Virginia Postrel is one hell of a writer with one hell of an editorial pedigree. She’s been a columnist for The wall Street Journal and The New York Times. She’s been a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. During the more than a decade that she was editor of Reason, the libertarian-viewpointed political and cultural affairs magazine, the publication gained numerous kudos for its journalism. Joining an impressive roster of writers and editors, she began writing a regular column for Bloomberg View, the buzz-garnering op-ed forum that debuted on Bloomberg News in May 2011.
If you want to learn about the art form of essay-writing, journalism, and cultural criticism, read Virginia Postrel. In her commentaries—whether on the magic of the iPad, “consumer vertigo,” the Oscars, the appeal of superheroes, or the high cost of local food—there is not one hackneyed phrase or thought.
In addition to being an intellectual powerhouse and a literary craftswoman, she writes with heart and from personal experience, as she did in pieces for The Atlantic about drug approval for cancer treatments and the aesthetic design of hospitals (she was undergoing cancer treatment). She is a modernday essayist with few peers, bringing to her writing an evolved mastery of the craft. Some people look at paintings to get the endorphin rush of experiencing the sublime—I get that from falling under the sway of Virginia’s compositional abilities and the intelligence of her ideas.
The blog Deep Glamour, which Virginia launched and edits, examines the role and power of “glamour” in our society, a subject that gains new relevance and richness—i.e., true glamour—in her hands. Her book The Substance of Style examines the pervasive influence of design in today’s culture; in The Future and its Enemies, from 1998, she considers the dynamics of innovation and the cultural resistance we have to it.
From all this, I’ve concluded that, in essence, Virginia is like a cultural lepidopterist—she studies the specimens of cultural dynamics, beautifully documenting each one. She can tell you all the qualities of its contemporary incarnation as well as how it has evolved over time. In that vein, she offers her keen perspective on how the relationship between status and fashion has shifted in recent decades. She has similar perspective on the interconnections of fame, style, media, provocation, articulating all the different trappings and tricks we use to position ourselves, to attract interest or love, to achieve popular adulation, to assess where we are on the cultural totem pole—to be a member of a group yet separate from it.
Our conversation covers extensive ground, ranging from the surfeit of clothes in the modern wardrobe to political parties, the natural state of the brain, Lady Gaga, attention, and Sarah Palin. Her discussion about clothes is essentially a discussion about language—and how it has proliferated because of the marketplace. On the subject of brands, Virginia says that she often uses Gold Medal flour to illustrate how brands got their genesis. “A brand is a promise of a certain kind of consistency and continuity over time.”
As she acknowledges, brands today convey much more than that, and we discuss the challenges of consciously crafting the brand experience. On that subject, a piece that Virginia wrote in 2006 about superheroes and glamour seems to have poignant relevance:
Glamour isn’t beauty or luxury; those are only specific manifestations for specific audiences. Glamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific, emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience’s hopes and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough distance to sustain the fantasy.
You wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal titled “Saved by the Closet” in which you observe, “In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing.” Following the economic crash of 2009, you explain that “the average wardrobe had shrunk—to a still-abundant 88 items.” You then compare this to what people owned during the Great Depression, when an average person’s wardrobe contained fewer than fifteen items. What created this staggering increase in the amount of stuff that we own?
At the most fundamental level, the change is a result of our increasing prosperity, which contains two components. First, because of increasing economic productivity and an increase in people’s earning power, the real amount of money that consumers had to spend increased quite dramatically, especially when you’re looking at that long of a time period. Second, when we think specifically about clothing over a much shorter period of time—from the 1980s to today, for instance—the real price of clothing relative to other goods has gone down quite a lot.
Really? How come?
In short, because of China. It’s more complicated than just that, but the development of the worldwide sourcing and manufacturing of clothing has reduced the price of the typical garment quite significantly. Also, because of improvements in fabrics and laundry technologies, the quality of clothing has also improved, and clothes today have greater longevity. So that’s the “how is this possible” answer. But I think the bigger question that you’re asking is why we spend our money on so many clothes.
Correct.
The “Why is it possible” question is very important. The people in the 1930s would have liked more clothes too, but for various reasons they couldn’t afford them. Clothing, in particular, is very important in expressing who we are, because it’s carried—it’s worn—on the body.
