wrote, referring to Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost at Midnight’ and its depiction of parenthood, ‘Perhaps moments, now, are all there is.’ I don’t have my shit together, but I’ve known that total loss of control and come through the other side.

Clementine de Pressigny is the editorial director of i-D magazine, currently on maternity leave.

I lock my bike to his and step into his studio. I say ‘bonjour’ to his mum, to his partner and to a few young women focusing on something important on a screen. He brings me coffee and we sit down in his tiny office to talk. When I leave I try to take everything in with my eyes: the clothes on rails and in piles, the Alaïa dress on a mannequin, the images of past collections pinned to a wall. And the focus and friendliness that seems a common trait to everyone who works here.

For me ‘sustainability’ is such a bullshit word. It’s very much a marketing tool today. It’s not about just using organic cotton; it’s about how you act on every level. It’s about respecting everyone you work with – from the person who picks the fibres to the people in your office. We know by now that fashion relies on an unsustainable system that requires us to buy more and more and more. But I don’t believe that fashion is ‘bad.’ It’s complex. Real sustainability is about how you practise it in a respectful way and on a human scale. I’m not saying that we’re succeeding, but we are trying. Atlein has sustainable practises but I would never say that we’re a sustainable brand. The most important thing we do is using dead stock fabrics because the most unsustainable practise is to produce more textiles; the chemical processes involved in dyeing are really harmful. We keep things local by working with a factory in France. But I’d honestly feel like a liar if I went out and advertised the fact that we’re sustainable – and yet we’re more sustainable than most brands who use that term in their marketing. It’s complicated and I’m very conflicted, like most people today.

I’ve worked in fashion houses for such a long time: seven years at Balenciaga, and before that at Givenchy and Louis Vuitton. And there was always something that felt wrong about it, about me being there. A year ago I was feeling so angry and sad about the state of the world. At that time Extinction Rebellion started in France, and I immediately joined them. It was a way for me to actively encourage change. I don’t think the answer is to feel guilty about loving fashion. We have an amazing knowhow and history of fashion in Europe and it needs to be safeguarded, but the challenge is to figure out how to do that in a less destructive way. Moving forward isn’t about saying I’m right and you’re wrong, and I don’t believe in pointing fingers at anyone. It’s our economic system that’s destructive. I mean, who am I to say that fast fashion shouldn’t exist for example? People who don’t have money, why shouldn’t they have access to fashion? I don’t think that we solve anything by saying only high fashion is good and everything else is shit. I’m well aware that I’m making very expensive dresses that very few people can afford. So yes, I’m conflicted. I don’t hold the answer. I try to find a way to work that’s respectful to people and to the environment. That’s all we can do: try, die trying.

In many ways I have my mother to thank for my my environmental consciousness. I remember sweltering hot summers in the car were she’d roll down the windows and tell us that she wasn’t putting the air con on because she was thinking about our future. And this was in the Nineties you know. People didn’t talk about the environment they way we do today. I’ve always felt close to nature, even though I grew up in Paris. I surf. Not as much as I’d like to, but still. I’ve always felt that we’re all connected, all one. When I named my company, I chose ‘Atlein’ as a nod to the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve always been super interested in biology and zoology. I don’t travel as much because I’m mindful of the effect it has on the environment, but I used to travel a lot. I have a big passion for primates, especially big apes. I’ve been to conservation centres all over to see mountain gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees: Sumatra, Laos, Uganda, Costa Rica. Seeing a mountain gorilla is like seeing the god of the mountains: it’s almost mystical. There is so much of us in them, and yet we’re so different.

Today we live in an entertainment society, a media society. You have to be out there. Sometimes I think I’m paying a high price for not being more engaged with Instagram for example. I’m being really unfiltered now, but you understand me don’t you? I can’t help but think that we’d be selling more or be more recognised if I was able to play the game better. I don’t know. I’m not saying those things are the only ones that make you successful in fashion… but they are important. I’ve made so many mistakes since I started. Learning who to listen to is one of the hardest things, in work and in life. Me, I get clarity when I surf. Surfing is a great analogy for life actually. You have to pay attention to how the wind is blowing, you have to analyse the sea in order to catch the best wave. When it comes, you need to be prepared to grab it. You need to intuit: this is going to be the good ride. I’m still learning. Atlein is such a personal project. Everything I have goes into the company: all my time and every cent I make. My mom, my brother, my boyfriend – they all work with me. The name reflects what I care about the most. It couldn’t be more intimate, but then again I wouldn’t know how to do it any other way.

