Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures

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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Using the selfie format as the visual representation of a luxury brand thus collapses these aspects of traditional fashion photography. First, there is no expert mediating aesthetic value, as now the models become the arbiters of photographic quality themselves. There is no voyeuristic game of seduction as the model’s gaze looks back into the mirror and thus the audience exclusively consumes the model’s own seductive play with themselves. The model, instead of the professional photographer, has the power to mediate the ways that their “beauty” will appear to the public. The fashion selfie plays within the discourse of empowerment as now it is the model that initiates the hedonistic game and therefore the model is not merely an object to be consumed by the photographer’s and audience’s gaze but an active subject creating their own imagery. Of course, in the fashion world this empowerment is deceptive as it is again the creative director curating the fashion brand who decides which selfies are allowed to be publicly shown.

In short, the use of selfies is an anti-fashion statement that questions fashion’s reliance on quality, elegance, and beauty, registering a symbolic revolt against conventional fashion iconography. To go back to the production of reflexivity in communicative capitalism, the use of selfies invites audiences to question, reflect upon, and momentarily transgress the rules of fashion as a social system as instead of demonizing them as banal and lowclass. Vetements welcomes their lowliness into this system and thus violates its archetypal values. This insertion of an utterly banal practice into luxury fashion milieus is again resonant of Duchamp’s appropriation of the mass and the unworthy in readymade art, yet as we saw with ugliness and will see with poverty in the next section, it is exclusively oriented toward corporate profit. Negativity is curated in a way that the risk of a backlash is contained and the whole enterprise continues to add value to the brand.

In the Vetements selfies (Figure 4.2), the models render their own, supposedly unmediated and unfiltered, eroticism available to viewers; the selfies are unpolished, with no make-up or efects, as if they would be quickly sent to a friend. Most of the time these models are not luxury fashion professionals but aspiring ones typically with (only) thousands of Instagram followers. Their feeds may contain posed photos but also posts from their everyday life, most often overtly emphasizing their sexuality and cool lifestyles. This is another curatorial-marketing strategy as by tagging “ordinary persons”, Vetements links with “the people” instead of the elites (although again it is only the elites who can aford its clothes). The Vetements selfies communicate a loosely transgressive atmosphere by means of banal and populist tropes. In the bottom right picture, for instance, the female model has a dick sticker on her phone case, claiming a sex-positive hedonistic empowerment. In internet culture, the “unsolicited dick pick” constitutes a threat and the figure of the “dick” usually stands for male aggressiveness and harassment. The positive identification with a dick then rejects the figure of the womanvictim in favor of a woman who celebrates sexuality in her own terms, and it does so as an everyday casual afair instead of as a grand political statement.

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The model in the bottom left picture wears a t-shirt writing “Think While it is Still Legal”, an internet conspiracy-type of slogan, and the model in the top left picture wears a t-shirt writing “Hotter than your Ex, better than your Next”, a tacky phrase found in internet memes. While these banal meme phrases can be printed cheaply on any plain t-shirt, these Vetements t-shirts have prices starting from \$450. All models in Figure 4.2 are focused on their phone screens, that is on their own self-image, in an overtly narcissisticcompulsive way.

The audience reactions in these posts are also indicative of a cool sexpositive atmosphere as they are more than often include many “heart” and “fire” emojis in the row, implying that the model looks hot rather than that the garment is beautiful. “Does the shirt come with the guy?” asks, for instance, a user in the comments of the top-right picture. Again, here the “guy” is more important than the garment (which is obviously and purposefully banal), and as typical for the Warhol Economy, it is the surroundings that matter often more than the objects themselves. In this selfie banality, the models then “look like us” yet the actual price of the garments erects a class barrier between “them” (those who can aford Vetements clothes) and “us” (who cannot). In many places on earth, for instance, a simple pair of

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Vetements tights cost several times more than the average monthly salary. In this sense, while the selfie trope aims to build intimacy with the audience this is a pseudo-intimacy, or a “cold intimacy”, to use the term of Illouz in another context (2013), as the intimate relationality that the brand cultivates stumbles over the inequal distribution of resources in society.

The Instagram selfie is part of Vetements performance of banality that spans from their social media accounts to actual apparel creations. The idea here, reminiscent again of Duchamp, is to turn ordinariness into a cult object, to render its boringness and repeatability into a desirable fetish. Luxury fashion is, of course, first and foremost an extremely profitable business, and therefore this gesture, contrary to the one by Duchamp, is dictated by the profit motive. The gesture has to arouse the feeling of desirability in networks of industry professionals, rich buyers, and the luxury fashion public alike, convincing them that it is worth spending time, money, and attention on the brand.

