Mercifully, advertisements don’t usually attract my attention at all. Perhaps that’s why I find them particularly bothersome when they do; distraction is their raison d'être. If ads were ignorable then how might we become subliminally aware that there are unmet needs in our life which only SalaciousCorpTM can satisfy? Aesthetically pleasing ones are not so bad, but those irritating, garish ones—frequently deploying the most crude methodology—are the type that, once they register, really stick in one’s craw. Today, I walked past an advertisement which, for the first time in a long time, seemed like both, at once.
I should note that by today I mean not today. In fact, I mean a not-today so far in the past it was prior to lockdown in 2020 when I began this particular reflection, tinkered with it for a while, almost completed it, then promptly moved on to other topics. Rummaging through dozens of half-finished half-thoughts, I realised this one had some potential, and only needed a few slight tweaks and, y’know, an actual conclusion. So… here we are, back at this this advertisement which was both garish, and attracted my attention way back then.
The scaffolding of both photographs are designed to represent a ‘selfie’—using a smartphone to take a photographic self-portrait—but this one in particular is explicit in its depiction of the act of taking a selfie, rather than it being a reconstruction of a faux-selfie. It reveals echoes of the classical cinéma vérité style of the 1960s, in contrast to a more expressionistic or artfully constructed style. Ironically it draws attention to the act of photography rather than the art of photography, and so is one step removed from the notion of capturing “truth” or “reality” as a purist vérité style would. In that respect it represents a diametric opposite of the ideals expressed in that particular movement.
It struck me with such force that I intercepted the friend I was meeting for lunch and immediately mentioned my compulsion to return to take a photo of the said advertisements. I did so: they are two of the images which accompany this piece. It doesn’t appear—neither now nor when they caught my attention—that they were designed with the ‘any attention is good attention’ theory in mind (French Connection UK, I’m looking at you), yet something bothered me nonetheless. The brand is something called “maje”, which I’ve never heard of, and carries the perennially-haute subtitle of, simply, “Paris”. The text is all sans-serif. So far, so run-of-the-mill.
Both images feature women (unsurprisingly), both include a pet dog, both are taken inside a lift. There, the similarities largely end. But there’s one more thing, an unusual thing, which unites them both—which, when I showed both photos to my (then) wife, she couldn’t discern. Perhaps this is little more than a signifier of my own age and detachment from the cultural zeitgeist, but it struck me immediately. The subject of each advertisement gazes not at the actual camera, not at another person, nor even wistfully into the distance—but at a phone. A phone which is an imitation of an actual camera: in regard to the actual photograph being observed, it is functionally useless but also functionally identifiable to those “reading” the ad in an aspirational sense.
In other words, the phone itself is the “camera” within the image which the advertisement’s target audience is likely to identify and understand as the one being “used” (as opposed to the real camera being used which we cannot see). More to the point the phone is deployed in a sense which those who are not inured to the cultural self-aggrandisement of Instagram and its successors are unlikely to properly recognise. In that sense, this is an ad very likely to divide interpretation along generational lines.
Perhaps none of this will strike young people as unusual. Perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps this is already a trend in advertising. I simply do not know; this is just the first image I happen to have seen with this motif. My first thought was that a certain kind of commodification—not just of social media or the overarching concept of self-branding itself, but of the way Instagram and its homogenous aesthetic is employed by wannabe influencers (ie. most of its most regular users)—had permeated the echelons of the advertising industry and was now not simply mirroring the occasion but actively exploiting it. Which got me, as usual, thinking.
Enter the Simulation
Way back in 1981—in an era of power suits and a staggering propensity for consumptive excess which foreshadowed somewhat naïve antecedents to our now altogether knowing and narcissistic nihilism—a French philosopher called Jean Baudrillard wrote a nigh-on prophetic book called Simulacra and Simulation. The work explores the fundamental mote of what had attracted my attention in regard to these advertisements.
I studied just enough philosophy during my first abortive attempt at university to have a grasp of the key voices in the field, and Baudrillard was (at least at that point in time) one of them. I was also quite interested in the fundamental hypocrisies of capitalism and its so-called and theoretical (that is, intended but not exercised in practice) “free market” economy, which makes extensive literal use of Baudrillard’s concepts. My interest in fashion, I suspect, also blossomed at the same junction, alongside my nascent awareness of artificial “need”. Perhaps they developed simultaneously because the aspects of fashion which lured me with the greatest strength were also those which spoke with the harshest terms toward precisely those dichotomies. It is an inseparable fact that these inspirations lay at the heart of an industry perhaps more perniciously exploitative than almost any other, even—or perhaps especially—despite its efforts to outwardly embrace progressive values such as diversity and sexual freedom.
A book hollowed-out and rendered a facade, containing not the knowledge one might expect from a book but a wooden shell surrounding a void into which physical articles can be placed. Very post-postmodern. It hasn’t lost all semiotic meaning, though; the simulacra of money and data have merely replaced literal meaning, not unlike the way the digital revolution has irrevocably altered the way most human minds consume and interpret information, and the meaning derived from it.
Remember, data on a tape (or on a disc or in a computer or phone) is useless without the means of decoding it, and has ceased to be “information” per se. It is information one step removed. The same with money: it has no inherent “worth” as an actual object—it only has value once it is agreed to as a unit of common trade. We forget, in the modern world, how many things with semiotic meaning have no literal meaning; to test this, just remove their context.
As an example, imagine receiving a foreign currency without the means to exchange it—would the physical notes or coinage be “worth” anything to you if nobody else accepted it as legal tender? Ergo, it is a simulacra of “value”, holding no inherent worth unto itself and no longer representing anything real—only a culturally agreed-upon rate for economic exchange. Without the cultural context, therefore, it loses literal meaning altogether.
Amusingly, the remaining “text” left within the mutilated book is entitled “on nihilism”, literally (and I mean that in at least two different ways) reflecting the destruction or disappearance of the meaning once held within, but hollowed out… leaving only the simulated shell. Beautiful. Absolutely, symbolically, beautiful. Image(s): Warner Bros.
I knew enough of Baudrillard to smugly chuckle at the appearance of Simulacra and Simulation in the 1999 film The Matrix. In that instance, the film symbolically and fittingly represents the book not as a book but as a hollowed-out representation of a book, a storage case in which is kept both data tapes and money.
A simulation is an object or concept which references a thing, but is not actually that thing. Neither text, money, nor a data disc or tape, has any inherent utility at all until they are deceiphered within a specific context. While a book may seem as though it has immediate utility, it is only useful so long as the reader is literate in its language. Hence, it is a simulation of knowledge.
A simulacrum, on the other hand, is one step further removed. Very simply put it could be thought of as a simulation of a simulation; the point being that it no longer bears any direct connection with the real. In Baudrillardian terms, it either: retains only referential (semiotic) meaning; is a reference to another referential object; or simply creates its own reality. In other words, it might be thought of as an imitation of a thing, no longer an actual thing.
Later in The Matrix, we discover that what the characters experience as the “real world” is in fact, the eponymous simulation itself (arguably, actually a simulacrum, depending on your perspective or definition of what it is the machines have chosen to depict). It was—at least in 1999—a shocking concept to even consider that things people perceived with their own senses in their everyday lives might, in fact, be unreal, fake, or otherwise illusory; these days, it frequently forms the foundations of entire ideologies.
Baudrillard’s work breaks down both simulacra and simulation into broad orders, then distils them further into degrees, and even associates them with particular phases of technological development. It seems remarkable that a work written so long ago could be so prophetic in its illustration of the link between the adoption of technology and a growing inability to discern the real from the simulated, and then even the simulated from its simulacrum. One could describe the very nature of the internet thus, and the phrase ‘fake news’ positively explodes with possibility.
