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August 01, 2006
Brand Underground 2.0
Rob Walker has a fantastic cover story in the Times Magazine this week: “The Brand Underground” about independant lifestyle brands, art, selling out, and the complex paradigm shift they suggest about branding and commercialism.
… and yet thousands and thousands of young people who are turned off by the world of shopping malls and Wal-Marts and who can’t bear the thought of a 9-to-5 job are pursuing a path similar to A-Ron’s. Some design furniture and housewares or leverage do-it-yourself-craft skills into businesses or simply convert their consumer taste into blog-enabled trend-spotting careers. Some make toys, paint sneakers or open gallerylike boutiques that specialize in the offerings of product-artists. Many of them clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream — but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression.
Making use of easy sales on the web, on-demand small-batch production, online buzz-building, and the power of galvanizing small, rapidly shifting communities of taste, these t-shirt lifestylists mash up their personalities and values with their products and marketing strategies. It’s a sensibility that’s not unlike crafting businesses, web startups that are “Getting Real”], high-gloss open-source DIY, or even amateur journalism.
It’s also a movement (scene? tactic?) that’s amazingly slippery: “‘I like to label all the different scenes,’ [one designer] says. ‘I coin the phrase, and people use it, and it goes back to me.’” At the same time, the surface of vague rebelliousness and edgy reference-mixing often seems to suggest that there’s nothing going on below the silkscreen. Walker admits he’s not sure if he’s not too old to parse tepid equivocations such as: “‘It’s just the idea of trying to be rebellious,’ [the designer] said. ‘Or trying to be a little bit anti, questioning government or your parents. Trying to do something different.’”
I know what function-over-form modernist designers would say to this: that this sort of work isn’t “design” at all, since it solves no problem, is willfully obscure, that it’s just adolescent narcissism (see, for example, Adam Greenfield’s “The Bathing Ape Has No Clothes”). To me, there’s a lot here that reminds me of 60’s critiques by 1960’s artists of the gallery and museum systems: if you and your ideas are the only real product, you gain control over a capitalist system that only knows how to profit by selling your physical work. And just as it’s possible to see Conceptual art, Pop, and Minimalism not as rejections of the High Modernism’s obsession with “flatness” in the 1940’s and 50’s (Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, etc.) but as deeper explorations of surfaces and flatness, these designers rebel against the tools and techniquest of corporate product design using those tools more fluently and nimbly than their predecessors could. See also Yves Klein on self-branding in 1960: “The painter has only to create one masterpiece, himself, constantly.”
Of course, almost by definition, if you don’t get it, you can’t get it. But what Walker’s article suggests, is that there’s more going on than simply cool kids carving out more obscure ways to annoy their parents. Oddly enough, William Gibson writes today on the Middle East and points to Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions” as a way to see paradigm shifts that I think’s helpful here (and is in no way meant to imply some equivalancy between t-shirt designers and warring powers). To Kuhn, “the paradigm shift does not just change a single theory, it changes the way that words are defined, the way that the scientists look at their subject and, perhaps most importantly, the questions that are considered valid and the rules used to determine the truth of a particular theory.”
Posted by Andrew at August 1, 2006 11:32 AM
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Comments
Interesting. Paradigm shifts, according to Kuhn, are internal to the world of scientists. As in it’s scientists who get to decide when the facts or rules change. And without getting into the limitations of an internal critique, we can still ask what kind of shifts can actually take place here given who the players are…
Posted by: Anne at August 2, 2006 09:25 AM
Great post. In particular, I love this:
Of course, almost by definition, if you don’t get it, you can’t get it.
It’s taken me awhile to really cement this fact. Some of the things I find intuitive are perhaps generational. Gen Y doesn’t really buy into the concept of “job security”; the only form of security we can really buy into is self-branding. This is in opposition to Gen X; who see branding as a neccesary evil that they cynically work around.
On this paradigm shift, also see Tyler Cowen: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/04/against_account.html . If job security in a global economy can only be measured by innovation/design (a huge leap, granted), what role does accountability play in the corporate sphere? An increasingly diminished role, as far as I can see.
Posted by: Jordan at August 15, 2006 03:50 PM