So, people value their clothes, and they enjoy having options. They’ll express this by saying things like, “Oh, I’m feeling this way today, so I can wear this.” Or, “I’m going to this type of encounter—be it a job interview or a first date—and I want to wear that outfit instead of some other thing I don’t feel as confident in.” There is a value to having alternatives. When you go back to the era of very limited wardrobes, you realize that people didn’t have the option of changing the signals their clothes sent.
Over the last twenty years, we’ve not only gotten more well-to-do, but clothing has become a lot less expensive to manufacture. There have also been changes in distribution that have allowed more people greater access to different varieties of clothing, whether that’s on the very inexpensive end with stores like wal-Mart, Target, and other discount stores, or through the more high-tech channels of distribution involving the various ways that people market over the Internet. So even if you live in a small town, you can now have access to all sorts of goods.
You mentioned that people have the ability to change the signals that their clothes send. Can you ever remember a time in our history where clothes didn’t send some kind of a message?
No. Clothes have always sent signals. The difference today—in contrast to what’s been true for most of our history—is that there’s more of a cacophony of signals than there used to be. This isn’t just because of economic factors that make it possible for us to have more clothing, it’s also because of cultural changes that have broken apart the rules about the signals that clothing sends. The rules for what’s proper and stylish are different now. So, if you went back to the 19th century and analyzed the very well-to-do, you would see that there were extremely elaborate codes delineating what could be worn for what occasion and even for what time of day. A Victorian woman was changing her clothes all the time. Also, there were a lot of signals being sent by those clothes that telegraphed her notions of propriety as well as her sense of personal identity.
The way that someone dresses today is still dictated by a personal sense of identity as well as one’s own sense of style, pleasure, and comfort. It is dictated far less by social norms.
This is not to say that there are no social norms—there are. As a woman, you probably don’t want to walk down the streets in Manhattan topless.
Are you kidding? I don’t walk around my apartment topless!
And I’m not talking about the law, by the way! I’m talking about social norms. I write in my book The Substance of Style about the idea that visual appearance, whether we’re talking about a person or a logo, sends two kinds of signals. The first signal states, “I’m like this as an individual, and this is the group that I fit in, so I share qualities with the members of that group. And I like that.” The second is, “This is what gives me pleasure as an individual.” So, when you have more clothes to choose from, you get more flexibility and you have the ability to make fine distinctions among the people you see—not only between individuals, but also between groups.
Why do you think we feel compelled to communicate who we are through the way we look?
I would say it’s because human beings are both social and visual creatures. Our brains are highly developed to take in visual information and also highly developed to take in social cues. And we don’t operate in isolation. These choices help us navigate our relationships with other people. There’s also a certain amount of pleasure in experiencing them—even if no one sees you, even if it’s just for yourself. But I would say the fundamental reasons have to do with navigating social relations.
You mentioned that a lot of these rules have “broken apart.” Certainly, we’re not changing clothes as much as we did during Victorian times. That being said, several years ago I went on a vacation with a friend who traveled with her teenage daughter. The daughter brought along twice as much luggage as the adults did and insisted on changing outfits several times a day. She found it thrilling to use her choices as costumes to transform herself for an event as benign as dinnertime. I don’t know if that’s a specifically teenage phenomenon, or if it describes someone who simply loves fashion.
I think it’s a little of both. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, people didn’t have enough clothes to be changing outfits like this all the time. But it does seem as if this generation has grown up with tremendous abundance and really enjoys taking advantage of it. I knew a teenager—this is going back a few years—who made a pact with her friends that they wouldn’t wear the same outfit to school over the course of a whole year. They defined the “same outfit” as the same ensemble. They were allowed to use the same garments, but could reorganize or layer individual pieces to make a new outfit. They were taking advantage of the ability to combine different styles. I find it interesting to consider whether teens who grow up with this kind of behavior will still be thinking this way when they’re forty.
There’s an interesting riff on this that’s gotten popularity online. A woman decided to wear the same black dress for a year but challenged herself to make it look unique every day. So she modifies the outfit by wearing different accessories, jewelry, and so on.
Sheena Matheiken’s Uniform Project.