An everyday example is mass production, which alters the inherent value of a thing (that is, a physical thing, the real) by creating so many iterations of it. This process of commodification nullifies inherent value and replaces it with a degree of homogeneity. This is by design, and is one of the oft-lauded benefits of capitalism: the cheapening of things built at scale. While on a crude level that is obviously true, it often overlooks the kind of value we might find within particular objects—art especially.
More problematically, what the mass-production and cheapening of material goods also does is shrinks profit margins, and makes most truly essential items so abundant that affluent humans become inured to convenience, and largely unaccustomed to true deprivation. That is, we live in an era where our most important needs are almost always met—which seems incongruous to most people whose lives remain, shall we say, somewhat miserable. Yet, the disconnect is not at all difficult to discern.
Industrialisation and mass production have certainly made many wealthy Western folk incredibly comfortable (at the expense of the less affluent, of course), but perhaps capitalism’s most perverse characteristic is its insatiable desire for exponential growth. More people, more output, more goods, more profit. In reality, it’s only the latter which matters in capitalism—the former are simply means to that end. Which explains why regulation—as a restriction on unfettered output via frivolous little requirements like safety or a leash on exploitation—tends to be a problem, and why manufactured goods tend, over time, to degrade and “cheapen” in many different ways (as corporate cost-cutting inevitably impacts the final product), even when purported “quality” remains part of its appeal.
Anyway, what all this results in is a nullification of the inherent value of the product, the real thing being made or offered. Its commodified expression can only mimic its qualities, and its very homogeneity waters down its perceived value. When the Spanish brought galleon after galleon stuffed full of gold back to Europe during its evisceration of central America, there was so much of it sloshing around that it became “cheap”, and Spain itself arguably set in motion the seeds of its decline when it stopped actually producing anything of value, as the acquisition of gold itself became more lucrative. Too much of anything—even a “good” thing like gold—can be a bad thing if its association with the real becomes too dislocated.
In our modern Western society, the homogeneity of generic mass-produced goods means for most people their most essential requirements are met. This, in turn, requires an arousal of artificial needs to drive desirability instead. If most “needs” are met, then what we are sold are not “needs” at all, even though they often feel like they are necessary. That’s the task of advertising. While money can’t buy happiness, it sure can buy prestige.
Instead of just shoes, we need Nike Air Max 270s, and probably a bunch of other shit, too. The association between cost and brand now bear no actual relationship to the “value” of the material goods themselves. It’s their perceived value that matters, because being above necessity they represent status instead. This process simulates very real needs—for things like food or shelter—and in an environment of such abundance that these things are frequently taken for granted, they are mutated into whimsical consumptive impulses for things like plastic pop-culture artefacts, Apple watches, or diamanté-encrusted handbags. Props, essentially. Things we absolutely do not need.
Have you ever wondered why the word “value” is now more likely to be synonymous with “saving money” rather than “inherent quality”? The very notion of a “sale” or “savings” makes a consumer feel like they are benefiting somehow financially when to attain the purported benefit actually requires the expenditure of money. If a sign says something like great value!, our first instinct is to think that it might be cheap, on sale, or a good price, rather than thinking to ask, “exactly which of its values is so great?” Our concept of the term has been reduced to its signification within a market where only capital matters, because money can procure status; a market which itself has been artificially manipulated by all manner of different vested interests in order to distort things like actual “value”. The meaning still exists, for example, in a related word like valuable. We don’t think of valuable things as cheap, or a bargain. It’s the opposite dichotomy to the difference between priceless, and worthless, which on the representative level of capital should signify the same thing but are actually diametrically opposed.
In my opinion, Baudrillard’s ideas are profound, and while an extended digression is inappropriate here, a basic understanding is beneficial to the point I intend to make. The rise of mass production has transformed artefacts of art or specific aesthetic value into copies, in vast volumes which in turn shifted their value as individual physical things into mere commodities; they are now items of exchange. When you buy “art” from some mega-store like Harvey Norman, you’re not really buying art… you’re buying a simulation of art in the form of a commodified representation of it. If it happens to be AI art, then it has become a simulacra of art instead, without any remaining link to the process of human creativity.
This shift also explains why exclusivity—that is, the exclusion of access to something from a particular group—has become in the context of high-end capital exchange not some parable of inequality but instead a mark of commercial appeal: something which marks the possessor with that same exclusivity. In other words, it becomes a status symbol.
And what is meant by “exclusivity” is really “superiority”. It does end up meaning exactly the same thing as you’d expect: the exclusion of one class for the benefit or status of another. In the vast majority of cases, an attempt at advertising exclusivity is itself a mid-stage simulacrum and, hence, a spurious lure or ploy (ie. it merely claims to be exclusive but is in fact available to just about anyone). Or, if it is legitimately exclusive then, in a commercial sense, it is almost certain to remain within the domain of only the super-rich. And by that I mean an élite in the sense that populists use the term, but no longer understand the term. In fact, the word élite has itself entered the realm of simulacra on more than one level, and has ceased to maintain integrity with respect to its origin—from which it has become unshackled—and perhaps appropriately it is now, in its populist sense, not unlike the word fake. A bombastic, propagandistic term stripped of legitimate meaning. A mere category, a label, an insult. It no longer matters what it means, only what it represents.
Exclusivity, though, is essentially the manner in which the super-wealthy are able to distinguish themselves from others around them in a (“Western”) world where an individual overflowing in an abundance of material possessions is positively commonplace. If you’ve ever “taken advantage” of an “exclusive deal” and it wasn’t worth millions of dollars, and it wasn’t just “for a limited time only” (in which case it’s almost always the price that’s been lowered, but just about anyone can actually still access it), and it wasn’t explicitly limited to a pre-set number of people (and is never offered again in the future—a notoriously difficult benchmark to appraise in advance) then congratulations, you’ve become one of capitalism’s billions of bleating sheep. In other words, you’re completely normal.
Scopophilia 101
How, then, does all this talk of meaning and value and reproduction and Baudrillard even relate to fashion? Well, I confess it has more to do with advertising than fashion per se, but it speaks to another of the world’s great simulacra, one which I would argue has existed since time immemorial: the gaze. Specifically, the male gaze, a lens through which the advertising industry in particular has prowled like a pack of sharks, ready to scent blood in the water. Status anxiety, fear of senescence, any insecurity you like, really—they all spill the same sweet sanguine smell, and billions of dollars are eagerly lapped up as men, mostly, look—mostly at women.
Sometimes irony shifts into farce—as it does here with a young boy representing quite literally the male gaze in action. He playfully waves the magnifying glass around so that his (I presume) mother can be examined through it. The ad is classic in its attempt to eat its cake and have it, too—the woman is framed simultaneously as youthful, adventurous, and carefree; and yet, quite incongruously, as motherly as well. That’s what the familiar intimacy with this boy infers, anyway. If it isn’t meant to be motherly, then the problems with this ad are substantially greater than I imagined. But, think about why that isn’t a little girl pushing a magnifying glass in her mother’s face, checking out all the pores digitally removed from beneath her insightful stare.
The entire ad is so incredibly soft-focus that everything comes off with an ethereal, fuzzy glow, largely invalidating the effort of the boy’s inquisitive inspection (a magnified cheek passes distinctly across our own gaze via the framing of the scene). But, symbolically it remains a powerful representation of the process this industry wants—literally, needs—women to employ upon themselves if they are to keep selling all this crap in the volumes and at the price-points they do. Image: Maybelline
Scopophilia is, basically, a love of looking, though here it might also encompass the desire of and within the act of looking itself. I should also note at this juncture that it’s very challenging to speak about theories of the gaze without acknowledging an inherent heteronormativity.
