As the pop icon Kim Kardashian says in her capacity as brand ambassador for Balenciaga, “When I wear clothes designed by Demna, I feel cool. I feel no matter what I wear, it’s going to be all right, because he designed it and he’s the coolest” (quoted in Friedman, 2021). The concept of “cool” in marketing literature is usually associated with mass consumerism (e.g., Levi’s jeans), rather than with the exclusivity and sophistication of highend fashion. Yet, I will argue that the aesthetic posture of coolness is precisely what runs through banal luxury networks in platform economies. Via “cool”, the signifier “luxury fashion” undergoes a subcultural artification that expands milieus of audiences and buyers. Coolness involves recurring traits that have dominated the post-war youth subcultures to varying degrees, such as narcissism, ironic detachment, and hedonism (Pountain and Robins, 2000; McGuigan, 2015: 4).6 Cool is a “permanent state of private rebellion”, a defiant state of not showing too much emotion, not becoming too clingy, not pressuring, not demanding but keeping loose, independent, decent, and distant (Pountain and Robins, 2000: 19). In banal luxury, these mannerisms are packaged in an atmosphere of sophistication, that is an overall cultivation, an informed outlook and the ability to make conceptual associations.7
In this chapter, I explore the figures of Demna and the Vetements-Balenciaga complex as they are a remarkable link between the historiographies of antiart, the avant-garde, and the curatorial, on the one hand, and the commercial world of fashion and high-end creative industries on the other. I therefore focus on selected exemplary expressions of banal luxury without exhaustively analyzing Vetements’ and Balenciaga’s history or Demna’s career. This chapter aims to bridge contemporary artworld and high-end culture before delving into less exclusive platform practices, like cooking, coaching, and flirting. In the first section, I discuss the idea of Warhol Economies as networks that rely on the appropriation of subcultural, underground, and countercultural trends forming dialogues within middle- or higher-class milieus. If the concept of the Warhol Economy “is the sociality of the Factory enacted on the scale of New York City” (de Peuter, 2014: 31), then I will here expand the concept, arguing that, instead of merely New York, it encompasses translocal creative milieus that sprawl in diverse sites, online and ofline, interweaving art, music, business, fashion, entrepreneurialism, and market-based transactions. Later, I look at the persona of Demna, who crafts a populist, controversial, and sophisticated genius in the tradition of Andy Warhol and embraces “ugly” fashion aesthetics. Next, I look at the use of the selfie in the Vetements Instagram accounts and the poor chic in apparel designs, such as the Okhrana Uniform and the Paris Sneakers of Vetements and Balenciaga respectively. I argue that banal luxury ofers a unique case of the curating economy as it updates the traditional avant-garde gestures of Duchamp and Warhol in the age of platforms, borrowing from the latter’s language of connectivity (see Figure 4.1).
Atmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital Warhol Economies
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