We forget that people working in the shadows can have the biggest impact. Do you know the designer Patrick van Ommeslaeghe? He’s not famous, but he is so important. He worked at Jil Sander with Raf Simons and at Loewe too. Maybe his name won’t be in books, but to me he’s one of the most important designers of the last decades. His dresses are on every mood board. You don’t have to make millions or be known to everybody to be important or have a lasting impact, and now that fashion is so intertwined with fame we lose sight of that sometimes. I’m the same. I get consumed by the fact that we have only 10 000 followers on Instagram. I know it’s silly but it can keep me awake at night. I’m not going to lie – it’s the way recognition is shown today. I hate how everything is about ratings, but I also realise that I need to partake in that culture. It’s the way the industry works now. Instagram can give you amazing access too of course; it’s brought us lots of good things. I’ve met amazing clients that way: one invited us to do a trunk show at her home in America and it was fantastic. We made money with that.

People expect clarity of vision from a designer; a lot of people come to fashion for reassurance. Sometimes people just don’t know what they want so the role of the designer is to say, ‘This is what’s good for you.’ But I’m a very intuitive designer, I don’t always know why I do what I do so when people rush up to me after the show to get my references, I don’t always know what to say. I don’t work with grand concepts, I’m interested in cutting, sewing, draping, structure and silhouette. I’m a dressmaker. I’m inspired by gestures and movement. The way a woman zips up the back of her dress, the way she rides a bicycle, or talks, or smokes. It takes time for me to digest and conceptualise what I’ve done. But as a designer you get that one moment – the show – which is over in fifteen minutes, and then you have another ten minutes to explain yourself to journalists afterwards. The idea of success in fashion today doesn’t always allow for someone like me: I doubt a lot, I’m not always sure. It’s normal; I think most people are like that. But the system isn’t set up to integrate it.

Why am I here? That’s such an important question. It helps us clarify why we do what we do. I remember this summer, I was on a bridge in Paris with Extinction Rebellion and the police were gassing us and I was scared. I thought to myself: I’m a fashion designer, why am I here? And sometimes when things are tough at Atlein I think I should’ve stayed working at some big fashion house, become the head of design somewhere, made a lot of money and been able to go on holidays. Why am I here? But no. The choices I’ve made for myself are the right ones. This is what I have to do. I can’t really explain it. But asking myself that question again and again helps me define who I am. Doubt is essential to creativity. It’s the point of creation, when all the possibilities open to you start to vibrate and you actively choose where to go, and what to make.

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj’s publisher and editor-in-chief, as well as a Research Fellow at London College of Fashion.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, whistleblower Christopher Wylie gave a speech at the annual summit BoF Voices.¹ He discussed how his former employer Cambridge Analytica used Facebook users’ preferences for fashion brands to profile them according to key personality traits and later target them with political messaging. According to his matrix, fans of American denim brands such as Wrangler and Lee scored low on openness and excitement-seeking and were therefore more likely to respond to pro-Trump content, while aficionados of labels such as Abercrombie and Fitch and Kenzo displayed characteristics that were likely to make them more liberal-leaning. ‘Fashion is powerful,’ he stated and went on to note, in a Benjaminian² stance, that totalitarian regimes are usually associated with recognisable and strong aesthetics: ‘You can easily imagine what a Maoist looks like. You can imagine what a Nazi looks like. You can imagine what an ISIS fighter looks like.’

Like myself, Wylie did a PhD in sociology of fashion. It’s not obvious from his speeches: his approach is at odds with that of many fashion theorists. We warn students against treating fashion as a language where every signifier points to an intelligible signified and where affinities for brands or styles can stand for personality traits. Our general consensus is that aesthetic products have become unmoored from their original meanings. I have heard homophobic views from people who looked like they came straight out of the 1980s New York club scene; a growing coterie of young neo-Nazis is sporting a hipster look, traditionally associated with liberal values, consisting of skinny jeans, Converse trainers, tote bags and beards;³ someone dressed like a Punk may well be a Thatcherite: this is how we explain postmodernism in the classroom.