Not to mention how it can be complicated in many ways by cultural context—especially in regard to gender norms and expressions. Many millennia of patriarchal dominance has, in my view, enshrined the male gaze with enough inherent power to ensure its relevance as a cultural force to be reckoned with, even in the face of even seismic shifts in (extremely) recent times. Entrenched male power has evidently existed for thousands of years (and conjecturally for tens or hundreds of thousands). While it is persistently challenged and its terms of reference change over time, our entire culture is built upon that foundation, which is why—despite overwhelming evidence and insight which might challenge them—most mainstream norms (like heteronormativity for example) remain notoriously stubborn perspectives to shift.
With that in mind, it may seem superficially heedless to then immediately state that there is no such thing as the “female gaze”. While it might be a trending topic on TikTok from time to time, what most people refer to when they use the phrase is a simulation—now that we have explored that word in a fuller context—of the male gaze, not unlike woefully superficial reinterpretations of “matriarchy” as merely “patriarchy with a woman at the top”. In other words, not the same thing at all.
The reason these ideas (matriarchy, a misunderstood actual thing, and the female gaze, a merely hypothetical thing) are so easily misconstrued is quite simple: culturally, they have very little context or historicity to inform them as a concepts, and even now almost no cultural power whatsoever. As regards the gaze, yes… obviously the majority of women can “see” in the physiological sense, women have eyes, and there are female “ways” of seeing which differ to those of men. Nevertheless, it’s important to think about why—in a patriarchy—not only is there no such thing as “the female gaze”, but there can be no such thing. Nor would we necessarily want there to be—switching the cultural hegemony of one gender for the other might feel like justice, but it remains just as problematic.
As a simple corollary, think of why there’s no such term as “masculinism”. If there’s “feminism”, there should be an opposite, right? Yet there isn’t, and there really can not be—despite the disingenuous bleating of the majority of men’s rights activism. I would suggest that anyone who can’t understand the difference isn’t really grasping just what patriarchal power actually involves. Nor, in a larger context, the insidiousness of its collusion with capitalism.
Spoiler: this ad is not, in fact, for men at all. No surprises there, perhaps. The brand intends to spruik its female-empowerment credentials, and likely know darn well that the vast majority of men won’t cast a second glance at a row of lipsticks which are far larger, you’ll notice, than any of the text. One can barely read the “hire more women in leadership roles” line; it’s hardly shouting it from the rooftops. That’s all by design. The intent is for women to see it, read it, do an internalised fist-pump for the sisters and feel a cozy warm sensation later to be associated with the brand itself. Which, you’ll note is not just beneath the ad, but chiselled into the lipstick drum as well as printed on the lipstick itself. There’s absolutely no chance you’re looking at this without gaining some kind of subliminal imprint from the ubiquitous branding. Image: L'Oréal
Instead, such arguments are merely co-opting capitalism’s vacant insistence on its ability to provide “equality” simply by creating ineffectual oppositional simulacra in an attempt to fill existential voids, just as it does with the cheap material objects it sells us as “necessities”. The mere possibility of a thing’s existence is not the same as it having meaning, or actuality. Incidentally, that’s also why such goods and services are so often ultimately so unsatisfying. Of course, it’s part of the show—product A fails to make you feel better, so the ad for product B steps in to sell you the same false hope in a different form. And guess what? When that fails, product C will offer you the exact same thing; this continues ad infinitum.
Whether it manifests as a physical item such as a handbag, a plastic toy, a sports shoe, or panders to a cultural one like status anxiety or physiological dysmorphia—a manufactured need is still just that: manufactured, artificial, and these things will ultimately fail to address anything close to fulfilment, much less systemic inequality, no matter how temporarily good it makes people feel. Even the best-intended and well-crafted advertisement remains a mere simulacra of lived experience, and betrays its true nature with the inclusion of any form of brand or logo.
Fundamentally, capitalism only cares about enshrining power in the medium of money, and little else (which in a semiotic sense we recognise in a corporate brand like “Nike” the same way that a family name like “von Habsburg” would once have represented royal power in a very significant way). Patriarchy, in turn, enshrines power in the medium of “masculinity”. Not just any masculine form, however.
Patriarchy’s particular brand of masculinity
I would argue quite vehemently that patriarchy is not even specifically about being male in a biological sense—which is why it so very obviously harms a great many men along with almost all women—but the repetition of the performance of being a certain kind of male, a performance intertwined within and among the reinforcement of expressions of power and status in particular.
That important distinction is why some feminist arguments around patriarchy fall so flat that they become practically indefensible. The problem is not actually about apparent gender per se, it’s the performance of gender. Which is also why the position of trans-exclusionary radical feminists—known as TERFs—follows a certain kind of logic, and yet remains pernicious and ultimately misguided. In being so wedded to centring “woman”, they’ve forgotten that woman is a performance just as man is, and gender is fundamentally a cultural construct and not some biologically deterministic fact.
Equally, when men say things like “not all men”, it feels disingenuous. Because it is. The men who say such a thing may not actually engage in rape or murder or harassment or gaslighting or negging or sexual entitlement or objectification or the many-thousand-year old Abrahamic traditions of patriarchal absolutism or whatever, but if they continue to perform masculinity as it was taught to them, and benefits them in a culturally structural way, then they remain part of the problem.
This is an ad for men. Who, of course, are just as susceptible to the many variegations of marketing which exploit base insecurities. Appear this way, by behaving this way, by dressing this way, and that shall bequeath you the status you desire (and, by contrast and logical inference, currently lack). The main difference between male and female advertising is the active rather than passive role, dominance rather than submission; most other tropes fit just as well into both. Unfulfilled desire, and the fantasy of feeling a particular way (in this image, “powerful”, and just as importantly, “emotionless”—in the mind of many men, one and the same).
Dolce & Gabbana, in their choice to display such provocative imagery, seemingly suggest it’s their attitude rather than their actual clothes which is worth emulating. Otherwise, the clothing would be what the image might actually be about. In this example they resort to the most sterile stereotypes of masculine power in order to sell their shirts to men for whom the appearance of power is more important than the appearance of style. Their shirts, perhaps unsurprisingly, are aesthetically awful, stylistically bungled clutter—and perhaps why two out of the four male models here aren’t even wearing them. This particular stylised rape is one among many D&G offerings—the brand is among the very worst offenders among the supposedly “haute” variety of couture in terms of scraping out harmfully puerile symbolism. Not to mention their habit of just overcooking their message by dialling a particular style up to the hypothetical “11”.
This ad reveals quite a bit about D&G’s own insecurity as a brand, via their need to reach well beyond clothing style itself in order to stand out. If their clothes were amazing, they wouldn’t need to stamp and scream and throw a visual tantrum. You’d never see an ad like this by Dior, because they actually design great clothes. Image: Dolce & Gabbana
Patriarchy has little to do with any one given “man” at all; it maintains its power via a complex web of behaviours and signals—the performance—not some overarching categorisation of the nature of any one individual. Even a “good” (if you can stomach the idea of such a trite binary) man can easily reinforce and enact most of patriarchy’s dominant discourse whilst being quite eloquent about its very obviously oppressive nature. Some men may even perform a kind of pseudo-feminist rejection of various elements of the patriarchal dance, while at the very same time reinforcing others and merely masking that unyielded power beneath some shallow facade of alliance or sympathy.
It’s the equivalent of corporate badges, awareness programs, training, or allotted “wear X colour for Y Group Day” to celebrate whatever oppressed minority a company has no interest (both figuratively and literally) in actually empowering—unless, of course, it serves their profit margin. These sorts of things stink: conservatives loathe them because it makes them feel guilty and forces them to acknowledge uncomfortable inequalities they’d rather ignore; progressives hate them because they pay a paltry lip-service to something that requires real action every day. But, it’s capitalism… so a simulation of action is all we get.
