Here, I focus on one of the (many) illustrations where Vetements uses internet culture in a transgressive way vis-à-vis the rules of the luxury fashion: the use of the selfie for depicting the models wearing its clothes in its Instagram account. These selfies are registered as a symbolic revolt to the canon of the luxury fashion, and together with other “flawed” posts, involving blurry, shaken, flashy, pixelized, bedroom, overtly sexualized and randomly cut photos, curate a stream of boundary-defying coolness. It is a coolness, which similarly to the Demna persona above, renders the ordinary and the banal as parts of luxury milieus. These posts enable a knee-jerk visual curiosity, which, especially in Instagram cultures, is central for grabbing the audience’s attention.
Phones ofer a simple and cheap way to create self-portraits that can be easily uploaded, shared, and reacted to. As the selfie aims to present an improved version of the self (whatever improved means for anyone), phones can make these versions of the self-public and thus open to social interaction. Selfie as a cultural form indicates an engagement with one’s self, face, and body. The selfie is also a vehicle of self-reliance and individualization, as, for instance, instead of asking someone, professional or not, to photograph you, you can now do it yourself. For the critical theorist Henry Giroux, the selfie expresses the “narrow orbits of self-obsession and individual posturing” that dominate contemporary capitalist cultures and has a further economic aspect as it boosts adjacent economic industries, especially the cosmetic, Botox, fitness, and plastic surgery industries (2015: 4). On the other hand, the selfie format has been also credited to be a vehicle for progressive causes, ofering for instance visibility to activist causes, such as the struggles of war refugees (Nikunen, 2019) and the female self-empowerment against patriarchal canons (Murray, 2015).
In the hierarchy of aesthetic value, the selfie stands for a mass and generally banal form that is usually at odds with the exclusiveness of high fashion. Traditionally, the representation of fashion involves a professional photographer taking pictures of the model. This representation is mediated by a (usually) male expert whose gaze supposedly provides access to the (usually) female model’s beauty and clothing elegance. Luxury fashion photoshoots can be part of the promotion of high fashion, and especially if taken by a celebrity photographer, they can ofer additional high-end publicity. By having the model looking at the camera lens, fashion photography shapes a voyeuristic triangle between the photographer, the model, and the viewer, in which the fashion photographer and the model are involved in a “game of seduction”, of which the final (and only) receiver is the viewer.
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism