Sarah Palin

Please see this great article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/oct/03/sarah.palin.debate.feminism/print

Michelle Goldberg says, “It was an appalling display. The only reason it was not widely described as such is that too many American pundits don't even try to judge the truth, wisdom or reasonableness of the political rhetoric they are paid to pronounce upon. Instead, they imagine themselves as interpreters of a mythical mass of "average Americans" who they both venerate and despise.”

Sarah Palin is a brand. It is obvious that she has honed her skills [of blabbering with a hick-ish accent] to sell the elements of her personality that the McCain campaign wants to promote- an abrasively down-to-earth persona. She has consciously crafted these traits into a very distinctive persona, and even I will admit that she has a pretty nice package for the Sarah Palin brand (no pun intended). And, “like the famous brands that have become a part of our consciousness, self-branders have to go about enhancing their profile and increasing their visibility through marketing, marketing, marketing” (Davis 47).

Palin tries to work against an emphasis on institutional roles, and work towards being a link between Americans’ internal impulses, and her own. In other words, Sarah Palin is trying to move beyond the institutional role of “Republican,” and move towards connecting with six-pack Joe, or the “average” American. The definition here of “average” is totally ambiguous, and is instead supposed to encapsulate most people in the mid-west or red states. This average inner-self is not completely internalized: it is externalized in the need to connect with others on this very basis of dignified ordinary-ness. It seems as though the Republicans have been running an election on, “a new emphasis on the exploration of personal desires and immediate experience, on distancing oneself from institutional (i.e., external) norms and goals, on finding one’s unique inner voice, and on freely expressing one’s intimate feelings” (Davis 43).

Palin’s artificiality is more than just her being a commodity- she is a brand. Davis writes, “A brand became a carefully crafted image, a succinct encapsulation of a product’s pitch…According to branding expert Scott Bedbury, in an interview with the business magazine First Company, a ‘great brand’ is ‘an emotional connection point that transcends the product’” (Davis 44). Both Sarah Palin and John McCain repeatedly fail to provide a product, or substantive explanations to their intended plans, and continue to reach out on an emotional level to connect with Joe the plumber. This echoes Debord’s idea of the spectacle, in which the image becomes more valuable than the actual product. Even though Davis was writing well before anyone knew who Sarah Palin was, he seems to have some psychic ability about her techniques: “the new marketing scripts incorporate the language of self-determination and transformation, and build on the knowledge that being true to our unique inner selves is a powerful moral ideal” (Davis 45). Don’t get me wrong- I am aware that Republican and Democratic politicians alike try to appeal to voters on an emotional level because voting is not an entirely rational process, and people must simply like the candidate they choose to support. But Sarah Palin is on a whole different level because of her complete and total lack of substance.

It seems as though Palin’s marketing scripts have been so successful because they reach both ends of the spectrum of self-definition that Davis initially talks about (one end being an institutionalized self, defined by external experiences and the other being an internal, unsocialized impulse). On the one hand, the “ordinary-ness” of Palin’s constituency that she is trying to capitalize on is originally an internal identity that many people trace to their upbringing. Yet, being “average” depends on defining oneself in opposition to those who are not average, and is inherently a social definition. So, Palin has been able to personally identify with Middle America, reaching a part of their self-definition that desires to be acknowledged, and connected with others on a large scale. Davis says, “People need to ‘locate themselves in a larger experience,’ and they need social recognition for their identity projects’” (Davis 46). Sarah Palin has sold herself as the quintessential sign, or spectacle, of the Republican Party, which is striving to personally connect with Middle America as opposed to politically or intellectually connect on a substantial level. She is the brand of the Republican Party, and you can certainly wear her on your sleeve.

Vivienne Westwood

“The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas. They are the only subversion.”-VW

From http://www.style.com/beauty/icon/101008ICON/:

“Kate Winslet has hotly denied recent rumors that she'll play Vivienne Westwood in an upcoming biopic. To which we say, are you kidding? What actress would turn down the opportunity to play one of fashion's most intriguing characters? Just think of the costume changes…

Yes, there'd be the dreary schoolteacher garb to start, but then came Westwood's peroxide provocateur phase, in which she played partner-in-crime to Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and the model for ripped-and-safety-pinned T-shirt-wearing punks everywhere. In the eighties, the designer was her own best advertisement for the mini crinis and reconstructed eighteenth-century garb she put on the Paris runway. Cut to 1993, when Naomi Campbell took her infamous catwalk spill in Westwood's ten-inch platforms; we'd like to see Winslet give those a try. Fast-forward to today—when fashion's great crusader isn't sporting tiny horns in her dyed orange locks, she's wearing a headband that reads "branded" and proselytizing an anti-consumerist message that must give her business managers some sleepless nights. Come on, Kate, reconsider.”

Vivienne Westwood has always been her own best advertisement for her fashions. Yet she has always held an anti-establishment, anti-consumerism message. Westwood is completely against everything that Fordism represents: rational and standardized approaches to human beings and time. How can one of fashion’s most respected, most unconventional characters be anti-consumerism? Her career rests on consumerism. How can she be against branding? She is a brand, even more so than the brand that she has created. These paradoxes are quite characteristic of Vivienne Westwood’s often puzzling character and dogmas- anything against the grain, anything nonsensical, anything against conformity, and anything against consumerism (no matter what the costs, even if the costs are a raging business based on elite consumerism). What a fascinating character.