To better understand the patriarchal aspect, though, we need to backtrack a little, and return to gazes. Because like most things, what is capitalist isn’t only about money, and what is patriarchal isn’t just about gender. Remember, having some money isn’t enough to be powerful under capitalism; and merely being male isn’t enough to be succeed within a patriarchy. You need real capital (that is, obscene wealth) and to perform a very particular kind of masculinity (consciously or unconsciously) to benefit from what they offer. Which is power: more specifically, power relations, which is more of a Foucauldian topic than a Baudrillardian one, but I think we’ll be fine without a deep-dive into the former. Simply know that those two things are much more inherently intertwined than it might initially seem.
Kind regards
Decades before Baudrillard, there was another French philosopher who had something to say about the gaze, or le regard as it is in French. Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, suggests that the act of gazing itself inherently creates a power discrepancy between the onlooker and the subject of their looking, precisely because it necessitates the turning of the person beneath their gaze into an object. It’s the origin of our contemporary concept of objectification, only in my experience it’s often forgotten that this process begins with something as simple as a gaze. It wasn’t philosophy where I learned about Sartre, though; it was cinema studies.
In most visual mediums where money is concerned, the gaze is assumed to be male because the control of the vast majority of resources in most capitalist societies—which are also patriarchies—fall within male control. Therefore, in order to normalise exchanges based on aesthetics alone (as opposed to other potential forms of value), the gaze is assumed to be male because the target audience was, when these industries began, predominantly male. But perhaps even more importantly, the designers of the manufactured needs which drive advertising are male.
Make no mistake: while female consumptive power and influence has undoubtedly grown, the expression of that power remains beholden to a highly adaptive and influential commercial discourse which remains predicated upon the dominant male way of seeing, adopting it within the manufactured needs which now simply also target women.
These aren’t proactive constructions, mind you; they don’t need to be. Such discourse is as innate to the systemic power imbalances inherent in capitalist patriarchy as the assumption of the existence of “god” is to, say, Christian nationalism. They are predicates, not absolutes, just so thoroughly embedded in our way of living (and, often, being) as to have become second nature.
Even longer than half a century ago, ads have been creating artificial fantasies for consumers to attempt to live up to. I say “attempt” because it is impossible on purpose. This image appears to be that of a woman, but even in the 1950s it has clearly been manipulated beyond the degree to which any actual woman might appear, or hope to conform to. But that’s the point.
Note also the untestable bottom line; “preferred by smart women the world over”. And you’re not an idiot, now are you? This is basically a form of operant conditioning in which, by preferring (and, therefore, likely consuming) the product, you avoid a negative stimuli—in this case, being excluded from the group of “smart women the world over”. Image: Maybelline
As a result, our culture has subsumed this assumption about the gaze precisely because that’s how it has always been presented to us, and to those who came before us, and those before them. These gendered roles have been ascribed to us in ways we cannot easily see precisely because they feel innate. For millennia that’s just been “the way things are”. In precisely the same way, to some people the concept of gender itself seems innate, undoubtedly because of this same unconscious reinforcement. A not insignificant number of people still seem unable to even conceive of anything other than a simple binary gender pairing despite ample scientific evidence, among other things, which clearly suggests otherwise. That’s the strength of tradition and the sluggish crawl of cultural change.
Women might now be the ones who buy their own clothes, but the unconscious symbolism which clothing has held since they were consciously manufactured as fashion (as opposed to being a necessity) has been encoded by a long history of garments embodying various signifiers of feminine desirability. These signifiers work in the same way as performances of masculinity which reinforce patriarchy.
Only very recently—in the last few decades and, as previously discussed, far too soon to have truly challenged cultural hegemony—has this been seriously transposed in the form of aspects like bulky and formless, or androgynous, attire. Or styles of an even more transgressive nature—those which seek to actively challenge these long-standing assumptions. And even then, any student inspired by a century’s worth of predecessors (which is what brings nascent designers into the field in the first place) cannot simultaneously reject the foundations of their artform—the work of those very same predecessors—without seriously compromising the process they’re undertaking.
Which is to say, rather than infer, that the fashion industry has long designed clothes for women in terms of how attractive (in some way) they make a woman appear to be when beheld by the gaze of a man.
Hot Damn
Obviously fashion is far more complex and nuanced than that in practice. Yet it is worth examining, for example, why waists are accentuated on many female-coded garments in ways which they almost never are in male-coded garments. Why is that? One’s first assumption might be to think that it’s because it flatters the body that wears it. And that’s true; it does, but why does it flatter? And why should it, or why does that actually matter? These are more slippery questions which point more directly to the history of clothing and what it represents.
A slender female waist denotes two things which suggests its underlying function vis à vis the gaze (pardon the pun, I couldn’t help myself). The first is that the wearer is not pregnant, which in a subconscious mate-selection sense is a critical factor for men seeking to invest in a potential partner. Mate-selection is precisely what places the female person—as object—firmly beneath a hypothetical male gaze in the first place. And it does so in a way which a female evaluation of male mate-value does not (given that a female is comparatively much less interested in specific genetic signifiers and much more attuned to cultural ones). The second reason is that a woman with a small waist is more likely to be young (and therefore fertile; markers of fertility are what we actually mean by “beauty”) because particularly small waists are quite difficult to maintain beyond a certain age (and women are certainly not alone in that respect, let me assure you).
This may seem, at first, to be some horribly reductive or primitive means of reasoning, which flies in the face of any kind of sophisticated garment production in a postmodern era with access to concepts like, say, deconstruction. Returning to some biological referents absolutely demeans women-as-objects, as well as men-as-mere-consumers-of-objects, overlooking the multitude of circumstances in which people engage in ways which at least attempt to circumvent such representations. It ignores the possibility that a man, for example, might choose to wear a female-coded garment despite its ostensible purpose or the social expectations placed upon his ascribed gender role. Or that a woman may make adjustments to her clothes or even create them herself, to her own designs, which negates the industrialised assumptions and practices which dominate the production of most consumer clothing. And these are just two examples.
All of these things are important considerations. Though ultimately none of them exculpate the original function of the cinched waist, which is to signify those two very simple things. Corsets were another means of artificially exaggerating such features, and the discomfort of their very design should illustrate the level of cognitive dissonance which is, and has always been, applied to fashion. Impracticality is likely why corsetry in particular eventually became antiquated, but remains fetishised by various sub-cultures and styles, occasionally resurrected mostly for nostalgia’s sake—but rarely without undertones of a certain kind of performative sexuality. It’s easily forgotten that the semiotic meaning of clothing is not deterministic; articles we choose to wear exist in the world as they are perceived by audiences, their meaning not defined solely by creators alone—and fashion, like it or not, is receptive as well as expressive. Think of how many times you, or a person you know, has said or thought something like “I just want to wear this thing without being judged, or objectified.” Because the garment is the aesthetic descendant of an original which actively invited that judgement, by design. This is a factor which only further complicates fashion’s entwined relationship with the past and significantly stymies the progressive and transgressive nature which the fashion industry itself—a cartel of commercial entities, don’t forget—often loves to talk up.
By the 1970s, corporate advertisers had recognised that they needed to appeal to younger consumers. And so we see the progressive notion of sexual freedom expressed in the sales pitch itself. Don’t constrain yourself to one man, ladies! How 1960s. Just make sure you can have your pick by ensuring you have the right lip gloss for the occasion.
Lip gloss, incidentally, is a classic example of an utterly unnecessary accoutrement—variously marketed as some kind of “moisturiser” for the lips (did “chapped” lips exist before lip gloss, which arguably causes such “chapping” as much as it prevents it?), or as a more subtle replacement for a more old-fashioned, garish lipstick. Or, as the ad suggests, you can have both. Why not spoil yourself, I guess? Image: Maybelline
Similarly, I reckon another of history’s most uncomfortable and impractical articles of clothing—the high heel—could elicit its own digression in that respect. It doesn’t take much imagination to suggest why fashion items which expose flesh might also be markers designed to attract male attention, either. An exposed midriff works the same as a cinched waist in a garment; more obviously so because it reveals, rather than suggests. Not all aspects of fashion are designed purely for the gaze, of course—these examples are offered as some among many which indicate the underlying historicity behind many fundamental design principles.