Cambridge Analytica’s model is based on the opposite premise: that fashion has solid, unequivocal meanings that can be used to profile and target you with political messaging according to your clothing choices; that it is a rational universe where ‘Wrangler ergo Trump’ correlations can be drawn. But can it really hold ground today? Of course, one might argue, the proof of the pudding is in the eating: just look what happened with the US election. But then is there really a way of knowing if Wylie and his cohorts played a significant role in it? Couldn’t it be that Cambridge Analytica was merely playing its clients, just like it was playing electorates?

Much like Newton’s laws, Wylie’s matrix can only fully work in an imaginary situation. In physics, it is a setup immune to external forces where a body is always either at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line. Such a predicament, however, is a mathematical abstraction that is impossible in the real world where various factors, such as the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation, air resistance and friction, come into play. In cultural terms, an equivalent of physics’ inertial frame of reference would be a hermetically sealed social situation; a static monocultural setup where narratives are coherent and linear, meanings are fixed, and brands (and, for that matter, politicians) stand for clearly defined values.

In reality, of course, such situations do not exist, and brand narratives are constantly re-interpreted and subverted. Let’s imagine, for argument’s sake, that ‘straight white men from Alabama’ whom Wylie invoked in his speech do indeed exist in a pure and adulterated state and see Wrangler as equivalent to conservative values and of putting America first. Conversely, someone from America’s supposed counterpole, Russia, will likely associate Wrangler and the like with liberal and progressive values. In a 1970s poem, still widely cited today, that humorously depicts St Petersburg’s hippy scene, one of the characters swears ‘by the holy firm Lee’⁴ which is framed as the symbol of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. A Russian Lee fan, then, is unlikely to score low on excitement-seeking, unlike his or her American counterpart. So, an Alabamian and a Russian will read Lee and Wrangler in polar opposite ways.

The problem is, pure and uncontaminated identities are exceedingly rare in the global late capitalist world, other than in the imaginaries of nationalist ideologues. Alabamians marry Russians; their children speak with a British accent because of Peppa Pig.⁵ Kenzo fans wear Wrangler. Anyone with a hybrid identity (not 100% straight, not 100% white, not 100% Alabamian) is likely to hold multiple, potentially conflicting, views on a lot of things, often at the same time. We are implicated in systems of exchange with so many touchpoints that our horizons of understanding are permanently shifting. In this cultural indeterminacy, a brand can be both conservative and liberal, as its meanings will be read and enacted from multiple subject positions at once, even by the very same person. As the writer James Meek, with whom I had an email exchange discussing the Cambridge Analytica case, wrote to me, ‘conservative patriotism and free love and white fear of marginalisation have all united in Trump, under the American flag, in Lee and Wrangler.’

It would be tempting to conclude that brands have no meaning at all, but this is not a point of view that I am here to defend. Brands do have meanings, but they are always in flux and are most certainly not shaped by any one group of people. Instead, they are rearticulated every time a brand is worn, pictured or mentioned. ‘The brand progresses or emerges in a series of loops, an ongoing process of (product) differentiation and (brand) integration,’ posits Celia Lury.⁶ An earlier Vestoj article unpacked how brands such as New Balance and Adidas were appropriated by alt-right movements,⁷ showing a brilliant, if terrifying, example of how such new readings constantly emerge.

This ambiguous world of ever-shifting brand meanings might be resilient to the likes of Cambridge Analytica and its profiling, but it is certainly more difficult to navigate. When aesthetics do not have solid and fixed links to ideas, Wylie’s maxim ‘you can easily imagine what a Nazi, or an ISIS fighter, looks like’ no longer applies. And then, to paraphrase an ad that warns passengers of plain-clothed inspectors on London public transport, ‘spotting one is “easy”: they look just like you.’⁸

However, one thing that Wylie was saying is indeed worthy of further analysis. He suggested that every consumer is also a voter, and implied it is the responsibility of the brand to communicate certain messages that might sway their vote. This was possibly the most important takeaway of his speech, but also one that rarely got cited or reflected upon.

