4.6 Conclusions
This chapter presents a snapshot of the (digitally) mediated atmospheres of banal luxury through provocative posts, interviews, online interactions, and controversies. As an “indeterminate, spatially difused quality of feeling” (Böhme, 2016: 18), an atmosphere impacts the ways that objects and subjects are perceived, thus being a terrain upon which value is performed and negotiated. Banal luxury capitalizes on the repurposing of beauty and elegance in the context of internet Warhol economies using populism, provocation, memes, irony, DIY, street language, sex-positiveness, and the underground. In the atmospheres we saw, internet platforms are not merely a means to showcase, network, and perform clothing collections but provide the raw material of connectivity and participation. This in turn becomes embedded in the clothes, style, and stunts of banal luxury.
Banal luxury is a subfield of the wider creative network of luxury fashion and thus postures of narcissism, ironic detachment, hedonism, interdisciplinarity, open-mindedness, social awareness, and the celebration of body and individuality are key in its social interactions. Banal luxury is a context within which subjects, objects, and events are shaped by and themselves are encouraged to perform a condition of desirability conditioned by the coordinates of the subfield. For instance, Demna’s framing of “ugliness” as potential elegance in the context of Balenciaga reterritorializes deviation within the dominant values of the field. These public interactions facilitate atmospheres, yet these atmospheres are neither fully intentional nor fully accidental, they rather emerge as aesthetic postures within the field’s structured and structuring predispositions. For instance, Douglas’ interview at the beginning of this chapter, is not an intentional act to shape her own “brand” around, say, Demna or Balenciaga, but a semi-structured and semispontaneous performance of a social actor within a larger creative network, of which Douglas, Demna, and Balenciaga are part. Douglas did not strategically “play a role” but inhabited an aesthetic posture of coolness that is suitable and potentially capitalizable within these milieus.
The omnivorous creative vision of Demna is reminiscent of the legitimized freelance professional curators in the post-1990s and capacity to navigate “posthumanism over pizza”. In the context of this creative vision, objects, concepts, and activities are interpreted and valorized as being instances of their creators’ visions. Thus, Demna declares that “everything I do has a reason” (Demna, quoted in Tashjian, 2021), and the audiences, critics, consumers, and users should be convinced that there is a certain rationality behind each trick, that there is a larger creative plan, that Demna knows what he is doing, that there is a curatorial vision behind seemingly disjointed stunts, and that he is “the coolest”, to repeat the opinion of Kim Kardasian’s about Demna. In the next chapter, we move from this high-end creative vision to the construction of purpose in food practices in the time of platforms, that is in less exclusive and seemingly more horizontalized areas of life.
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism