In banal luxury, the rhetoric toward the democratization of fashion (via celebrating ugliness or unconventional beauty) often flirts with a larger populist rhetoric, which praises the ordinary and subaltern versus the elite. Populism is a discursive construction that “interpellates citizens as members of ‘the people’, considered as an underdog, and opposed along a vertical down/up axis to ‘the elite’, conceived as a small and illegitimately powerful and privileged group” (De Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2020: 316). In populist discourse, there is an often-rhetorical celebration of the masses that are superior than the elites. Demna appropriates elements from the underdog classes in the expensive clothes he designs, as we shall see later, but also employs similar tactics, applauding the subaltern classes for being real and authentic in contrast to the self-righteous elites:
A lot of people who don’t have money and who don’t have the possibility to buy designer clothes—they have much more understanding of style than the elite.
(Zahm, 2022, emphasis added)
And
When you have too much money, you lose that sense of style because you don’t have to be creative anymore. You can buy your identity by buying the brand, by buying a watch, a diamond, whatever. And when you don’t have [money], when you have to be creative with a roll of toilet paper, that’s when you really can make something new.
(Zahm, 2022, emphasis added)
The people here have presumably grown superior taste over the elites who have become complacently conformist as a result of their material abundance. The strategic use of underdog identities in order to reinforce one’s authority as expert resembles what De Benjamin De Cleen and Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado call “populism of the privileged” (2023). Given that it comes from the creative director of one of the most expensive fashion brands in the world and maybe the most visible fashion superstar at the time, this rhetorical style reverses the commonsense hierarchy of taste and at the same time continues addressing the elites (the 1%, the people who can aford, say a Balenciaga dog bowl for \$900, see Pauly, 2022). That is, the luxury fashion designer credits the dressing capacities of the masses and discredits that of the elites yet at the same time attempts to appeal exclusively to the privileged latter. This assumed “friction” in the system, or “crisis” in De Cleen and Casado’s terms (2023), does several things at once: it enables system reflexivity and therefore expansion, as the high fashion participants are encouraged to question their lifestyles and choices, as well as announcing Demna as a culturally omnivorous expert who navigates with remarkable ease both highend and low-end clothing styles (Savage, 2006). This crossover throughout genres is persistent in several of Demna’s creative expressions; for instance, his curated playlist for Apple Music “Hello, My Name is Demna” resembles a Greatest Hits album of global pop/rock, with songs of Kayne West, Marilyn Manson, Garbage, Muse, and Rammstein spiced up with more internationally obscure Russian and Georgian music related to Demna’s growing up.
Atmospheres of Banal Luxury in Digital Warhol Economies
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