Two years ago, tens of thousands of people within Moscow-based opposition assembled at a rally opposing government corruption. It ended with an unprecedented number of arrests – the highest at any rally in post-Soviet history, according to BBC Russia;⁹ many of them were violent. On that day, my old Muscovite friend Sasha Boyarskaya, a creative consultant for Nike and an Instagram influencer with tens of thousands of followers, posted two photographs of herself. In one, she was wearing a gas mask.¹⁰ In the other one, the gas mask was hanging off her neck, and she had a flag in her hands. ‘I hope we all have a good day today,’ she said in the caption.¹¹ This was complete with a hashtag that I read, while scrolling down fast, as the Russian word for ‘revolution.’

Sasha used to be an avid and vocal supporter of the protest movement at its inception in 2011, but in the latter years I hadn’t seen her post much on the matter. I was moved by her renewed interest in the protests and by her bravery: she had given birth only a few months earlier, and it was obvious that participating in rallies in early 2017 was anything but a safe affair. She could easily end up detained, beaten, and parted with her very small son.

I scrolled back to take a closer look at her photo and then realised that the hashtag I had hurriedly read as ‘#revolution’ said, in fact, ‘#revolutionair,’ as in Nike Air Max. Her post was a reference to Nike Air Max Day, a running event sponsored by the sportswear conglomerate and happening on the very same day as the rallies. Sasha is a very skilled social media strategist. She knew exactly what she was doing.

‘I am stunned,’ I confessed to my husband when recounting the episode to him that evening, as I watched the arrest poll grow. ‘How cynical – taking a political narrative that will land real people who uphold it in jail and using it to flog trainers.’

‘Yes, but don’t you think for some people brand narratives are an entry point to political ones?’ he replied.

He had a point. In The Culture of New Capitalism, sociologist Richard Sennett asks ‘do people shop for politicians the way they shop for clothes?’ and invites readers to ‘consider the citizen as a consumer of politics, faced with pressures to buy.’¹² This was published in 2006, the same year as cultural anthropologist Adam Arvidsson’s text Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture, where he argues that brands are ‘spun into the social fabric as a ubiquitous medium for the construction of a common social world,’ creating a ‘complex web of meanings and intensities’ that invites certain actions and attitudes: ‘Brands do not so much stand for products, as much as they provide a part of the context in which products are used […] with a particular brand I can act, feel, and be in a particular way.’¹³ In other words, brands shape a certain ‘structure of feeling’, as per Marxist theorist Raymond Williams’ definition.¹⁴ This ‘framework’ then informs our decisions that go well beyond consumption in its traditional sense. There is no reason not to imagine that such decisions may include our votes and other political acts. In the years that have passed since the publication of those texts, such ‘webs of meaning and intensities’ created by brands have enmeshed us even more closely than before, as our relationships with brands have got more intimate due to new media and to ever evolving marketing strategies aimed at turning brands into friends.

Before she even got employed by Nike, Sasha had a Nike swoosh tattoed on the left-hand side of her chest, right where it would be if she was wearing a T-shirt. Her body has thus become a Nike garment; she literally has the brand under her skin. She isn’t the only one – brand tattoos are a phenomenon that has been studied academically.¹⁵ This illustrates the extremely intimate relationships with consumer brands characteristic of late capitalism. For a lot of us, these relationships are more solid than those with political parties. Brand narratives are often more digestible, more shareable, more memefiable and more relatable than those of political campaigns, and they may well have more say in shaping political attitudes.

I have discussed campaigns such as Diesel’s ‘Make Love, Not Walls’¹⁶ and, more recently Gilette’s ‘Toxic Masculinity’¹⁷ ads in cultural studies seminars at Chelsea College of Arts and London College of Fashion. My students usually correctly identify them as tapping into political narratives that have a certain ‘cool’ cachet due to being popular with young and progressive groups of people, and most are disappointed to see them ‘riding the hype’ and using these narratives for profit. But then the discussion usually takes a slightly different turn: yes, someone says, we can safely assume that some anti-Trump consumers who have not yet bought into Diesel may become interested in the brand after having seen this ad; but what about people who haven’t yet decided which way to vote but are already fans of Diesel? In a culture oversaturated with brand narratives, ‘we end up living in a well nigh all-encompassing brand-space,’ Arvidsson argues.¹⁸ It is easy to form brand allegiances before political ones, and, in that case, there is a chance one’s brand allegiances will inform political preferences. Even though campaigning for Democrats was not Diesel’s intention – its intention is to flog as many jeans as possible – it might be the outcome of its messaging.