The waist and the leg (heels are aesthetically about legs, not feet) are hardly the only examples. Lipstick and blush both simulate sexual excitement, which flush the lips and cheeks with blood and are naturally also visually appealing to men. That’s also why men don’t themselves typically wear lipstick or blush—heterosexual men have no interest in (and in fact may be confused or intimidated by) the allure of other men. Interestingly, it also explains how seemingly incongruous colours, like black lipstick, seem at odds with typical notions of “beauty”; because that is precisely the point. The goth aesthetic is a counter-cultural one, a resistance, a refutation, baroque and absurdist and in opposition to the insidious machinations of the status quo (especially where “beauty” is concerned). And yet, for example, even the gothic aesthetic frequently includes the anachronistic corset. There’s no escape, and it remains centred around that same process of being observed.
Even a defiant avant garde is still just that; first into the breach, ahead of its time, not capable of remaking all time. It reveals a (quite natural) conceptual blindness which persists to this day precisely because it is so ancient that it is likely impossible to undermine for long enough, or strongly enough, for our inherent—very likely at this point unconscious—understanding of it to change. And that speaks nothing of regressive political or economic interests in actively resisting such change, either. It is very obviously to certain people’s advantage (most of whom are men) for these patterns to remain not just as they are, but as they have always been.
Finally, none of this is to say that fashion cannot be simultaneously enjoyed by women, or designed for women, or empowering in various respects—or, perhaps most importantly, outright subverted—because it absolutely can be. But it would be unfortunate to pretend the origins of what we think of as “fashion” were not largely designed for the benefit of attracting a male gaze, any more than we might overlook the nature of the vertical hierarchy underpinning patriarchy as having originated in the hands of those with the biggest sticks. What is less important is whether those sticks represented actual brutal violence or, as in the case of “civilised” authority like government or religion, merely coercive violence—the threat of it, rather than the enacting of it. Reminding, rather than needing to actively show, us from whence such authority originally obtained its power.
Seeing past the gaze
So: the male gaze has dominated almost every visual cultural process in the world, for millennia. It permeates a vast coterie of cultural strictures, all conspiring to maintain the status quo. This is significant because it is an example of how marketing can exist as a simulacrum. Consider someone seeing a female-coded face with make-up on it within an advertisement for said product. That face is neither just that of the model, nor is it simply an amalgam of the product, which just so happens to resemble a face (or at least requires one to facilitate its application).
The “original” face has been artificially altered in other ways, either by lighting, distance, or positioning, during the photographic process, and certainly these days with some element of digital manipulation, in order to express features which are desirable and disguise those which are not. It is not implausible to consider that, soon, products may dispense with an organic original at all, and have the entire process created by the ultimate simulacrum: artificial intelligence.
The “face” we see in an advertisement does not itself actually exist, and if you were instantly able to magically scry upon the model whose features the advertisement borrows and resembles (but is not), the model would be asleep, or talking to a friend, or reading a book in the sunshine, or in some other state which bears little resemblance to the static face in the image—the simulacrum-posing-as-simulation—we see. The conditions of the face would likely look completely different; the model older, her hair tied up or let down, with less or alternative make-up on, et cetera.
Further to that, not only does the face no longer represent something real, it has become something representative in and unto itself: desirability. An abstracted feeling. The face exists only to draw admiration, and have no other ostensible qualities of its own. Because that would potentially undermine the illusion, and its associated fantasy, which is that the face exists and might be possessed by the observer, who could be anyone. For women that possession is an embodiment, but for men it’s a functional ownership.
It’s the same dichotomy as the institution of marriage offers: the same fictions of empowerment which, in turn, obfuscate the pantomime of performance in the service of status. Status defined and pre-determined by patriarchy, and exploited by capitalism (as the sickeningly venal wedding industry plainly illustrates). Familiarity and, hence, comfort in the form of tradition is probably its greatest virtue. Countless couples endure the excruciating process of marriage and its various expensive ceremonies simply because it’s, what… just what’s done? Where, exactly, did that childhood dream come from?
There’s a certain status to the big event, the demonstrative value of having found a mate, the white dress, the expensive photography, the gifts, the ritual exchange of rings and vows, all functionally unnecessary accoutrements to one simple act: commitment. While symbols can of course be of the harmless variety, the event of a wedding as it is commonly understood in Western society no longer signifies merely an act of commitment, nor even one of religious devotion. Instead, it has become a commodified performance of the culturally requisite tradition which reinforces not just the notion of commitment but also a grandiose—often obscene—display of wealth in the form of excessive consumption and waste (bonbonnière is my personal bête noire), all in the guise of celebration. Sure, it has a few hangovers from its religious origins, mostly in the form of the patriarchal handing-over of the goods—the bride—from father to husband; the original owner to the new. Capitalism has remade function and purpose into simple superficiality.
Most modern weddings, in my view, as a social construction are not about the union itself (if they ever were; traditionally they were either business transactions or tactical dynastic alliances)—they are about the fantasy nested in that union, and are simply yet more ways of communicating social status. Weddings are not about the actual commitment-making (which can be, and sometimes is, done with as little as two people and a registrar); that ceremony is merely the facade which justifies what’s really happening: the selling of a fantasy. A very expensive one, which is why the modern incarnation is more often about status than, say, religion.
The modern wedding has become a simulacra of “love”. A simulation (a commercial ritual focused on attendees and status performances) of a simulation (the religious ritual focused on agreements between men), which in its original form had nothing to do with romance at all. That’s not to say it can’t be—I’ve attended plenty of lovely weddings, including my own—but the event itself bears no functional relationship whatsoever with the love it coincidentally hosts.
The 1990s yielded arguably the biggest upswing in the celebrity endorsement type of ad (and made models themselves huge celebrities). It must have been a particularly great time to be an in-demand artist or athlete. You might not recognise her underneath all that make-up and behind the too-good-to-be-true, saccharine 50s smile, but that’s Kristin Davis of Sex and the City you’re looking at there. She was likely chosen as the most “classically” pretty of all four—though if they’d been selling pure sexual allure or confidence, then Kim Cattrall would have been a much better choice.
But the classical appearance is important—as it is, was, and probably will ever be with makeup—because this is a fundamentally nostalgic advertisement. Beyond some quite obvious oral fixations for lipstick, makeup in general doesn’t tend to overdo sexual overtones, perhaps given that sex tends to be fashion’s schtick. Underwear in particular (given its proximity to genitals, I guess).
This is also the era when we saw the introduction of the now-ubiquitous association of Maybelline with the undoubtedly catchy tag, “maybe she was born with it—maybe it’s Maybelline”. Of course, if she’s in the ad she probably is born with it, and even then it’s been artificially accentuated for her; otherwise it’s almost always Maybelline. It is now quite a distinct anachronism to see even the very small smile lines they’ve left beside Davis’ eyes here; perhaps the notion that this is a supposedly recognisable celebrity meant that there was a risk that, if they altered the image too much, her face may have become homogenous—thereby invalidating all the money they paid to have Davis specifically there in the first place. I imagine there were a few versions floating around before they settled on this specific one.
Note the supremely ironic “extreme warning! May cause excessive joy”. What a joke. I suppose people believe what they want to believe. But if you’re wearing this and not feeling excessive joy… I guess that’s on you, yeah? I mean, if Kristin Davis is happy in this most natural of poses, then anyone with this shit slapped on their lips should be, too. Image: Maybelline
In the same way, a face which exists in advertising is nothing more than a simulacrum of a face, neither an actual face or even the face of an actual person any longer. Arguably it is not even a simulated face—airbrushing, digital or manual, removes many features we might consider “natural” or even “human”—but merely a possible face. The fantasy of a face. That is the purpose of something which is fundamentally idealised. It is a face that many men will look at with desire.
