Fear of a Chinese Luxury Consumer Market

One of the biggest financial news stories right now is China’s economic boom and the rise of the Chinese luxury consumer.

In 2011, the international accountancy firm Ernst & Young reported that China was the world’s biggest IPO market. This was due in large part to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, which raised more than US$50 billion. That’s up 162% from 2009. Compare that to the far weaker U.S. and U.K. IPO markets (US$40 billion and US$12 billion, respectively) which are still struggling to recover from, in the U.S., a sporadic market and decelerating growth and, in the U.K., an ongoing debt crisis in the Eurozone.  It’s no wonder, then, that luxury fashion companies Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo, Jimmy Choo, and Coach have all opted to launch their IPOs in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange or that a broad range of companies across the fashion spectrum from Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Hermes, and Hugo Boss to the Gap and Levi’s have been opening hundreds of stores across China since 2009. The Gap’s plan to close over 150 stores in the U.S. by 2013 while tripling the number of their stores in China is a telling account of these times.  And if we needed any more evidence of the significance of the Chinese fashion consumer (who Ralph Lauren COO Roger Farah calls “the world’s most important luxury customers”), consider that some European and American brands have begun creating exclusive lines “infused,” as the Los Angeles Times recently put it, “with Asian sensibilities in look, feel and size.”  For Prada’s first-ever runway show in China, for example, Muccia Prada recreated her cotton dresses with radzmire silk and a liberal amount of sequins—WWD describes them as being “coated” in sequins.  Further strengthening China’s position in the luxury market is the steady, albeit slow, expansion of e-commerce in China (expected to exceed US$3.1 billion over the next two years).

While China remains a poor country with an average annual per capita consumption of US$2,500 (the U.S. per capita average is US$30,000), China’s rising number of millionaires (1.1 million)  and the Internet-enabled diffusion of Western fashion consumer culture are quickly transforming this communist nation into what The New York Times has called “The Shoppers’ Republic of China.” Today, young Chinese mostly between 20 and 30 years old are buying luxury fashion and micro-blogging about it on Sina Weibo (China’s version of Twitter) where fashion tips are one of the most popular trending topics. To be sure, Chinese luxury consumers are not all moneyed. Many, like 22 year-old Lu Jing who earns $943 per month at her advertising job, live on instant noodles and public transportation for months in order to save for a $3200 Louis Vuitton handbag. Nonetheless, we’re witnessing a remarkable historical shift in China’s relationship to global fashion. Once “the world’s factory,” in Asian American fashion scholar Thuy Linh N. Tu’s words, China is now poised to be the world’s mall.

China may be saving the Western fashion industry but not everyone is especially gracious about this prospect. In a Style Council discussion in the current issue of Bon Magazine, fashion consultant and stylist for Charles Anastase Valentine Fillol-Cordier is especially prickly about Chinese luxury consumers: “you can’t pretend to have lots of taste if you’re simply buying all that shit and spending tons of money.”  A fashion journalist from the Forbes website is just as condemnatory. “Conspicuous consumption [is] left to the cash-rich Chinese and their penchant for Chanel.” Robert Bergman, president of Bergman Associates luxury branding and advertising company adds, “it’s no longer fashionable to make sure everyone knows what brand you carry or wear from meters away.”  Similarly unfavorable portrayals of the Chinese luxury consumer as having more money than taste are increasingly commonplace in fashion media.

Conspicuous consumption—a style of consuming highly visible status objects—is neither exclusive to China nor fully explains the motivations of Chinese luxury consumers. Studies conducted by public relations firm Ruder Finn Asia and the market research institution Albatross Global Solutions found that for most Chinese luxury consumers “‘self-oriented triggers’ such as pampering themselves” is the primary reason for their purchases. In other words, Chinese consumers’ reason for shopping is an all-American one: retail therapy. So why are Chinese luxury consumers being singled out in the fashion media—a backlash that’s especially odd in light of the significance of China’s new role in the global fashion economy?