Sasha is a skilled social media strategist, and her comment ‘I hope we all have a good day’ under the second image, paired with ‘do more than just run 5k today #justdoitsunday’ was, on second thought, probably deliberately ambivalent (or at least I’d like to think so). She knew very well that a lot of her friends would get arrested that day and was weaving their stories, however subtly and probably imperceptibly to many, into her message; giving protest imagery a touch of Nike. It’s a sad state of affairs, one might say, if political ideas are more persuasive if they come from a consumer brand; but isn’t this how late capitalism works: not only is everything branded, but brands are an access point to anything, helping consumers to make sense of the world well beyond themselves. This is what Wylie was talking about: brands have the power – and, given their economic resources, the platform – to send certain messages that may remain unheard if they are coming from elsewhere; to make them part of the vernacular. Of course, brands can capitalise on political messages to build relationships with their audiences, but the reverse is also true: they can similarly capitalise on their already existing relationships with audiences to get political messages across.

Not that their marketing executives will necessarily want to do it, as Wylie seemed to be hoping – why would they? – but, as the earlier section suggests, there is a possibility of it happening even despite their intentions, as brand meanings and messages are never fixed, never straightforward, and never in the hands of the brand’s team alone.

Jana Melkumova-Reynolds is a scholar, writer and consultant based in London. She lectures at London College of Fashion and Chelsea College of Art, and is currently a ESRC-funded PhD candidate at King’s College London.

1. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/video/cambridge-analytica-weaponised-fashion-brands-to-elect-trump-says-christopher-wylie ↩

2. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm ↩

3. https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/heil-hipster-the-young-neo-nazis-trying-to-put-a-stylish-face-on-hate-64736/ ↩

4. This poem, by the singer and songwriter Boris Grebenschikov, is available (in Russian) here http://www.guelman.ru/artists/mg/kniga-prozy/view_print/  ↩

5. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/peppa-pig-children-american-english-accent-cartoon-network-a8777581.html ↩

6. Celia Lury, Brands:The Logos of the global economy. London: Routledge, 2004 ↩

7. http://vestoj.com/operation-new-balance/ ↩

8. For a brilliant discussion of invisibility as a new strategy of extreme ideologies such as the alt-right, see the article mentioned in the previous footnote. ↩

9. https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-39402540 ↩

10. https://www.instagram.com/p/BSGcj26jz1i/ ↩

11. https://www.instagram.com/p/BSGkHA2DsQT/ ↩

12. Richard Sennett, The Culture of new capitalism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006 ↩

13. Adam Arvidsson, Brands:Meaning and value in media culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2006 ↩

14. See, for instance, http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100538488  ↩

15. A. Orendt and P. Gagné, ‘Corporate Logo Tattoos and the Commodification of the Body,’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 38 (4), pp. 493-517, 2009 ↩

16. https://www.adweek.com/creativity/diesel-and-david-lachapelle-offer-joyous-resistance-with-the-flamboyant-make-love-not-walls-campaign/ ↩

17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=UYaY2Kb_PKI ↩

18. Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and value in media culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2006 ↩

As evidenced by one of Menkes’ most recent reviews, ‘#SuzyPFW Balmain: Supermodels, Curves, Super Relevant,’² readers cannot help but recognise Menkes’ efforts to ensure her so-called ‘relevancy’: she designates her digital status via a catchy hashtag, casually namedrops Kanye West and Kris Jenner as backstage guests, tightens her word count to accommodate shortened attention spans and even refers to the ‘hourglass body looks’ that Olivier Rousteing sent down the runway as ‘Instagram friendly.’³ Her critique of the Balmain show and its underlying ideas, however, was shallow at best, overshadowed by mentions of click bait celebrities and superfluous nods to social media platforms.