And, perversely, so will many women… precisely because they are projecting an image of themselves upon the object of desire and making a comparison. A negative one, usually. When they inevitably fall short (which, remember, is the purpose of advertising), they subconsciously seek a solution; a means of artifice which might assist them to reach a little bit closer to the ideal. Maybe… the make-up that the face wears, perhaps? Which the company who created this illusion in the first place has manufactured as a need precisely so it can then provide a solution: its own product. Thanks to that possible face, which to a woman in possession of an actual face becomes a literal impossibility.
So what is the result of all this largely subconscious anxiety? A woman sees an impossible face, rightly feels as though she cannot hope to compare herself positively with it, and in the same visual glance absorbs the intended solution: the make-up which the company who created this artificial need is now selling to meet that same need. Then there’s the brand, conveniently right there, lodged in the mind ready for all those feelings to surge back to mind when the name and its visual iconography are semiotically linked in a different context—the supermarket or shopping centre, for example.
In many cases this process is almost identical when it comes to fashion. Have a think about why the appearance of models has morphed over the last few decades beyond being really good-looking to an almost ethereal or otherworldly appearance even if it’s not immediately “pretty” in quite the same way. Fashion brands will tell you it’s because of inclusivity: bullshit, it’s much more insidious than that.
The less “normal” the impossible image becomes, the less likely any “normal” person has a chance to feel secure in comparison. Extreme thinness likely needs little explanation in this context. It all depends on the target audience and its sophistication, of course, but for society’s upper echelons—which haute couture targets—then good genes and a comfortable lifestyle, including access to surgical enhancement, means that their mostly female audience may already look like a generically attractive person already.
Therefore, in order to manufacture an effective need, those elite brands have managed to find people so unusual-looking that it becomes impossible to mimic or live up to their unobtainable image. Sound familiar?
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
The means by which we view and understand our appearance has shifted radically since before antiquity, when the first introduction to what we look like would have been something like an occasional glance in a pond. Or, as Greek mythology would have it, an extended gaze in the case of Narcissus, whose degree of self-obsession was evidently disdained by Hellenic culture.
For millennia, it was the mirror which offered us insights into personal appearance. A mirror is itself a simulation: what we see is not the thing itself but it directly (and literally) reflects and represents that thing. Yet it is not that thing. The mirror is not the person looking into it, merely a reflection of it, the imperfection of the process expressed in its being permanently reversed, so we can never see in a mirror exactly what we look like, and in a perverse kind of way we see precisely the opposite of what we look like from a certain point of view. A reversed image isn’t even the image, much less the thing which that image represents.
When we gaze into a mirror, we are not observing ourselves empirically, but instead via a means of a simulated reflection. We can observe, say, our hands or limbs as things-unto-themselves, and most of our bodies, but not our face. Our perception is made impossible by the limitation of our eyes being in our skull, atop the rest of our body. In that sense, we can never “see” our external appearance either—from the perspective, or gaze, as another would see us—without the aid of such a tool. There can be few more simple examples of a simulation than a mirror.
This is the same “mother” from the earlier ad; if you can see a single natural line or hair in this image, you’re doing better than I am. The use of light and focus to draw attention to specific features such as the eyes and the gloss of the lips, and the softening of literally every other feature grants this image a sense of “perfection”, if by that we are to expect a lack of flaws. This woman—if she is a celebrity outside of the fashion world, I’m unaware of it—is clearly already a very attractive person, but the ad goes to great lengths to make sure that even someone such as she is so heavily modified as to make the very image of her even more un-real.
Not to mention that this ad flashes statements like “flawless skin”, “air whipped” (whatever the hell that means), “100% poreless” (if we are to ignore biological reality), across images of blue skies, fluttering scarves and, of course, airbrushed female faces. Then—the pièce de résistance—the bold “prove it”! If it’s unreadable in the image above, that’s on purpose, but that tiny line says “based on consumer testing”. A golf-ball covered in this goop is meant to express some kind of laboratory testing process, one presumes; a faux-appeal-to-authority. I wonder if by “proof”, they mean “some people we asked said so”. People who, for all we know, may well be employees—who can of course also be “consumers” if they have used the product. In other words, there’s no logical connection between statement and fact here, just a symbolic one. Image: Maybelline
Photography acts in a similar manner. While a photograph is not reversed as a mirrored image is, it is not immediate in the sense of it being real-time, and instead captures a static moment in time. Therefore, it exists as a simulation not simply because it represents reality through reproduction, but because its place in time is fixed. Photographs can, for example, capture and retain images of places or people which no longer exist. They are not the “thing: merely a representation of it.
The live-feed video in, among other things, a modern smartphone camera might seem to be closer to the truth of a thing than either a mirror or a photograph. And, yet, it is constrained by the same limitations of each. It too is either reversed (if being observed in a front-facing camera), or not immediate, in the form of a pre-recorded moving iteration of a photograph. These technologies also require the device itself, and the constraints of its reproduction, in order to function. One only needs to consider smartphone app “filters”, which radically alter what’s being observed, to see how wildly what we see often differs from the real.
Never mind that the physical article we typically observe when looking at most modern media is illusory. While we interpret the blobs of ink or printed chemicals in a photograph as a discernible image, or perceive the flashing pixels of a digital screen, or the electron beams of cathode-ray tubes projecting against a phosphorescent screen as “television” (literally, Latin for “far-sight”, or “across-sight”), these means of transmission are entirely artificial. That we possess a means of reception (or at least interpretation) of these signals as an analogue for something real they once recorded, or currently represent, is not unlike our means of disseminating semiotics. Human minds do not need to perceive an actual in order to understand a representation of the actual. It’s how our entire imagination works; that same wonderful brain creates ideas, imagines a future which is yet to exist. We have that capacity to exchange the real for the represented, and create simulations among our own thoughts. Yet over time, we have clearly lost the capacity to reliably discern one from the other, if we ever possessed it at all.
The digital age presents another interesting conundrum: does a digital image—the image, not the data—actually exist beyond the device into which it is encoded? Or is it purely self-referential? In other words, until a digital photograph is printed and becomes a physical artefact unto itself (whereupon it is arguably a simulation), does it remain digital and, hence, an artificial representation reflected only by digital code and interpreted only by the screen of the device for which it was designed?
If the answer to the latter is yes, all digital photographs or images are simulacra. They are a reproduction (as data) of a representation (the photograph) which itself is a simulation (of a thing) and not an actual thing unto themselves. The subject of a photograph does not exist in any sense within a photograph—it is merely represented there—and, therefore, a digital photograph—being a representation of that representation—is a simulation-of-a-simulation: a simulacrum.
In the Eye of the Beholder
A digital image, it might therefore be argued, remains purely internal to the device itself, having no means of existing outside the framework of the phone’s internal mechanism. Without the phone, there is nothing. It becomes an internalised storage of the gaze of others. Or, more accurately, an encoded perception of what an externalised gaze might see, interpreted via the screen of the phone.
The way the shadow of the elevator aligns with, yet also works in a strangely inverted way against the shadow of the garment in this image, as well as speaking to contrasts of the lighting in general, is fascinating. The model’s hair is another fine expression of contrast within the mise-en-scène of this photograph. Say what you will about the underlying process, most people would rightly be pretty happy to have taken this on their phone.
The awkward Dalmatian, however, is a complete mistake (other than its thematic necessity, in comparison with its twin and, presumably, other similar ads in the series). Unusually, the fluffy, Ewok-looking handbag-mutt in the earlier image is better suited to this than the clearly distracted canine leashed literally at its faux-mistress’s feet. You know what they say: don’t work with children or animals. This is why. The hope in the construction is that the focus will be on the primary subject—the model’s selfie-pose (not merely ‘the model’)—and the clothes she wears, rather than the wealth-coded affectation of an expensive breed of dog.