The seeming paradox between the fantasy and fear of the Chinese luxury consumer is understandable when we consider the social function of taste judgments. According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, judgments of taste legitimate social differences between and within social classes. Representations of the tacky Chinese luxury consumer serve to differentiate them from non-Chinese luxury fashion consumers. Criticisms of Chinese tastes (“it’s no longer fashionable to make sure everyone knows what brand you carry or wear from meters away”) and consumer behaviors (“simply buying all that shit”) suggest that Chinese luxury consumers are poseurs who are neither genuinely fashionable nor genuinely of the elite class (“cash-rich”). The association of Chinese with fakeness is not new in fashion. Images of Chinese manufacturers and street merchants selling fake merchandise are well established in the fashion imaginary despite the fact that American manufacturers like ABS Allen Schwartz and Faviana (the company promises to dress its customers “like a star”) and UK retailers like ASOS (an acronym for “As Seen On Screen”) are some of the biggest purveyors of designer copies. That fakeness is linked to Chinese retailers, manufacturers, and consumers (even those buying actual luxury goods!) and not their American and British counterparts suggests that “fake” attacks are not only tinged with classism but also racism.

The image of the tacky (and thus, fake) Chinese luxury consumer helps to contain historical fears in the West about Asian economic power. Attitudes towards China’s growing economic power and cultural influence echoes those directed at Japan not too long ago. In the 1980s, as Japan’s GDP soared and Japanese investors began acquiring highly visible and iconic American companies like Sony’s purchase of CBS and Columbia Pictures Entertainment—a kind of industrial level conspicuous consumption—many Americans viewed Japan as a predatory economy that engaged in unfair and, according to some, supernatural trading practices. Economists have shown that fears about the “Japanese invasion,” as it was portrayed in the media, were overblown. Japan’s actual economic power and practices in the 1980s were not unique in relation to other European nations. Between 1988 and 1990, there were more than 30 foreign investment mega-deals (in the US$750 million range) that involved non-Japanese companies. These deals included the takeover of Pillsbury and Burger King (both quintessential American companies) by England’s Grand Metropolitan, PLC.

While the West’s attitudes towards Japan’s rising economic power in the 1980s and its attitudes about China’s economic power in the 2000s are similar particularly in the ways that both are rooted in anxieties about the changing global and racial balance of power, there are key differences. Japan is a parliamentary democracy that openly embraces U.S. capitalist principles. China, on the other hand, is a communist country. While Japan’s economic success reaffirms the foundational principles of American style free-market capitalism, the success of China’s state-controlled capitalism contradicts them. Further, unlike Japan in the 1980s, China is not popularly perceived as financially bleeding the West; to the contrary, Western economies need China.

And this, along with the shifting racial etiquette of a post-racist age, helps to explain the last difference I want to note between the popular perception of Japan’s economic growth and China’s. Whereas Western anxiety about Japan’s economic growth and industrial development were articulated in explicit racial terms (U.S. Representative John Dingell of Michigan, a Democrat, referred to Japanese as “those little yellow people”), anxieties about China’s economic power are expressed in the non-racial language of conspicuous consumption. The tacky Chinese consumer stereotype shifts racial signification away from the body to fashion objects and behaviors. This isn’t to say that discourses about conspicuous consumption aren’t racialized. The historical associations of African Americans, Latinos, and now Asians with conspicuous consumption (“bling”) demonstrate the racial dimensions of these kinds of taste judgments. But the tacky Chinese luxury consumer stereotype is a form of coded racial discourse that articulates fakeness with racially marked bodies. At the same time, this stereotype reaffirms the whiteness of the ideal fashion subject. Or to translate into fashion code, in Bergman’s words: “The face of luxury is […] much more subtle, understated and less ostentatious.”

** This is the fuller version of the essay published in American Prospect last month.

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LINKAGE: Couture’s Chinese Culture Shock

A short comments piece I wrote for American Prospect is finally online! It briefly explores the emergence of a new but not unique stereotype: the tacky Chinese luxury consumer. I consider how we might understand the co-existence of this ugly stereotype alongside all those breathless proclamations among fashion industry insiders about Chinese luxury consumers saving fashion.

Check it here.

Copyright or Copywrong?