Britain experienced a cultural revolution in the 1970s with the birth of the punk subculture. Catherine McDermott says, “Westwood and McLaren saw themselves as the natural inheritors of Dada and Surrealist antics and one of the weapons they used to attack the establishment was the subcultural world of sexual deviancy and pornography. The clothes the pair designed carried with them the spirit of play with the signs of the times- a spirit that was vital and alive. The people who wore their clothes reflected their manipulation of urban culture and the libidinous world of London night life. Westwood’s designs acted as a trigger for the consumer, rendering them participants of the counter culture” (McDermott 13, emphasis mine).

Thus, from the get go, Westwood’s clothes were powerful symbols of rebellion, and were barely read in terms of “clothes.” Throughout the course of her career (especially from the late 70s to the early 80s), Westwood paradoxically brought punk, which was founded on an underground mentality of anarchy, anti-authority, and anti-conformity, to the mainstream. What does it mean to bring something that is rooted in anti-establishment beliefs to the mainstream? It has certainly changed the original meaning and significance of punk. Westwood became disenchanted: “I got tired of looking at clothes from this point of view of rebellion- I found it exhausting, and after a while I wasn’t sure if I was right. I’m sure that if there is such a thing as the ‘Anti-Establishment’- it feeds the Establishment” (Wilcox 15). Claire Wilcox goes on: “Westwood, now in her early 40s, turned her attention to subverting the Establishment from within” (Wilcox 15).

It seems to me that Vivienne Westwood has succeeded in sending an anti-consumerism message via a consumer based business because of the sign value, as defined by Baudrillard, attributed to her fashions. People do not necessarily buy Westwood for aesthetic purposes, but because of the radical messages the label sends. It also seems as though her seniority has tamed the reputation of her fashions. For instance, the recent Sex and the City film kissed Westwood’s feet, many times. Carrie’s wedding dress was Westwood, and Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall donned Westwood to many of the international premieres. But Westwood's unpredictability remains. She said of the film: "I thought Sex and the City was supposed to be about cutting-edge fashion and there was nothing remotely memorable or interesting about what I saw. I went to the premiere and left after 10 minutes." Westwood’s unconventionality will never die. And although her fashions have become more conventional, aesthetically speaking, the sign value of her looks as anti-establishment, anti-consumerism, and anti-conformity are stronger than ever.

"Fashion was a baby I picked up and never put down," said Westwood, whose formal training consisted of a single term at Harrow Art College.

"The only reason I'm in fashion is to destroy the word 'conformity,' " the designer once said. "Nothing's interesting to me unless it's got that element."

“Fashion is all about playing with the polarities of masculine and feminine with ideas about dress and undress. Fashion is eventually about being naked.”

Sources:

Wilcox, Claire. Vivienne Westwood. London: V&A Publications, 2004.

McDermott, Catherine. Vivienne Westwood. London: Carlton Books Limited, 1999.

Mulvagh, Jane. Vivienne Westwood: An Unfashionable Life. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998.

The Breakdown of Fashion as We Know It

From the New York Times, September 4, 2008. “Wanted: Genius Designer” By Guy Trebay:

“What seems disorienting about this absence [of a genius designer] is that fashion is no longer a discipline of interest mainly to female consumers and a cult of aesthetes. Like it or not, fashion has become something larger, a viral cultural force that sometimes seems only incidentally concerned with clothes. Cocteau wasn’t kidding when he said style is a simple way of saying complicated things- a point the United States Olympic Committee clearly noted (American teams may not have dominated in the medals, but in the parade of nations they killed the competition in jauntily classic Polo Ralph Lauren uniforms), as do politicos. Were the Dead Sea scrolls subjected to more exegesis than Michelle Obama’s floral print sheath at the Democratic National Convention in Denver? (Thakoon, by the way.) The voices of the blogosphere say, No.

"Yet, contradictory as this may seem, the notion of a Next Big Thing in fashion may itself be culturally discordant. As in film, music, and other arts, consumers have wearied of big names and labels. Except on TV, they are bored with diktats, with taste legislated by self-appointed “experts” and with camphor-scented archaisms like “stars.”

"They have lost the desire to partake of media in hunks: an entire musical album, or a single artist’s whole career.”

It sounds like Marx has predicted the downfall of the designers of 2008, more specifically the New York based designers in Fall 2008’s collections. Marx says, “The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men” (71). He goes on to say, “this fact expresses merely that the object which labour produces- labour’s product- confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (71). The power that is independent of the producer, in fashion’s case, must be the individual’s agency over a garment’s representation, associations, and thus socially derived meaning or value. [Hidden] labels mean nothing in society- garments’ meanings endlessly fluctuate as they are relatively created by the wearer and the viewers.

Trebay’s article goes on about a DIY attitude prevalent among young consumers, which ultimately gives more power to the individual over the masses (even though the style of the masses is really composed of an elite club of “Heathers”). I can sense a DIY ethos, or at least a “tweak-it-to-your-one-of-a-kind-satisfaction” ethos. Alienation, or at least a visceral desire to be unique, and express yourself as accurately as possible, has surely created this new DIY ethos. For instance, even among the insanely rich and fashionable, one-of-a-kind dresses, or even custom fit dresses always surpass a “mass-produced” dress, even if (in the case of couture), “mass-produced” only means eight. It seems to me that the alienation Raymond Williams and Karl Marx define is still raging today. An unmatched, truly unique connection to garments, and more broadly the presentation of the self in society, is what our hearts are truly yearning for. Fashion may be breaking down from an oligarchy to feudal markets and homemade garments.