Bloggers and Ann Taylor’s Bottom Line

As a postscript to my previous post about the implications of the corporatization of the fashion blogosphere, I just wanted to share this bit of hubbub over Ann Taylor LOFT’s recent invitation to bloggers to “come take a sneak peek at LOFT’s Spring 2010 Collection before anyone else.”

The invitation, according to Jezebel and the Los Angeles Times (threadbared was not invited), promised “a special gift to all attendees and entry into a ‘mystery gift card drawing.’” So far, okay, right? The cause of the controversy is LOFT’s fine print stipulation that “all bloggers must post coverage from our event to their blog within 24 hours in order to be eligible” for the gift card drawing. (The amount of the gift card to be revealed after the submission of this blog coverage.)

Jenna of Jezebel admonishes those “editors and bloggers [who attended the event for being] too excited by the opportunities for graft to notice that it’s precisely this kind of constriction of editorial judgment that atrophies creativity, and which is turning the fashion media — women’s media — into a lowest common denominator whirl of focus-grouped, product-placed bullshit. The internet was supposed to be different.” (Click here to read one blogger’s response to this post.)

While LOFT’s terms of inclusion are no doubt unseemly, my point in the previous post is that creative digital labor, while represented as free from market relations, is actually deeply entrenched in capitalist relations and logics. Moreover, the capitalization of creativity is rooted in a much longer history of art and commerce dating back to the late 18th century, when writers and other artists labored under what cultural economic scholars call a “regime of patronage.” What’s shocking about the LOFT’s invitation is not that it invites bloggers into a matrix of market relations — let’s be honest, this happens all the time! — but that it does so so openly.

Recall, for instance, that in 2007 the Chanel Company invited 12 bloggers to Paris for a weekend of discovering “the history and iconic places of Chanel.” Susie Bubble stresses on her blog that “there was no obligation to do blog reportage but for me along with most of the bloggers I think, it would have been criminal not to blog about the wonderful experiences we had.” While there may have been no formal agreement to post (positive) comments about Chanel’s traditions, products, and largesse, Bubble clearly understands that there is an unspoken social-economic contract conditioning bloggers’ access to the fashion industry. It was precisely New York Times fashion writer and blogger Cathy Horyn’s perceived breach of this contract that led legendary designer Giorgio Armani (and before him, Helmut Lang, Carolina Herrera, and Dolce & Gabbana) to ban her from their shows.

GENDER/QUEER: “The oldest queer girl story in the book”

“Clothes are more than a little fraught for me,” writes Krista Benson in the preface to a post that addresses some provocative, pertinent absences in fashionable discourses in new media (or what might cringingly be called the blogosphere). Bringing up two of the most troubling problems for the study of style as “self-expression,” so often understood as a substantive good in and of itself, Benson continues:

They always have been. Unlike my academic-fashionista kin, I have not always loved clothes. I wasn’t someone who was really clever with pairings or daring with how I dressed. I just … wore clothes. The history of my discomfort with fashion is bifold and it’s the oldest queer girl story in the book (or one of them, at least); it’s about gender presentation and body dysmorphia.

Her post points suggestively to a link between deviant bodies and sexual and gender anxieties that goes for the most part unremarked in fashion and style blogs, with some notable exceptions. (Fatshionista and lipstickeater, for instance, and some of the blogs I will be linking and excerpting in this series.) She notes that she often doesn’t understand how clothes are supposed to fit her body –let alone clothes for professional purposes– and explains further the trouble that gender makes:

Which leads to the second point of discomfort. As much as I love the aforementioned blogs, they’re all variations upon femininity and femme-ness. Which is great, but it’s not necessarily me. Occasionally, sure, I’m interested in some kind of queered femininity, often pairing something softer with some kick-ass boots or something, but in an average day, I’m not comfortable being that girly. I’m not masculine-presenting, exactly, but I am uncomfortable with compulsory femininity and, in a lot of ways, I’m not feminine.

This is, of course, complicated by being an out, queer woman who is partnered with a woman. Even in the notoriously liberal higher education field, assumptions are laid upon both of us in terms of presentation and expectations.

It is absolutely true that most fashion blogs –including those blogs dedicated to “professionals/academics,” and this one at times– tend to paint a rosy portrait of a happy relation to clothes. And this bothers me too, because there are so many times I hate this thing Fashion for its complicities, both mundane and avant-garde, with colonial racial classifications, predatory capital, class stratification and class slumming, able-bodiedness and rehabilitation imperatives, gender and sexual norms, biopolitical measures of health and beauty, militarism and imperial statecraft. (And as many times that I wish I could roll out everyday in my old punk rock uniform, which is partially nostalgia for sure.) And because I am also an “out, queer woman who is partnered with a woman,” and whose gender presentation does appear to be femme –however unresolved I may be with such a designation, especially since this presentation was a conscious, and certainly troublingly expedient, decision I made to “professionalize”– I want to echo Benson in the spirit of her questions.