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110823/05073715632/would-we-have-art-without-copyright-law.shtml

A short video on copyright just came over my Twitter feed today which got me thinking about the Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act (good god) or as it’s also known the Fashion Copyright Law. The video is below but first, a quick review of the status of the IDPPPA: In December 2010, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the bill that would give copyright protection to clothing design. I read last month that it had finally arrived to the Senate for a vote but I don’t know if the vote has happened yet. I’m guessing not. While the CFDA and other institutions, agencies, and people of the fashion establishment are fighting hard to get this bill passed, there are a number of organizations, economists, lawyers, designers, and manufacturers who are opposed to it. They include Johanna Blakely whose TED talk, I believe, we posted on our Facebook wall. Blakely also wrote an article for The New Design Observer  called “The Costs of Ownership: Why Copyright Protection Will Hurt the Fashion Industry.” Also see TechDirt’s post “Yet Again, Evidence Of The Need For Fashion Copyright Is Totally And Completely Missing” and the countless articles about the booming luxury market (at a time when the copyright protections for fashion are very limited, mostly to logo trademarks). Here’s a recent one. Also, see Kal Raustiala and  Christopher Sprigman’s (a.k.a. the Freakonomics guys) testimony against the IDPPPA. Finally – though she doesn’t write about fashion copyright specifically, check out Martha Woodmansee’s fabulous work on the history and politics of copyright. Her book, The Author, Art, and the Market is brilliant.

The script can be found here: http://blog.cgpgrey.com/copyright-forever-less-one-day/

The Racial Construction of Preppiness

Monday’s article in The Guardian titled, “The Mexican Fans Ralph Lauren Could Do Without” by Sarah Ditum is mostly a rehash of an earlier Guardian article called, “Mexico: Youth Follows Drug Barons’ Fashion with Ralph Lauren Polo Shirts” by Jo Tuckman. Both begin with a photograph of alleged drug trafficker Edgar Valdez Villareal – wearing a green Ralph Lauren Polo shirt – being escorted by armed Mexican federal officers dressed in riot gear.

The incongruity of this “Mexican outlaw” donning the symbol of American prep leads Ditum to conclude: “sometimes, the market gets away from the marketers.”

The company has spent nearly 50 years defining and refining preppiness. Its website is full of vomtastic talk of “American style” and “inviting people to take part in our dream”; the advertising is full of clean-cut boys starring in what could be a burlesque versions of The Great Gatsby. And then it turns out that some of the biggest fans of the label aren’t gilded Wasp youths after all, but thick-set and stubbly Mexican drug dealers.

It should be noted right away that neither Ditum nor Tuckman offer statements by any representative of RLP on this matter. So their concerns for the company’s reputation and sales seem to be their own. But what is their concern?

For Ditum, it is the strange coupling of “thick-set and stubbly Mexican drug dealers” and the material symbols of “American style.” But Villareal is American, born and raised in Laredo, Texas. That this American should covet the “American style” of RLP and the aspirational social and economic values it symbolizes and secures is hardly noteworthy. Socioeconomic climbing is the promise at the heart of the American Dream. For Ditum, though,Villareal’s Americanness is not legible because his brown body is an inappropriate representative of the U.S. national body (which she describes in the racial terms of “gilded WASP”). Here, “thick-set and stubbly drug dealers” is code for “Mexican”. It is the collapsing together of his social, economic, and physical attributes that forecloses his Mexican identity for Ditum, in spite of the fact that he’s actually American (an American whose history in the U.S. predates the histories of most EuroAmericans).

Ditum’s criminalization of Mexicans is also evidenced in this alarmist statement about the harm Mexican consumers might have on the status and sales of RLP:

This is the sort of success a label would happily do without: sure, the brand is popular, but with people who’ve got no cachet to share, and worst of all, no compunction about shopping for fakes instead of the real thing – both cannibalising sales, and turning off those carefully nurtured core customers.

Again, knowing a little history helps. The Ralph Lauren Polo is itself a knock-off of Rene Lacoste’s polo shirt. Lacoste, a French (not American) 7-time Grand Slam tennis champion, wore the polo shirt for the first time in the 1926 U.S. Open championship and began mass-producing it in the 1930s—40 years before Lauren created his polo. Further, “Ralph Lauren” himself is not a gilded WASP. Born Ralph Lifshitz to Jewish immigrant parents, he anglicized his name to avoid schoolyard bullying. As he once told Oprah, “My given name has the word shit in it. When I was a kid, the other kids would make a lot of fun of me. It was a tough name. That’s why I decided to change it.” The “counterfeit” (and I use that term without any pejorative connotations) is not “foreign” to but rather embedded within the very history of American prep.

