In 2014, a woman posed a question to the 1.1 million members of a Reddit thread called Female Fashion Advice. The post was titled ‘Help, I need to wear an ID badge/key card at work!’and it was right in between ‘Help! Uniform for conference interns’ and ‘Enamel pin badges — how do you wear yours?’ How, she wanted to know, do you wear an ID without messing up your outfit?

Each day millions of people — a veritable army — put on an ID badge and go to work. The badge is usually a plastic card clipped to a lanyard with a photograph that looks like state-issued documentation.

Forty-three of them were quick with a reply: carry a purse, a phone case with card slots, use a retractable badge, hang it on a silver necklace like the one the commenter’s mother wears.

In design parlance this is known as a workaround. When people hang jackets on doorknobs, write PIN numbers on their hands and chain bicycles to park benches, says designer Tim Brown, the adaptation reveals an unmet need.¹ On Reddit, the tone was supportive and friendly. Everyone agreed it was a pain, but a necessary one. If the ID badge is a collective fashion problem, and the Reddit thread suggest that it is also, by turns, a status symbol, an ergonomic challenge and a proxy for the changing nature of work. As with any other aggravation, from ugly smoke detectors to hidden security cameras, millions of people have, in their own ways, learned to deal with it.²

The lanyard was once useful — it originated as an accessory to war. Everything from badges and lanyards, worn at work, to camouflage, worn worldwide, to food pouches, now feeding babies globally, was developed by the military. In its first incarnation it was a strap made of rope, threaded through hooks to rig sails or attached to a knife or a whistle. Early news references to lanyards often involved wartime activity. ‘Early Bradley Pulls First Lanyard as All American Artillery Pieces in France Hurl Steel Against Germans’ Positions,’ reads a New York Times headline from 1944. One pulled, but did not wear, a lanyard.

But our badges serve the same purpose as they do in the army. Agreeing to wear them is an act of ‘consensus essential to community life,’ like using hello as a greeting.³ The badge stratifies, keeping its wearers in and others out. At Davos, for example, where heads of state and celebrities meet to discuss global affairs, the badge system is colour-coded and complex. Different shades denote varied levels of access, which sometimes results in paranoia. ‘Every encounter begins with an unabashed glance or two down at the other’s badge. It is Davos Man’s defining gesture,’ writes Nick Paumgarten of his time there. ‘So frequently did gazes slip to reexamine my badge that I came to know what it must be like to have cleavage.’⁴

Employees express the same kinds of feelings. A Google contract worker described her disappointing badge on Forbes like this: ‘This may seem like a silly thing…but never has something made me feel like I stood out more in a workplace. Google employee badges are 3D and have the standard picture along with different colored bubbles. The contractor badge had the standard picture and a very obvious red background, not to mention starting out with the big red C, which we nicknamed the scarlet letter.’⁵

So what of the lanyard of the future? The system that created the lanyard is a system predicated on the fragile thesis that people don’t mind wearing plastic tags around their necks when they leave the house. But the remote worker, who is the worker of the future, doesn’t need a badge. They were designed for the workers of the last century, who never left their desks. Workers are now untethered, meeting in communal spaces or a warehouse in Brooklyn. They have standing desks and walking meetings. Their phone is the office they carry with them.

Where we work, and how we feel about it, has also changed in the last decade. In 2005, Enron book-ended the dot com bubble. The first episode of The Office aired. Two years later, Joshua Ferris published Then We Came to the End, a bestseller about corporate culture, and Matthew Weiner created Mad Men. Work became a setting to explore alienation and anxiety, and revealed a cynicism about how it might set us free.

The very idea of identification has changed along with it. We’re being surveilled in more ways than ever before. Fingerprints and eye scans are replacing photographs. There’s a laser that can track a heartbeat. Technology, and identification, is binding itself to our bodies in irreversible ways. Sociometric badges were once used to monitor and track office behaviour in a scientific study and people found it creepy. But worrying about a badge that gathers data now seems quaint since we worry about being tracked online and on the street. If ID badges suggested there was a freedom to the twenty-first century office, a boomeranging ease to come and go as we pleased, this new kind of identification signals its end.

Jordan MacInnis lives in Toronto, and works as a writer and in PR.

1. T Brown, Change By Design, New York: HarperCollins, 2009, p. 40–41 ↩

2. B Katz, Make It New: The History of Silicon Valley Design, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015, p.178 ↩

3. U Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1986, p.177 ↩

4. N Paumgarten, ‘Magic Mountain,’ The New Yorker, March 5, 2012. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/05/magic-mountain ↩

5. Quora Contributor, ‘What It’s Like to Work at Google as a Contractor,’ Forbes, September 24, 2014. https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/09/24/what-its-like-to-work-as-a-google-contractor/#296983737ac9 ↩

‘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 ↩

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 ↩