So I wanted to start this series of scattered thoughts and excerpted selections on “queer feelings, gender presentations” with Krista Benson and her provocative musings on the problems of deviant bodies and gender and sexual anxieties. Especially because of the increasingly pervasive cultural authority of fashion and style bloggers –on both individual and industrial registers– it’s critical that ideological categories as well as corporeal configurations of race, gender, sexuality, et cetera, are subject to ongoing contestation at these sites. What other sartorial experiments and experiences demonstrate to us that such categories and configurations are not simple, singular, or self-evident? For whom is “self-expression” through clothes or style difficult, unavailable, or even undesirable? What other gender presentations, sexual identities, and embodied states can point us suggestively toward alternative ways of inhabiting our clothes and the uncertain stories they tell?

(Image from Queer Action Figures, 1994)

RuPaul as Style Guru to Baby Drag Queens and Everyone Else

Tonight’s the Season 2 premiere of RuPaul’s Drag Race (9pm on Logo TV or Logo Online)! Among reality contest shows about fashion, style, and beauty, this is my favorite. Hands down. Drag Race has the most diverse group of contestants – in race, gender, sexuality, and likely, class. Last season, three of my favorite contestants were from outside of the U.S.: Bebe Zahara Benet (Camaroon), Ongina (Philippines), and Nina Flowers (Puerto Rico). Also, one of the guest judges last season was Jenny Shimizu (who I adore even if she looked like she was on an Asian American literature panel at MLA)! The photo of Shimizu below (circa her Calvin Klein days) has little to do with this post but it’s there because: I. love. Jenny. Shimizu.

I’m looking forward to this season but I’m also a little nervous. The guest judges that have been announced for this season are Kathy Griffin, Cloris Leachman, and Debbie Reynolds. I can’t honestly say any of them excite me much. Another reason to be apprehensive about Season 2 is precisely because it’s Season 2. Reality shows are always best the first time around. In proceeding seasons, contestants seem too versed and too ready to manufacture drama in order to stand out as a “personality.” Ru seems to be hinting at this when she says:

The biggest change in this season is the contestants are actually a bit more – how can I put this? They’re more tenacious. In the first season, they were a bit more diplomatic because they were representing drag for the first time in a decade. This time around, though, the kids have seen the first show, they know what the prize is, and they know what’s at stake, so they have taken the gloves off.

Still, can’t wait to watch! If you missed Season 1, you can catch up online.

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In related news, RuPaul hates fashion people. She tells W Magazine why she has nothing to do with New York’s Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: “I think the fashion people are so nasty and so pretentious.”

Also, she’s got a new book out called, Workin’ It! RuPaul’s Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style (Harper Collins 2010). Both the TV show and the book firmly position Ru within the increasingly familiar trope of the lifestyle specialist/style guru. In Drag Race, she plays (wonderfully!) the matriarch/mentor to baby drag queens (Nina Flowers even calls Ru, “mother,” during their private lunch together).

With Workin’ It! (totally judging said book by its cover here), Ru expands her domain of influence, to “provide helpful and provocative tips on fashion, beauty, style, and confidence for girls and boys, straight and gay – and everyone in between!” The neoliberal makeover logic at work in the book is, by now a pretty trite one. As Brenda Weber explains the logic in her essay, “Makeover as Takeover” – see also her new book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (Duke UP 2009):

A new and improved appearance will not only make the woman more congruent with larger codes of beauty, but will increase her confidence and thus her personal power. In order to gain access to this form of power, however, makeover subjects (often called “victims,” “targets,” “marks”) must submit fully to style authorities . . .

RuPaul’s embracing of her role as neoliberal style guru is evident in the title and description of the book. In articulating style in the language of democracy (here. the Declaration of Independence), RuPaul’s book connects the consumption of resources like fashion, beauty, and style commodities to political acts. Workin’ It! suggests that “girls and boys, straight and gay – and everyone in between” who wants to be free (and who doesn’t want to be free?) needs her style expertise. This is a central tenet of neoliberalism’s lifestyle politics: consumer power is political power.

What is different about RuPaul as style guru is the difference of race, gender, and sexuality. And while this is a significant difference, it isn’t a radical one. Instead, the book (maybe more than the TV show) is a function of what Lisa Duggan has called “the new homonormativity” of neoliberal sexual politics:

[I]t is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them . . . [through] a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption.

I love RuPaul. I think she looks amazing and will never be outclassed by any of the contestants on her show. And basically, I can get behind her general message. But her book nonetheless illustrates the power and pervasiveness of neoliberalism as this era’s cultural logic.