While Ditum’s assumption that Villareal is Mexican is a racist one, it’s supported by dominant discourses about the “drug war” in Mexico which tend to obscure the massive role the U.S. has played in this “war”. The U.S. government via the Merida Initiative (signed in 2007 by George W. Bush) has funneled more than $1.5 billion into this “war,” in the form of US military equipment and training. Moreover, drug trafficking is not limited within the Mexican borders. U.S. drug consumption is a multimillion dollar business—one that involves not only American drug users and dealers but also corrupt U.S. bankers and businesses (some of whom are no doubt of the “gilded WASP” set) to launder drug money. (By the way, the criminalization of drug use that enables the underground economy of drug trafficking to flourish unregulated is a social and legal policy that is opposed by the majority of Mexicans—as demonstrated by recent protests in Mexico City.)

Still, it’s curious to me that Ditum finds criminality and preppiness to be at odds with one another. What does she think the bankers responsible for the 2007 subprime crisis that brought the U.S. to its economic knees wear in their leisure time?

Flashback: Superman fights Fashion Pirates (1943)

I spent all day yesterday researching the Design Piracy Prohibition Act, a bill that would extend copyright protection to fashion design and levy significant penalties against those found in violation. (The 2006 proposal never made it out of committee but in April 2009, the bill was reintroduced, revised, and I believe it’s still pending.)

While combing through the Internet for popular and academic literature on this Act, I found this image from a 1943 Superman comic on fashion law professor Susan Scafidi’s blog, Counterfeit Chic. (Scafidi is a proponent of the bill, likening herself to Superman: “Yes, your favorite law prof has been involved in the re-drafting; no, I don’t represent anyone in particular — just truth, justice, and the American way, to borrow the motto of a fellow concerned citizen.”)

The image articulates as well as anything I’ve seen the dominant relations of gender, consumerism, and nation. Here’s how Scafidi describes the comic:

[T]he summer of 1943 . . . Clark Kent was forced to accompany Lois Lane on a shopping expedition.  She bought an expensive, one-of-a-kind dress (French, of course), only to see a cheap imitation in a dress shop in a “down-and-out neighborhood.”  Shocked, Miss Lane demanded her money back — and mustered both her feminine outrage and her journalistic instincts to expose the knockoff racket.  Naturally, she endangered herself in the process, requiring Superman to come on the scene, avoid a not-so-clever trap, and vanquish The Dude.

So those who trade in knockoffs are villains, women are fashion victims, and the hero is a male figure in red, white, and blue? Got it.

But why were the creators of Superman so concerned about issues of fashion piracy? Scafidi explains:

[Jerry] Siegel’s mind was on copyright issues.  He was already uncomfortably aware that he and his partner, Joe Shuster, has signed away the rights to Superman for a song; moreover, DC comics was engaged in a series of ongoing legal battles, claiming that other companies’ superheroes infringed on Superman.  So perhaps he had some sympathy for upscale fashion designers, or at least the women who wore them.

Taking a broader view of this, the comic also demonstrates the shifting perspective in popular economic thought in the US at this time towards a consumer economy. Following the Depression and throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the government realized the importance of the consumer in constructing a viable economy. As consumers became a specific identity category, it required the government to safeguard consumer rights.

But not all consumers represented the ideal consumer citizen. Instead, consumers were stratified by race, class, and gender. A 1939 article in Business Week, for example, concluded that “the real strength of the consumer movement” were middle-class white women’s groups like the American Home Economics Association, the American Association of University Women, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. So while Lois Lane’s consumer practices, imagined to be directly supporting the nation’s economy, deserved the protection of Superman, an agent and embodiment of “truth, justice, and the American way,” working women and women of color’s consumer practices which included bargain, secondhand, and knockoff shopping were viewed as national problems. No wonder Lois Lane was so incensed to see “a cheap imitation of her dress in a ‘down-and-out neighborhood.'” She didn’t want to be perceived as one of them.

Cheap clothes publicly telegraphed one’s low social standing during this period and bargain shoppers, as implied from this comic, were indicted in popular culture as psychologically and socially inferior and morally bankrupt. To quote Katrina Srigley, a historian of women’s consumerism:

If a woman’s clothes appeared like finery in the “pejorative sense,” that is, cheap imitations of society-lady outfits, her appearance might suggest moral vacuity or pitiful attempts to imitate “upper-class womanhood.”

Similar ethical-economic indictments (but articulated within a neoliberal horizon) are made towards fast-fashion and knock-off shoppers today. . . but more on that in another post.
Back to the Design Piracy Prohibition Act!