This, in my view, is the foundation of the insidiousness of social media. Instagram is an easy target because it’s the boldest and most markedly visual of all, the easiest to doom-scroll. Except perhaps TikTok, which in my opinion is quickly shaping itself merely as Instagram That Moves—which is precisely what Instagram’s “reels” intended to blunt. Need video? Don’t defect to TikTok: we’ll invent something similar (ie. copy it) for Instagram.
The point is that this entire process is still about the same thing: a gaze. But now, rather than seeing an ideal based on a lifestyle or a specific desire—which “old-school” pre-millennial advertising had mastered—the social media generation of advertisers have created an ideal “internalisation” of what an external gaze would view as an internalised process. That is, to reinforce and actively market what it looks like to be pondering one’s own self, through the mechanism of a simulacrum.
The mission statement for this style might be: “I am central to this performance, and my self-worth is nested in the unacknowledged external gaze idealising me for idealising myself (thereby validating my worth) reflected through an internal ideation of that same gaze via the conduit of a device which does not—and cannot—accurately reflect my own reality.” Or something like that.
This brings the level of simulacra to a truly absurd degree of departure from anything other than the performance of life (gender, for example, is merely one such performance). The self-subject of a selfie gazes at the phone screen, not even the camera lens as has been the case for centuries prior. That’s exactly what suggests it is performative; it’s practically impossible to take a candid selfie. It strikes me as part of an existence that is no longer living unto itself, but enacting life as it appears to others. A kind of echo of reality. Performative behaviour has always been around and isn’t anything new, but as is often the case with technology, this particular iteration exalts the gaze above what was once an occasional performative consideration into the raison d’etre of dasein; the underlying reason for the act of being.
It seems not so different to the way in which some people who loathe their own self will perform an opposed identity—for example becoming a loud-mouthed, homophobic Christian nationalist in order to psychologically counter some unwanted internal reality, such as a latent sexual thirst for a same-gendered partner; internally desired but externally despised. In other words, it embraces a denial of actuality, consciously or otherwise, usually in exchange for external validation from others who require only garden-variety bigotry to hold such opinions. Merely being so wouldn’t work; as it would fail to generate any external validation, which is the whole point.
If such a person were internally at peace, with a strong and proactive identity, they wouldn’t need to perform at all—and this is a universal truth.
Airs and graces, virtue signalling, hyper-masculine strutting (and, controversially for some, even gender itself) usually hold no inherent meaning; their value is in the expression of an encoded acting-out of expected or approved patterns of conduct (rather than being a true aspect of identity per se, in which case such a facet of identity would drive behaviour regardless of external expectations). It seems to me to be a reactive form of self very much tied into social or status anxiety in particular. Identity unshackled from an internalised self and reduced to an expression of in-group loyalty not unlike a cult or gang, quite detached from a conscious dasein; the concept of being in the world.
Perhaps this is also an instance of both simulation and simulacra acting at once, together. Should it come as a surprise that the generation of young people raised under the poisonous aegis of social media are also identified as suffering hitherto unimaginable levels of social anxiety, depression, and a general sense of displeasure with the experience of simply existing? It should not.
To return to the photos which triggered this entire reflection in the first place, remember that the internalised gaze doesn’t even fall upon the self, specifically. It falls upon the phone screen, requiring no particular introspection or even direct reflection; it is a simulation of reflection. This is yet another level of signification removed from reality.
The seductive value of the simulacrum is that it is capable of convincing the user into thinking that this image is them; but digital images are disconnected from the real. They are a mere representation of that person, at best. This ad’s form of selfie-replication invites one to think of themselves, the viewer, as the person in the elevator taking the photo—they can then imagine themselves posting the photograph on Instagram (or their social media app of choice). How many likes would that generate? Imagine living in a world where validation came in the form of an integer next to an icon of a thumb. I, for one, would want to throw myself out of a window, too.
Insidiously, this process also piggy-backs on the fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) which is infamously exaggerated by social media. That is, a constant stream of doom-scrolling feeds full of endless content make a consumer feel as though everyone is doing everything right now, in all these wonderful (and carefully curated) ways. Whereas I, lame-oid that I am, remain in my room, doom-scrolling (probably unhappy with how even the filters I put on my last few photos make me look), instead of doing these wonderful things myself. It’s that very dread, the feeling of life slipping by—in part because you know darn well it is with every little flick of your finger—which feeds the sense that there’s so much more going on.
It’s an interesting teleological question: what is the purpose of one’s own life? Not necessarily the meaning, which is the more common question, but the purpose—a more personal interrogation. These endless feeds and reels seem to communicate a sense of life-as-adventure, whereupon if you’re not out there experiencing things then you’re necessarily going without. Which isn’t true; the function or purpose of life is dependent only on the being who lives it. The primary criterion for a well-lived life is contentment: ergo, if scrolling generates discontent, then it becomes the death of purpose and the opposite of what makes a good life. Could the act of viewing someone else’s carefully curated selfies, or wedding photos, or whatever, actually be the very definition of existential poison in regard to how we should live a full life? Such images should mean nothing to us at all, inherently—and emotionally only insofar as we are pleased that our online “friend” is happy. Or, more accurately, that they appear happy (it’s performative, remember; it does not have to reflect the real).
In reality, other people are only posting their content on occasion; a wedding usually only happens once for most people, and you can bet your arse they don’t post their divorce online with the same fanfare. It’s the great splattering totality of all those adventures all at once from hundreds of accounts at a time which make it seem so immediate and immense. The feeling that “all my friends are getting married”—FOMO again—is probably one of the worst reasons to actually want to get married in the first place.
Or, if the content really is constant, it’s basically a job; a life of nothing but performativity—and it won’t be as fun as it looks. Almost all social media users are savvy enough to consider what they post and what they don’t, which means that most of it skews toward the more accessible, or aesthetic, or attractive. Who, while visiting some exotic place, is going to post that accidental shot of their worst facial angle, stuffing their intoxicated face in some grungy late-night McDonalds, instead of the curated selfie in the fancy café in the most expensive part of that same far-flung city the morning before? Statistically nobody, that’s who, perhaps with the exception of a few irony-conscious hipsters.
And so, advertising tapping into that same sense of FOMO and inadequacy makes people think, “ugh, I really need to post something on Instagram soon”, prompted by the image of someone striking a pose commonly understood to be about preparing to do just that. Quickly followed by “I should be wearing something like what I see in this image of someone whose lifestyle is appealing to me, as they presumably post to Instagram.” Because if your lifestyle isn’t all that appealing, what are you doing bragging about it where other people can see?
I’ll say it again: anyone who is actually happy with their life is almost certain to keep it to themselves—precisely because they don’t need that external approval.
Status Symbols
So what does that say? Is all of this just an appeal to a latter-day narcissism? Or a next-level, gaze-seducing renewal of the same old status quo? I’d suggest both, but particularly the latter; for all their social-media savvy, the youth of today still have the same psychology baked into their brains as anyone else who’s lived in the last couple of hundred thousand years. Phones and the social media apps they host exist only to draw eyeballs—via ads, and the revenue they create, and ads will prey (and always have preyed) on insecurity and its relationship to longing and desire in order to keep those eyeballs looking.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is actually anything new, or that it is a uniquely female problem, either. While the most obvious marketing derived from pure envy tends to target women, for men it targets a more specific kind of status anxiety. Where women might be traditionally drawn into comparisons with other women as objects—their value placed in the adornments of appearance to the detriment of their agency—men in contrast are lured by what it takes not to be an object, but what it takes to own objects (whether or not that message is actually “deserve”, or “dominate”—it certainly doesn’t need to be an altruistic desire). To do so, they need two things: authority, and control over material possessions. How might one express such things? Often, through ironically subtle displays of ostentation—as much as that sounds like a contradiction of terms—in the form of whatever happens to reflect prestige in their particular circle.