4.5 Poor Chic, the Security Uniform, and the Damaged Sneakers

The first widely popularized banality of Vetements was their collaboration with DHL, in which, similarly to the examples above, they marketed a common yellow and red DHL t-shirt as luxury fashion in 2016. This DHL t-shirt cost around \$200 at its release in stores, and now its price is rising on reseller platforms as it became a collector’s item (creating artificial scarcity is very important for Vetements strategy and vision). In October 2021, Vetements pushed banality further by launching a new hoodie called “Okhrana” in collaboration with the online concept store SVMoscow (which after the invasion of Ukraine was renamed to “S77”). The hoodie was a simple all-black hoodie with the yellow logo Okhrana (охрана) printed on it, which is “Security” in Russian. The term is loaded with references to the Russian security and police apparatus, known for their brutal methods. For instance, okhrana was the name of the notorious tsarist secret police that used falsification and torture against political opponents, especially leftists and Jews. Apart from the signification with the tsarist police, the word okhrana in contemporary Russia is printed in the uniforms of security personnel that guard public buildings (it is this uniform that Vetements copied). These security personnel are paid little and come from working class backgrounds. Furthermore, the word okhrana bears references to state discourse, whether as the provision of security or as prohibition and unfreedom, and at least in popular parlance, it is the radical other of contemporary fashion, which supposedly celebrates the values of freedom, individuality, and expressiveness. In the context of growing authoritarianism and censorship, okhrana comes to signify the more repressive and lumpenproletariat elements of Russian society that would unquestionably embody the conservative values of the state discourse (without of course meaning that all security personnel individually share these values).

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The appropriation of the figure of lumpenproletariat by Vetements is an example of “poor chic”, which more broadly refers to “an array of fads and fashions in popular culture that make recreational or stylish—and often expensive—‘fun’ of poverty, or of traditional symbols of working class and underclass statuses” (Halnon, 2002: 501). Instead of appropriating the exotic other, as in more traditional accounts of cultural appropriation, poverty chic is a form of appropriation that colonizes the class other (Ryndya, 2023). This has been a constant motive of Demna and post-Soviet fashion design in general (Gosha Rubchinskiy is a case in point). As in the process of cultural appropriation, the class other does not have the power and cultural capital to self-represent in high-culture milieus and the luxury fashion designer speaks exclusively on its behalf. This conceptual gesture of aestheticizing the lumpenproletariat and elevating a typical security uniform to an expensive fashion item (its price is more than \$1,000), parodies high fashion and injects friction into the system.

Vetements, Balenciaga, and Demna repeat the motive of “safety” in many collections; for Demna, as seen above, this is justified through references to his past. For instance, in the SS20 Vetements collection, presented in a McDonald’s restaurant, Demna showed a number of militaristic costumes, such as the pufer jacket and pants that almost precisely copied the German police uniform in a more oversized silhouette. Yet when it comes to banal representations of power, Vetements is omnivorous as it also welcomes its exact opposite, that is anarchism and revolt. As such, there is the “Destroyed Anarchy sweater”, which is actually a ripped black sweater with the symbol of anarchy printed on the front and priced at €1,480.14 Anarchism and the ripped sweater are signs of anti-power, that is anti-systemic signs, as such signs can range from the anti-capitalist Santiago Sierra to conspiracy theory slogans. In this endless semiotic play, even the “okhrana” and police personnel represent anti-systemic figures as from the point of view of liberal mainstream society they are the lumpenproletarian “others” with poor taste and little volition of their own (see Figure 4.3).

This romanticization of poorness is equally spectacularizing in the “Paris Sneakers” launched by Balenciaga in May 2022 under Demna’s creative direction. Balenciaga sneakers are a trademark of the brand—they even figure in Douglas’ paintings, as we saw. In Obrist’s question of why to paint sneakers, Douglas responds that they are “Balenciaga, there is a lot of hype around them” and they are “the kind of thing where people line up around the block hours before they are first released in the stores” (Douglas quoted in HERO, 2019). The Balenciaga sneakers in Douglas’ paintings become a fetish, telling a story about cultural obsession that should be read along the lines of their context, concept, and creator.