LINKAGE: “Lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture”

One of our fabulous readers, Emily Kennedy (who also blogs at A Radiant Mephit) just tipped me off to Johanna Blakely’s TED talk called, “Lessons from Fashion’s Free Culture.” Like all TED talks, Blakely’s talk is informative, accessible, lively, and quick. After cataloging the “magical side effects” of the “copying culture” of fashion (including the democratization of fashion and the acceleration in creative innovation), Blakely concludes with a question about the relationship between creativity and ownership:

The conceptual issues are truly profound when you talk about creativity and ownership. We don’t want to leave this just to lawyers to figure out. [Y]ou want an interdisciplinary team of people hashing this out, trying to figure out: “What is the kind of ownership model in a digital world that’s going to lead to the most innovation?”

The answer for Blakely, of course, is fashion. But how digital technologies increase creative innovation is a different question, I think, than asking how digital technologies increase freedom (creative or political). In other words, Blakely’s “free culture” is only free in limited ways and in fact, can produce unfreedoms in the process.

I began drafting another post having quite a lot to do with that question so it’s absolute serendipity that Emily clued me into this TED talk! While I finish writing that, check out the video.

What is this “Fake” in the Fake Sartorialist?

All images from The Fake Sartorialist

Part I: Free for All = Free for Some

I have to admit that I barely glanced at the New York Times article, “The Sartorialist Blog is a Victim of Knockoffs” when it was published a few days ago. And I gave it very little thought even after more fashion blog parodies were revealed (here and here). The Sartorialist (the blog and the man who created it, Scott Schuman) is located firmly in the cultural imaginary – by Schuman’s own design and with the great help of his throngs of readers and models who provide the bulk of the content for his site. Parodies of The Sartorialist, it seemed to me, was as inevitable as the Times‘ narrative of “victimization” of the most commercially successful fashion blogger in the world is ludicrous.

But what finally caught my attention was the response of 25 year-old resident of Johannesburg, Eduardo Cachucho, who is the mastermind behind The Fake Sartorialist. Here Cachucho is specifically responding to Schuman’s statement that “Now everyone feels the internet is a free-for-all”:

I find it odd that Scott sees this as a “now” moment. The internet has always been somewhat of a free-for-all, that is what makes it such an important medium. Without the internet his very own blog (that is renowned for being reposted all over the web) would not be as popular as it is.

One of the strengths of the internet is in the power users have to create new content from existing sources. And though of course I don’t condone people just copying images willy nilly, I think there is definitely something to be said for new works created from appropriated sources.

I for one used The Sartorialist’s images only as a base and incorporated images from over 100 blogs that I visit every day. It’s hardly a free-for-all; more like a long thoughtfull [sic] sifting through gigabytes of content.

For both Sartorialists, the terms of the debate about the cultural and legal legitimacy of fashion blog parodies turn on the phrase, “free-for-all.” Interestingly, they both seem to agree that the Internet “free-for-all” has its limits. Schuman told the Times that “he was amused to a point” but had to draw the line at “the unflattering depiction of his subjects.” Likewise, Cachucho asserts that free use of digital content should not be available to “people [who] just copy images willy nilly” and that unlike these people, he is doing something more “thoughtful.” In other words, their point is that blog and other new media content while accessible to everyone is not equally accessible to everyone.
And in a way, they’re right.

As numerous Internet scholars have argued, despite the open access of the Internet (for people who must first have access to a computer and a broadband Internet connection), the Internet is hardly democratic. The operating logic of search engines is such that only the most popular websites are likely to show up in searches. The same websites and blogs appear in the top 3-5 results of every web search; all other sites are, as Jodi Dean put it in an NPR interview discussing her book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Duke UP), “drowned in the massive flow [of commercialized data].” As such, Internet democracy is not a democracy of equitability but of popularity. To quote Dean further:

Rather than a rhizomatic structure where any one point is as likely to be reached as any other, what we have on the web are situations of massive inequality, massive differentials of scales where some nodes get tons of hits and the vast majority get almost none.

The Internet’s uneven distribution of cultural power is clear when we consider that before the controversy, Cachucho’s site got 50 hits per day whereas Schuman’s site got an estimated 250,000 daily hits – that’s 5000 times more than Cachucho. (Thanks to Schuman’s objections, Cachucho’s online traffic has spiked since the controversy – a point Schuman’s detractors are beyond giddy about.)

But in debating the concept of “free-(use)-for-all” Cachucho and Schuman aren’t talking about technological or class barriers. Instead, they’re referring to the ethical and legal barriers. Schuman actually provides a comment on The Fake Sartorialist post (March 31, 2010) that ominously intones, “Intellectual property beware. Intellectual freedom beware. En garde.” I think the en garde is pretty funny – even charming in another context – but I’m not really sure if he’s threatening Cachucho or being playful here.

On its face, Schuman’s objection to The Fake Sartorialist site – an objection based on his concern for the “unflattering depictions of his subjects” – makes little sense. First of all, Cachucho isn’t parodying Schuman’s subjects so much as he’s parodying fashion blogs in general and The Sartorialist (the exemplar of fashion blogs), in particular. Schuman’s protective claims on behalf of his subject seems mislaid at best and disingenuous at worst since they’re clearly not the target of the parodies.

Secondly, the idea that Schuman was fine with the parody site until it became “unflattering” is illogical. Parodies are intrinsically unflattering (though their objective is not always or necessarily to offend); otherwise, they’d be homages. Schuman probably just reached his limit with the parody – and this is understandable – but his being fed up with it is not a sound ethical basis for Cachucho or any other parodists to cease and desist. Arguably, this is precisely the moment when the parody is most effective! By the way, I’m no legal expert but it doesn’t seem to me that Cachucho is breaking any copyright or intellectual property rights laws either. In 1994, the Supreme Court found in favor of 2 Live Crew in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (yep, a reference to 2 Live freaking Crew found its way into threadbared!) that parodists are protected by fair use doctrines so long as “it is unlikely that the work will act as a substitute for the original.” Since Cachucho’s website explicitly announces its difference from Schuman’s (e.g., The Fake Sartorialist) and since the images are so clearly touched-up (unlike other fashion images – Schuman’s included – that disavow or conceal their processes of production and manipulation), no one is likely to mistake Cachucho’s work for the original. Indeed, the aesthetic punch and cultural value of Cachucho’s site depends on this difference! Anyway, I’m hoping law professor Susan Scafidi of Counterfeit Chic weighs in on her blog.

Finally, Schuman’s squabble with users’ appropriation of his blog style and images, as Cachucho points out, is more than a little hypocritical. Bloggers, to varying degrees, depend on external Internet users for their content. The higher the number of reader comments, links, and cross-postings a blog can amass, the more likely it is that the blog will achieve top search status and as such, increase the unique hits it gets. Sites with large numbers of unique hits gain the attention of not only more readers but advertisers, editors, literary agents, and designers who are all in the position to monetize the blog. Put another way, blogs and other Web 2.0 domains (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) depend on and, increasingly, profit from the voluntary labors of users. That Schuman’s cultural and financial coffers runneth over due in large part to the unpaid digital labors of readers (who are often also fellow bloggers like Cachucho) seems lost on Schuman.

The fashion blogosphere is an inherently referential, associational, and interactive space of cultural production. Typically, readers comb through fashion and style blogs to see what other people are wearing; what they should be buying, wearing, or storing this season and next season; and where to shop for these items. And as part of these consumption practices, they often leave comments on the site that comprise a major part of the digital content of the blog. Fellow bloggers cite, link to, and cross-post each other’s posts as well as the fashion images found in an array of digital sites. An exemplar of the fashion blogosphere – are there any print or digital discussions of fashion blogs that don’t include at least a mention of The Sartorialist? – Schuman’s blog is one of several elite blogs that show up in any Internet search among the hundreds of fashion and style blogs that don’t. The digital buzz about his blog is free advertising that helps to maintain and secure his cultural dominance. Cachucho’s parody is just another – albeit more creative – mode of productive consumption that does free work benefiting Schuman’s blog and blogger profile. Whatever Schuman’s personal feelings are about the parody site, it along with the controversy Schuman has helped to manufacture will likely increase his readership as well as secure his position as the reigning fashion blogger. To echo Amy Odell, “We Thought Scott Schuman Understood the Internet Better” too.

To be sure, parody is double-edged: at once confirming and contesting dominant relations of power. The parody site and the controversy has inarguably raised Cachucho’s cultural capital as well. How many had even heard about The Fake Sartorialist until this controversy? How sustainable this cultural capital is or whether he will see a financial effect remains to be seen though.

Part II: Legitimate Fakeness vs. Illegitimate Fakeness

I can’t end this post without considering this key question: if the Internet’s democratic mantra “free-for-all” really means “free-for-some,” then what are the conditions for accessing and claiming its freedoms (of communication, knowledge, and artistic expression)?