For a renowned fashion critic who gained a reputation for her bold point of view and often blunt critiques over the course of her twenty-five-year-plus career as chief fashion critic for the International Herald Tribune, Menkes’ new role as international editor across Vogue’s nineteen editions (save for the US) leaves something to be desired, particularly where the relevancy of her ideas is concerned. In the move from the British media platform to Vogue, Menkes’ embrace of digital platforms has not been a smooth one. Menkes clearly cares deeply about how the public perceives her embrace of the digital age, which has irrevocably changed the way we consume fashion media – 24/7, interactively, on smartphones. Yet there is a difference between staying ‘relevant’ via merely acquiring technological fluency, if only on the most basic level (i.e. regularly utilising Instagram), and offering contextualised, challenging critiques that push the industry and its insiders forward.

In this same interview, a then seventy-year-old Menkes explained that she was entering a ‘digital-first’ phase, moving in a new media direction aiming for increased publication speed, a wider international reach, and greater relevancy to the multi-platform millennial generation she now writes for. Menkes, and by extension, her current employer, recognise the necessity to cater to this new audience, for whom the daily consumption of digital media via social platforms – where significant profit lies – has become a natural extension of their lives. This has undoubtedly impacted Menkes’ decision to abandon her Herald Tribune post and migrate to Condé Nast. Now, two years on, and nestled in her new role at Vogue, Menkes has gained greater reach and immediacy with her readers, but the tactic arguably comes at a cost to her integrity as a critic.

The once analytical voice to be reckoned with seems to have lost its sharpness, its probing and considered tone – the very qualities that once made Menkes stand out – only to be replaced by generic, comfortably complacent content: glorified blog posts interspersed with blurry Instagram photos of Menkes smiling beside this or that celebrity or designer. Although the fashion world continues to talk about Menkes as if she is still a critical voice worth respecting above all others, her move to Vogue signifies not only a shift in her priorities, but also a tonal shift. In her golden years as a critic, receiving a compliment from Menkes in a review felt earned, not diluted by empty praise; it was indicative of a collection not just well made, but created with something important to say about the culture at large. Menkes did not simply applaud a designer on the basis of how many Instagram followers he or she had accrued. Her past writing, such as ‘The Bright Continent,’⁴ her February 2009 commentary on fashion’s embrace of both African design and increased diversity among models on the runway, written in the same year that President Barack Obama was elected, found Menkes working and thinking on many levels: she contextualised the current moment in a helpful way, critiqued past iterations of the trend, noting how ‘In previous years, references to Africa have at times seemed awkward, patronising, even insulting,’⁵ and engaged with art, politics and appropriation, all the while staying forthright but not unnecessarily acerbic. It is these qualities which are becoming increasingly difficult to discern in Menkes’ writing today.

Fast forward and consider Menkes’ first blog post for Vogue in June 2014, tellingly titled: ‘Fighting the Bitch Brigade.’⁶ The conceit of the column – that the internet, and particularly Twitter, runs rampant with a ‘stream of catty comments’ – seems to contradict Menkes’ once-discerning voice. ‘Suzy in Vogue,’ she declared, ‘is going to be “anti-bitch.”’ Surely it was never in question of whether Menkes was an industry ‘bitch,’ but as a fashion journalist, her critiques for The International Herald Tribune often challenged designers’ thinking or questioned their concept. Though not explicitly ‘bitchy,’ her critical writing was enough to get her banned, famously, from the Versace shows for several years. Then, in 2001, she was banned from all LVMH shows for a day that season’s week in Paris, a result of her critical comments towards brands in the conglomerate. As Menkes herself explained, ‘I try to offer constructive – not hateful – comments. It is about thoughtfulness as opposed to meanness and analysis rather than knee-jerk reaction.’⁷ For someone like Menkes – and her peers, Cathy Horyn, Vanessa Friedman, Tim Blanks et al – the expectation was that she would always write and think about fashion in the spirit of independent journalism. Now, with a global platform on which to discuss fashion at her disposal, Menkes’ 500 plus words debut, bemoaning fashion-police style criticism, is a telling stance.

For Vogue, the addition of the critic to their staffing is indicative of their desire to be seen not merely as a newsstand-exclusive fashion glossy, but as the premiere arbiter of taste – and relevancy – both online and in print within an increasingly global fashion industry. Hiring Menkes – a critic eager to expand, not diminish, her presence within the rapidly changing fashion world as her audience skews younger and towards the internet, by writing more accessibly for wider appeal – conveniently bolsters Vogue’s credibility as a publisher of respected commentry. The mere mention of Menkes’ name, no matter where her byline appears, calls to mind a certain gravitas, formed through the decades of knowledge and experience and relationships she has acquired within the industry.

If fashion media continues to provide old guard critics like Menkes, whether or not they remain as relevant as they once were, with the most widely read platforms to write and think aloud, it will miss out on marginalised and rarely heard critical voices. Those are the voices that hold the potential to introduce new perspectives and ideas within an industry that relies on constant change, even as it hesitates to embrace structural change. Those are the voices that just might prove themselves not only relevant, but also utterly refreshing.

Olivia Aylmer is a New York-based stylist, writer and graduate of Barnard College at Columbia University.

1. I. Amed, “Inside Suzy Menkes’ New Digital World,” The Business of Fashion, 10 June 2014. ↩

2. S. Menkes, “#SuzyPFW Balmain: Supermodels, Curves, Super Relevant,” Vogue, 3 March 2016. ↩

3. Ibid. ↩

4. S. Menkes, “The Bright Continent,” T Magazine, 19 February 2009. ↩

5. Ibid. ↩

6. S. Menkes, “Fighting the Bitch Brigade,” Vogue, 3 June 2014. ↩

7. Ibid. ↩

‘Nearly every show attendee, from the front row to the standing section, now arrives with phone in hand and Instagram account primed […]. This is fashion in the age of Instagram, a heady era in which digital media is changing the way clothes are presented and even the way they are designed. As shows are calibrated to be socially shared experiences, and fashion itself is rejiggered to catch eyes on a two-dimensional screen, some skeptics wonder what is being lost or sacrificed as fashion becomes grist for the digital mill.’

Matthew Schneider, ‘Fashion in the Age of Instagram’ for The New York Times, 2014.¹

THE DIGITAL SCREEN AND fashion form the cornerstones of modern day consumer culture. Now the two are increasingly fused, but back in 2009, Alexander McQueen was one of the first designers to capitalise on this. The designer brought his creations into the digital sphere by live-streaming the apocalyptic, sea creature-inspired spring/summer 2010 vision, ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, on SHOWstudio.com. Only three years later, Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons proclaimed, ‘The future’s in two dimensions’²) and sent a collection of graphic, felt-pressed garments down the runway. Many saw the collection as a criticism of online media coverage of fashion, others saw it as embracing these technologies by literally making the designs flat. It begs the question: in a world of so-called ‘bi-dimensional fashion’³ and online oversharing, has creativity become the ultimate commodity?

Some would argue that the proliferation of mobile devices in the fashion industry has created a more open and participatory platform, evolving from a tradition of exclusivity. This echoes what theorist Martin Hand outlines in his essay ‘Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption’ in The Handbook of Visual Culture. He argues that ‘The image has simultaneously become the vehicle, context, content and commodity in consumer culture’. Hand goes on to explain that there is ‘an increasingly commodified yet participatory culture’⁴ evolving out of online social media sharing platforms such as Twitter, Vine and Instagram. Fashion shows may still be restricted to only a limited number of journalists, bloggers and photographers, however social media enables all aforementioned participants to share the event with a much wider audience. Cara Delevingne’s live runway video from the Giles autumn/winter 2014 ready-to-wear show garnered over 230,000 likes from her 5,828,643 followers,⁵ the result of combining celebrity status, brand power and the allure of the spectacle.

Whilst some might see the use of mobile devices as scratching away at the fashion industry’s inaccessible and glossy exterior, it also provides an interesting model for Michel Foucault’s theory of simultaneous surveillance and self-surveillance as proposed through the Panopticon. The theorist outlines in his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, that those in a field of visibility assume the responsibility of being observed. Analysing this architectural structure, where a subject is under constant surveillance, Foucault concludes that ‘the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.’⁶ This emerges with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as its twenty-first century reincarnations, which have induced a sense of constant surveillance for activities within the fashion industry.