In this sense the “destroyed sneakers” is a deconstructive reference to the larger trademark of “Balenciaga sneakers”. The Paris Sneakers essentially look like a shattered, ripped, torn, muddy, and dirty item. One would associate these damaged shoes with people in a state of despair, such as refugees or economically disadvantaged people. And still, the more destroyed the sneakers the more economic value they have as they verge toward the conceptual artwork instead of a common footwear item: “while Balenciaga will sell 100 pairs of the limited edition extra-destroyed sneakers featured in the campaign for \$1,850 each, the actual Paris sneakers—slightly distressed but still very much intact—start at $\$ 495$ (Kennedy, 2022). The sneakers were launched amidst some of the biggest refugee movements in Europe and the world, including Syrian and Ukrainian, and somewhat expectedly caused frustrated headlines, debates, and Twitter polemics. Yet this very frustration around the Paris Sneakers has “generated almost \$5 million in media impact value (MIV), a measure of conversation on social media, in just 48 hours”, that is, it created “a self-sustaining conversation on social media” that kept on promoting the brand (Kennedy, 2022). Here, again, the scandalous avantgarde tactic is a means to generate publicity and virality for the brand.

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The social media frustration against Balenciaga skyrocketed in November 2022 for another transgressive campaign, which involved little children photographed in bondage teddy bears, that eventually brought a serious crisis to the company and even made Demna apologize publicly. With this stunt going too far, it is hard to predict at least at the time of writing in which direction future Demna and Balenciaga-Vetements transgressions will head and whether the shocking avant-garde techniques will continue.

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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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Notes

1 This and the rest of the quotes from the exchange between Obrist and Douglas come from HERO (2019).

2 A “gopnik” is a derogatory term used to refer to person from a lower-class background mainly in Russia, Eastern Europe, and ex-Soviet Republics, particularly one who is perceived as lacking in education or refinement; it is the approximate equivalent of the English “chav.”

3 It can be regarded as a subfield of luxury fashion distinct from its more traditional manifestations, in say Prada, Hermes, or Luis Vuitton, brands which coalesce around the signifier of “elegance” (this will be discussed later on in more detail).

4 The YouTube user Bobby B made the following comment on the page of the performance: “What a joke—rich kids posing as artists, posing as musicians doing big corporations collabs in the disguise of “fashion”. Artists need to transcend this capitalistic shit, we don’t need another rehash of the rock star.” www.yout ube.com/watch?v=AkAXumBqwcc

5 To put this in Marxist terms, this staging of an underground spectacle as part of the brand’s DNA exemplifies a transition from formal subsumption to real subsumption in the field of culture, where in the former, the capital takes command of processes originating outside or prior to it, such as in the commodification of subcultural styles (e.g., grafiti), while in the latter, capital organizes the production process internally so that subculture materializes after its own image.

6 Narcissism refers to an “exaggerated admiration for oneself, particularly for personal appearance”, ironic detachment to a “stratagem for concealing one’s feelings by suggesting their opposite” and hedonism to something more than the pleasant, tending toward “the worldly, adventurous and even orgiastic” (Pountain and Robins, 2000: 154).

7 Coolness developed from being both an attitude and style related first to black and then youth subcultures in the Anglo-American world and became gradually a global signifier to commodity culture, design, and advertising (as in the marketing practice of coolhunting). Coolness is not a quality fixed in entities, but a fluid condition related to the people’s judgments about these entities and, indeed, a condition primarily pertaining to the development of capitalism and commodity culture. It also difers from milieus to milieus as well as from time to time—what was cool yesterday may be kitsch now and what is kitsch now may be cool in the future. While Dick Pountain and David Robins speak about the “cool” as part of a personality type or attitude, I would like here, following Jim McGuigan, to see coolness as a fundamental aspect of commodity culture that in turn shapes social interaction around which identities, relations and desiring investments are performed (2015).

8 We should stress here that this is a process related to the development of capitalism and its techno-social relations rather than generated by a single individual; apart from Andy Warhol as a flesh and blood person, when I speak about “Warhol”,

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I highlight a process that involves the gurufication of a creative persona via the promotion of an enormous symbolic economy around them that far exceeds the flesh and blood individual.

9 Richard Florida, the guru of creative industries policy who endorses Currid-Hackett’s book, argues that perpetual creativity means economic value, and the hipper a city appears the more creativity and thus capital it will attract (2004).

10 The description can be found here: www.onassis.org/whats-on/end-credits-stevemcqueen

11 The film was shown in the Onassis Foundation, a partner institution of Athens Biennial. This foundation, recently involved in gentrification policies in downtown Athens, is devoted to the memory of the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and mainly funds its activities thanks to oil and fossil fuel extraction and transportation.

12 The struggle for maintaining a frictionless space of coolness can then lead to the prescription of what we may call, following Foucault (1977), “cool regimes of truth”, as a cool curated atmosphere can advertently or inadvertently prescribe its own version of historical events built after its own image.

13 Vetements was founded in 2014 as a design collective from designers who had previously worked in prestigious brands, including Maison Margiela, Balenciaga, Céline, and Louis Vuitton.

14 This information can be found at the following address: https://sv77.com/eu/men/ vetements/destroyed-anarchy-sweater/215615-product/

References

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