According to Cachucho, “people just copying images willy nilly” don’t count. This is a stunning distinction: here, The Fake Sartorialist is legitimizing his fake art against the illegitimate fakery of so-called willy nilly copycats. Legitimate fakeness vs. illegitimate fakeness? What’s the difference? Cachucho explains that his is a “new work created from . . . a long thoughtfull [sic] sifting through gigabytes of content.” In other words, his fake art is an original and unique endeavor (“new work”) and thus he is a true author of fakes (rather than a real copycat) since he alone produced this new work (a labor-intensive and time-consuming “sifting” of over 100 blogs per day).

By positioning himself as an author of “new work,” Cachucho articulates himself as an individual against the masses of “people just copying images willy nilly.” This is the definition of an author. According to Martha Woodmansee, the author (a figure that emerged in the 18th century alongside print capitalism and the modern nation-state) is “a unique individual uniquely responsible for a unique product.” She also notes that historically the author was never “regarded as distinctly and personally responsible for his creation” but instead was perceived as a master craftsman who was notable for “manipulating traditional materials in order to achieve [desirable] effects.” But the cultural, political, economic, and aesthetic value of Cachucho as creative genius also differs from Woodmansee’s 18th century example. Rather than a unique or original genius, we might say that he is an ordinary genius – an oxymoron that actually makes sense in the era of the democratization of fashion and communication. Rather than a signification of artifice or derivation, “The Fake Sartorialist” is a brand that signifies democratic expression. This is what Cachucho means when he asserts that the Internet enables users to have “the power . . . to create.”

That said, the “fake” in the Fake Sartorialist stands for “the little guy” against the cultural and social giants that the Sartorialist aligns himself with and represents. Fakeness sets right and secures the democratic socioeconomic relations the Internet is supposed to foment (as Cachucho points out).

But it isn’t just Web 2.0 technologies that have opened up a space in the fashion world for those outside to enter and occupy it. For the past 8 or 9 years, cheap chic fashion and democratic design have been valorized as enabling non-elite consumers to access and own the look of elite classes. The democratization of fashion ushered in a new cultural politic that values and legitimizes (some) knockoffs. It is against this political economic and cultural backdrop that the real and virtual consumption and circulation of fashion images, objects, and discourses are given new meaning. Cachucho’s blog is appealing because its fakeness, like the legitimate knockoffs I mentioned in a previous post, is embedded in and enacts the new cultural dominant of democratic design.

The Fake Sartorialist site is a reminder that the margins, as Stuart Hall, bell hooks, and so many others have shown us, is a productive space. It is the site in which new cultural forms, new social relations, and new identities are imagined and produced against their dominant counterparts to struggle over the meaning of “culture”. Thus, “fake” in this new creative economy is not the opposite of “authentic” but rather the other side of the same coin. They mutually constitute each other. Additionally, the fake and the authentic are linked as well by a shared neoliberal logic of the creative economy in which privatized identities (“individuals”) are endowed with political economic protections such as intellectual property rights – protections the unindividuated masses are denied. It is as such that Schuman has been shielded from accusations that he’s copying Bill Cunningham who’s been doing street fashion photography for more than 40 years and that the “ethnic inspired” clothing collections of star Western designers are aesthetically valued in the fashion industry while designer-inspired handbags circulating in underground economies are condemned as “fake.”

** My “fake” title is brazenly taken from Stuart Hall’s essay, “What is the black in black popular culture?” which inspired key ideas in this post.

Counterfeit Couture

This is a short documentary on the “Counterfeit Crochet Project” that San Francisco artist Stephanie Syjuco started back in 2006. By Syjuco’s own account, the idea for “hand-counterfeiting designer handbags (Fendi, Gucci, Chanel, Prada, etc.) . . . is to insert strange variants into the stream of commerce and consumption.” Through the internet, she enlisted collaborators (or perhaps co-conspirators is a better word) to “translate” recognizable designer handbags into homespun craftworks that truly democratize fashion.

The documentary is from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts exhibition she did called “Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy)” in 2008.

(For some reason, it won’t upload to the blog but click here to link to it.)

Also check out Counterfeit Chic‘s recent post on sartorial tricksters in France and Korea.

Sonia Sotomayor: Fashion Police?