Exactly. What was interesting about the project was that it was also an exercise in creativity. “How can this basic look be different every single day?”
I find it incredibly fascinating. When I first saw the project, it reminded me of the way kids who wear school uniforms are able to individualize their outfits with kneesocks, jewelry, or hairstyles. They all look so unique, even in uniform! And it takes me back to the interesting tension between wanting to telegraph that you belong to a specific group while simultaneously communicating that “this is what gives me pleasure and makes me feel unique.”
If you look at cultural subgroups, there is often a great deal of pleasure evidenced in “defined distinction”—the way that groups display their individuality. You can even have a fragmentation of the subgroup. A lot of subgroup communities are created based on creating clever plays with individual distinction.
But if you deconstruct it, and look at the various Goth, yuppie, or Harley-Davidson biker subgroups, there is still a behavior that I don’t yet fully understand. I understand that we want to be able to telegraph who we are and what our affiliations are and what we believe in. But I’m still fascinated by the tremendous need that we seem to have in regard to developing kinship with others. I remember being very young and desperately wanting a pair of Levi’s because I felt I would be able to project something about myself that I actually didn’t feel. The Levi’s would magically make me “cool.”
So I wonder if we use these self-decreed amulets—a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, the latest Nike sneakers, or the shiniest iPad—to telegraph some aspect of how we want to be seen or recognized. Given how common this tendency is, I wonder if it has something to do with the very nature of being human.
There is certainly an aspirational quality to it, which can be about status, which we haven’t talked about yet. Status is so often used as the one and only explanation for everything, which is why I tend to avoid it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an influence on what’s happening.
Status is definitely present as one of the determinants that shape what people are trying to communicate. The trick is not to confuse status with money, especially today, because there are different kinds of status hierarchies. And it’s not as simple as perhaps it once was. In 1955, if you were concerned with status and fashion, you would have focused on showing that you were well-todo, and standing out in that way. Whereas today, while that aspect of it might still be present, status is more about showing off your creativity and your cleverness, your eye and your discernment. Now the outward signs of status are often a combination of high art and low art. People are mixing clothes and accessories from the high status world of fashion and the perfect thrift store finds in extremely interesting ways.
The act of putting clothing on to become who you would like to be—as opposed to representing who you are—could be about status and signaling, but it can also be similar to the way a performer puts on a costume to become a character.
Your outside self projects something to the world and also reflects back into you. The image of you in specific attire helps you imagine yourself as the person you would like to be.
I think these projections allow you to imagine yourself transformed in some way. You are projecting outward and using what an economist would call “signaling”—the process of telling the world something about yourself. And this can be beneficial. Why do doctors wear white coats and why do soldiers wear uniforms? One reason is to allow that person to take on that identity, which includes their own sense of who they are, in a very fundamental way.
I was recently researching the history of flags and how we started using flags to signify where we came from. Originally, it was based on warfare. Flags on the battlefield signaled what side you were on.
Right. Literally, “Shoot here—don’t shoot there.”
This was before the mass manufacture of clothing when uniforms were not yet used on the battlefield. We needed uniforms to discern one human from another in order to determine who the enemy was.
Think about sports fans dressing up to go to a sporting event.
Or the fans who attend a sports event with their team’s colors painted all over their faces. Why do people do this? Is it simply to signal team loyalty or does it have a deeper meaning behind it?
I think it’s a combination of signaling which side you’re on, like a flag would, and, in this particular case, the communal aspect of watching the game in person, with a group—versus on the television in your living room. You’re not trying to lose yourself and become anonymous in a group; rather, you’re seeking to become part of a larger group of fans on a particular side. The same thing happens when people go to concerts and either dress a particular way to emulate the band, or wear the band’s merchandise.
As our rules are shifting, there seems to be a trajectory toward more risqué behavior as well. I never thought I would hear myself say that a popular female performer could make Madonna look tame, but that is exactly what Lady Gaga has done. For a long time, Madonna was the epitome of edgy, bad behavior, which flew in the face of what was acceptable “etiquette” for a female rock star. And then Lady Gaga comes along and sets a new benchmark for what is cutting-edge in popular music. Before Madonna, we had Cher. Before Cher, we had Josephine Baker and Mae West. In this case, why does it seem that more and more exaggerated sexualized female behavior continues to influence popular culture?