Not for the first time, I would offer the pitch-perfect exchange of business cards in Mary Harron’s masterpiece American Psycho as a sublime example of this kind of subtle exchange. Perhaps in this context with the additional adage that men express their status through the perception of control. Even the illusion of control, in the same way that make-up offers the illusion of beauty. That is, men drive cars, they own objects, they take risks; their insecurity tends to be expressed far more as a need to exaggerate masculine traits associated with either extant (usually physical strength or the appearance of it), or economic, power.
Which is incidentally why men are so easily seduced by money-making scams like gambling or cryptocurrency, well out of proportion to women. Patriarchal messaging also tells men that if they aren’t wealthy, they won’t be able to “afford” a woman, and without a woman they’re worthless. I suspect this messaging is also where a great deal of latent homophobia originates; being attracted to other men is abhorrent sometimes simply because patriarchy demands that they need to own a woman. So a man won’t help. It’s nothing to do with happiness or companionship or living a good life—it’s about playing the patriarchal game. What more than one washed-up, pallid bloke has over the last decade called “winning”. It seems no surprise to me at all that the modern incarnation of this anxiety reaches its apex with stereotypes like the poor, cellar-dwelling, quite often physically unattractive, enraged incel, or the more likely middle-class, unnecessarily aggressive, gym-junkie “alpha” male obsessed with their self-perceived dominance of all and sundry.
After all, what greater humiliation could there be for a man who—our popular culture reminds us all the time—has been blessed by all the fruits of patriarchy, their path gilded by an effortless rise to the top, failing upward, bumbling their way to every conceivable success… and yet still isn’t the CEO of a Fortune-500 company? It’s easy, right? Patriarchy engineers it so. Naturally, that kind of stereotype is just as reductive as that of the classical gold-digger, moving from one man to the next, each wealthier than the last. It’s not completely without real-world examples but becomes a very crude means of characterising an entire gender. Men do, very often, find themselves beneficiaries of power structures and entitlements which most women could only dream of. What is often overlooked is that they just as often find themselves slaves to those same structures. Men don’t talk about it much precisely because it scares the shit out of them—what if all this prancing and peacocking and showing off their purported dominance didn’t actually lead to contentment? Best to just stow that one away in the subconscious somewhere.
Beneficiaries or not, men are still driven, hard, to play the same bullshit game—one in which, among other things, they are disallowed an emotionally expressive life. That’s why those chads in the Dolce & Gabbana ad hold such robotic expressions. Heaven forbid they allow themselves some sensuality or genuine intimacy. Only anger, the language of dominance, is sanctioned; vulnerability in particular is condemned. That comes at a grievous cost, and not just for women—as suicide rates regularly, and reliably, show.
The answer to this is not to create a female gaze, or to simply ignore the male iteration (which is practically impossible in any case). It’s to remove the power of the gaze in the first place, and to redirect that energy into something equitable. Which is a lot harder than it sounds. Because it will require the deconstruction—if not destruction—of almost everything culturally familiar and, often, reassuring to us. Of many millennia of patriarchy, and of several very influential centuries of capitalism (which I would argue is predicated and possibly even dependent on patriarchy), I’ve heard it said (I believe by Slavoj Žižek) that it’s easier to imagine the end of the entire world—as is frequently expressed in various post-apocalyptic films or novels—than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That’s how cruelly ubiquitous that system has become, how deeply it has sunk its claws into our common, global, human culture.
These images—which I confess drew my attention merely because they were framed differently to the way I was used to seeing advertising subjects framed—seem to me to be feeding yet another layer of externalised imagery into a “feminised” gaze. A gaze perpetually turned inward (what do I look like?), and manifesting a mere simulacra of themselves, not unlike the way ordained priests of the Catholic church once translated the Latin of the bible into the vulgar language of the peasants to whom they preached. The point is that the actual frame of reference is uninterpretable by design, whether an arcane, dead language or an almost invisible, if ubiquitous, form of cultural discourse. In the latter case we no longer need a priest because the language is instead very effective semiotics: the pose; the glance; the clothes; the accoutrements of wealth; the mise-en-scène; nudge that insecurity and make it time to visit the shops for a bit of retail therapy. Instead of a church: a phone.
This largely visual information is processed internally through several obfuscating layers of simulation: a false need communicated by a false image but fed by a very real emotional response—status anxiety of some kind. Where do I belong, what is my worth, and how do I increase my cultural capital? That’s what advertising fundamentally targets. That is its function. As Don Draper says in the magnificent series Mad Men:
You are the product. You, feeling something. That's what sells.
Ultimately, this is just another in an endless list of capitalist adaptations to changing cultural norms. Once upon a time it might have been a girl in jeans on the back of a motorcycle—now it’s a girl in an elevator taking a selfie. The fantasy of freedom expressed in the first idea morphed eventually into the fantasy of wealth (which is what ‘glamour’ is) in the second. A remedy for what you’re missing—whether you even realised you were missing it before now or not—is what you’re being sold.
Another way to look at it is that the imagery itself has become so cunning as to appear intimate, even though it remains, as all advertising is, meaningless in any sense of actuality. It is without dasein, which is the understanding which a being—aware of its own existence—bequeaths its own being; in ignorance, it it just a thing, purposeless. Advertising is not real. If the particular style of imagery has incidentally changed or adapted to a new way of appealing to its audience, that is merely incidental. It has but one purpose: to provoke a simple exchange. The reciprocation of currency in exchange for a fleeting salve for insecurity. That part hasn’t changed at all.
None of the words in this article have any inherent meaning unto themselves. That meaning must be brought by the reader, whose interpretation of it will vary from my intent as an author, or a third party who reads it in the future, or has read it in the past. That is the task of linguistic interpretation. And of symbols and representation—that is the task of semiotic interpretation. There is no absolute “meaning” beyond that which is granted it through understanding—which is what Heidegger means by dasein. As a “being”, it is not enough to simply exist, nor be aware of existence, but to understand existence through the lens of being. Most things we assume to have a purpose—such as a chair—do not hold that purpose inherently; we must interpret that function as a possibility for a being such as ourselves. Put a chair in the middle of a forest, and hundreds of animals will pass it by without notice; they won’t all begin to use the chair as we would use it as humans.
Capitalism inserts itself—via advertising—in the interim between those processes of interpretation. It presents to us an image, like a chair, and says “this is a thing, and it has value”, and manipulates our assumptions about meaning to ensure that we view the chair a particular way. Not as dasein, as self-determining beings able to appraise its value unto ourselves, but instead as an artifice of social value. A symbol aligned with our desire for social capital, the great deception of which is that we can possess it—via the medium of economic capital. That’s the fraud. Sure, we can own a thing… but owning it does not give it any more inherent meaning than it had before; it remains inert, holding meaning only as we observe it ourselves. That is to say, the price tag is a simulacrum of value; joy, appreciation, or function… they are entirely unrelated.
Economic capital is a simulacra of social capital (what we might call status), itself a simulation of what makes real social connection valuable: intimacy. Which is not something anyone can actually display, or perform. It is interpersonal and, arguably, not even social at all because it ultimately relates to discrete individuals. Intimacy might be simulated to a degree, but only ever approximated, and its duplication can only represent, not reproduce, the actuality of it. Because intimacy is lived, requires vulnerability, trust. While carefully manufactured images can fleetingly mimic the feeling of intimacy, or what we imagine it to be—usually by introducing a twinge of desire via nostalgia, guilt or shame—no amount of staring at a screen or a glossy poster can actually produce it. No brand, no matter how many billions of dollars they throw at it, can manage that.