After only Day One completed of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the historic nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for Supreme Court Justice,* we’ve already heard some of the more predictable commendations and attacks about her. Committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy, a democrat from Vermont, began the hearings with a cautionary note (Let no one demean this extraordinary woman) that ranking Republican committee members like Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) disregarded (I will not vote for –no senator should vote for — an individual [who] allows their own personal background, gender, prejudices or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of, or against, parties before the court).

Throughout the rest of the hearings, we are also likely to hear about Sotomayor’s judicial record on capital punishment, affirmative action, abortion, and her civil rights work with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, now known as LatinoJustice PRLDEF.

One bit of news about her judicial past that has been circulating in the fashion media but has not made its way into the mainstream is her work with the legal firm, Pavia & Harcourt, as a civil litigator for luxury fashion houses Fendi and Bulgari between 1984 and 1992. According to articles in WWD and Latina magazine, Sotomayor’s crackdown on the knockoff industry involved stakeouts “in the back of police vans with the windows blacked out” and dicey motorcycle pursuits “around Shea Stadium in an attempt to catch some criminals selling bootleg merchandise.” She also participated in rather theatrical protests like the 1986 “Fendi Crush” in which “phony Fendi bags were smashed by a garbage truck in front of Tavern on the Green as a message to those who sell and buy these fake goods.” Also finally, while at Pavia & Harcourt, Sotomayor drafted key anti-counterfeiting legislation that has since become part of the New York state penal code.

* If she is confirmed (as she should be!), Sotomayor will be the first Puerto Rican, first Latina, and only third woman to serve on the High Court.

Your Fake Bag

Thank god Tatiana the Anonymous Model addressed the New York Times City Room blog post about MIT professor Dan Ariely’s “findings” about counterfeit chic and moral laxity, because the responses to the study over at Fashionista were, as ever, driving me crazy. (Sample: “…when I see someone with a fake I think that they are ‘fake.'”) Jennifer 8. Lee writes, for the Times,

In one of his studies, half of the 250 subjects were told that the designer glasses they were wearing were “real,” while the other half were told they were wearing “counterfeits.” They were told to do a number of tasks that seemed to be related to the glasses, like evaluating scenery. But tucked into the sequence was a math test. Researchers found that 60 percent of those who were wearing “counterfeit” glasses cheated, while only 20 percent of those wearing “real” glasses cheated.

The Times interprets these findings to mean that counterfeit chic is the worm in the apple — that is has, as Tatiana puts it, “a discernible corrosive effect on an individual’s morality — that, in effect, wearing an item you know to be fake is like kryptonite for your sense of right and wrong.” She goes on to note:

Ariely also seems to have lacked a control group. No research subjects were asked to complete the honesty-testing tasks while wearing sunglasses whose brand-status was not stated, or while wearing no sunglasses at all. Having essentially no baseline for comparison makes the results suspect; unless we know how often “average” people will cheat at mathematics or lie for low-stakes financial gain under identical conditions, there’s no real way to know if people wearing branded items they believe to be counterfeit or real lie and cheat more or less often.

But most importantly, in real life people are not randomly assigned authentic or copied goods — they choose to buy them. And what motivates those choices more than wealth? The segment of the population who can actually choose to buy a real Birkin (price range lower limit: $6000, according to a Forbes article from last August that quotes a luxury goods marketeer thus: “People want to spend their money on frivolous things”) is vanishingly small. The market for the $100 Chinatown version is increasingly well-stocked. How utterly insulting that a study should come along effectively to congratulate the tiny segment of the population who can afford authentic luxury items on being not only more financially successful than the rest of us, but more moral. Except I’m pretty sure Bernie Madoff’s Cartier wristwatches were real.

And just for good measure, two of the comments left on the City Room blog in response to “The Moral Costs of Counterfeiting:”

The marketing processes used to turn commodities into status symbols are, from the outset, deceptive, cynical manipulations of cultural material. Associating these commodities with “realness” is highly problematic, and departing from consumer responses to branding to make general statements about honesty and authenticity is methodologically unsound. I suggest Professor Ariely enroll himself in Media Studies 100 before proceeding with his research. Moreover, this is the second article I’ve read in the Times about how unethical it is to buy counterfeit products. Both articles ignore the root causes of the social ills they describe. A better starting point from which to address the issue would be the enormous disparaties of wealth that these products are designed to publicly flaunt.

Obviously the Professor has never read “The Devil Wears Prada”.

NOTE: The “fake” Vuitton bag pictured above comes from Mind What You Wear, a “fashion guerilla” project “to bring awareness about what you wear and consume.”