Continuing this notion, in her piece ‘How Instagram Can Make You Forget Why You Love Fashion’ for i-D magazine, fashion journalist Courtney Iseman states: ‘The entire industry has adapted to the fact that now it’s not just a few select journalists writing about shows in their columns, but the masses click-click-clicking away on their smart phones to share their take on the shows and the clothes with their thousands of followers’.⁷ This instantaneous documentation of the fashion show means that audience members experience the garments not in their three-dimensional state, but are instead transfixed by the two-dimensional vision of what they are looking at on their mobile screens. Furthermore, the social media coverage of the ‘circus’ surrounding fashion, which now includes celebrity sightings and street style, in some cases becomes more prioritised than the fashion being presented.

Beyond the catwalk, professional photographers and image-makers are also fully embracing the mobile medium. Nick Knight’s pioneering online platform, SHOWstudio, showcases projects such as the ‘#DIESELTRIBUTE’ campaign, ‘Pussycat, Pussycat’ (an Instagram photo shoot) and ‘The Elegant Universe’ (a couture photo shoot captured on an iPhone). The use of a smart-phone product as opposed to higher-quality photography equipment not only enmeshes the smartphone fashion image even more into the consumer culture cycle but further democratises the production method of the fashion images by professionals and members of the public alike.

Alongside Knight and Delevingne, many other fashion platforms and practitioners have embraced the popular medium of the smartphone as a press and marketing strategy. For instance, Centrefold, a biannual arts and fashion magazine, was hired by Nokia to create an issue that was shot entirely on one of the brand’s latest mobile devices. The designer Kenneth Cole, who staged his runway comeback after seven years absence, sent models down the runway with mobile phones taking pictures of the audience during the finale, an act that echoed Foucault by reversing the viewer/participant roles. For, according to Foucault, ‘the Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.’⁸

Although these image-making processes can be deemed as democratic and accessible, the ever-quickening pace of consumer commodities only gains momentum through the constant influx of different ‘It’ people, labels and objects being generated through online platforms. While fashion has always had an obsession with the new, these digital additions are sending the cycle into overdrive. Certain designers like Phoebe Philo have consequently banned photography at their shows as an attempt to keep a certain aspect of the fashion industry sacred in the age of overexposure.

The examples of Cara Delevingne and Nick Knight also raise issues on authority and status in fashion. It takes a photographer with Knight’s credibility to shoot an international campaign on an iPhone. Likewise, only someone with the following of Delevingne could post a runway selfie video that goes viral. The influx of smartphones and online social media may make the general public feel like the velvet rope to enter the fashion macrocosm has been set aside, however in reality the boundaries between insiders and outsiders are still very much in place.

Carla Seipp is a freelance fashion, arts and fragrance journalist.

1. ‘Fashion in the Age of Instagram’ by Matthew Schneider for The New York Times, April 9, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/fashion/fashion-in-the-age-of-instagram.html?_r=0 ↩

2. ‘Comme des Garçons Fall 2012 Ready-to-Wear Collection: Runway Review’ by Tim Blanks for style.com, March 2,2012. http://www.style.com/fashionshows/review/F2012RTW-CMMEGRNS ↩

3. ‘Fashion in the Age of Instagram’ by Matthew Schneier for NYTimes.com, April 9, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/fashion/fashion-in-the-age-of-instagram.html?_r=0 ↩

4. M. Hand, ‘Images and Information in Cultures of Consumption’ in The Handbook of Visual Culture, edited by I. Heywood and B. Sandywell, Berg, London & New York, 2012, p. 526 ↩

5. http://instagram.com/p/kh0kmODKBX/ ↩

6. M. Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish, Panopticism.’ In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, edited by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, New York: Vintage Books, 1977, p. 197. ↩

7. ‘How Instagram Can Make You Forget Why You Love Fashion’ by Courtney Iseman for i-D Magazine, July 14, 2014. http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/read/think-pieces/3653/is-the-fashion-worlds-instagram-feed-getting-you-down ↩

8. M. Foucault, ‘Discipline and Punish, Panopticism.’ In Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, edited by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, New York: Vintage Books, 1977, p. 201-202 ↩