Well, this isn’t exactly an answer, but there’s an interesting contrast between Madonna and Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga does this all with a wink, and Madonna has always been deadly earnest about it. Madonna had a cultural agenda to break down rules and get everybody to talk about sex all the time. Whereas for Lady Gaga, it’s more about spectacle and commedia dell’arte. She’s playing a theatrical character as opposed to providing social commentary. There are times when she tried to provide social commentary—her efforts with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, for example, but it seems to me that even when she does this, it has a bit of a wink to it.
We live in a society where there is so much media, but what’s scarce now is attention. The fundamental economic fact of contemporary society is that attention is scarce. So, how do you get attention? One way is to be outrageous. The problem is that over time, this becomes more and more difficult to maintain. We become habituated to the latest version of outrageousness.
Why is that? How did that happen?
Well, attention is necessarily limited. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and your brain can only process so much information. You can pay attention to only so many things at any one time and throughout the day. And so, in some fundamental way, attention has always been limited. But now our attention is being further constrained, because there are so many things competing for it. Because of the explosion of media—which is largely an Internet-driven phenomenon—things, people, and voices continuously compete for your attention. There are an astounding number of avenues in which you can direct your attention, and there are so many vehicles of communication.
You have cell phone calls, texts, e-mails, and web links coming at you constantly. It’s as if everybody lives in a high-speed, souped-up version of Times Square all the time, with words and colors and people flying around everywhere.
It’s very hard to prioritize your activities and goals unless you’re very disciplined.
But we also seem to enjoy the overstimulation quite a bit.
Many of the things we are engaging with online are interesting, and one link often leads to another. In some way, this behavior mimics daydreaming.
Really?
Not exactly in the way we use the word colloquially. The natural state of the brain is an associative state where one thing leads to another. Often these different meanderings are salient and need attention. Think about it: we could be talking about something, and I’ll start out listening to you, and then you say something that reminds me that I need to go to the grocery store, and I start thinking about being in the grocery store, and then that reminds me of the last time I was in the grocery store and I ran into Susan, and so on and so forth.
This is the natural state of the brain. And it takes effort to pay attention to one thing and focus. So what we now have is a media environment that is like the natural state of the brain. It encourages that process of bouncing from one thing to another.
So the natural state of our mind is to be multitasking.
Well, it’s not necessarily doing different things simultaneously. Perhaps “hyperlinked” might be a better way to describe it, because the mind goes from one thing to another. And this behavior tends to be driven by the things that do need our attention. So, how does anyone stand out in this environment, and what can you do to attract attention to what you think is important—whether that’s to yourself as an individual, or to a cause, or a brand? It’s much more difficult today than it was in a less-media-rich environment.
Do you think that the drive that humans have for fame or to get attention has changed over the last century?
What it means to be famous has changed. The idea that someone might become famous regardless of who they are is certainly new. On the one hand, literally a billion people or more could know you. There are not a lot of people who fall into that category, but there are some figures who are actually known worldwide. And there are more people in that group than just the pope and world leaders—they’re not necessarily in categories that existed one hundred years ago.
But at the same time, the idea of being famous by becoming well-known to people who have never met you has become more and more accessible and simultaneously more deluded. It’s one thing to be yao Ming, but it’s another thing to be Virginia Postrel.
What do you mean?
Some years ago, my niece asked her mother, “Is Aunt Virginia famous?” When I spoke with her, I told her, “No, not really.” But, on the other hand, there are a lot of people who have never met me who know who I am, and this group probably numbers in the tens of thousands on a good day. That’s the kind of fame that didn’t exist until fairly recently in human history. The idea that a person who is not born into some royal family could be known by tens of thousands of people was very unlikely. Now, there are many, many people who are known by tens of thousands of people they’ve never met.
It seems that the quest for fame has become as much of an obsession as the fame itself.
Right. That this has happened only in the last ten years is very much a function of reality television shows. It used to be that you did something that made you famous, and then you could parlay that fame into being on television, and that would get you more money. Now, if you can get well-known enough—even if it’s just well-known for being a nut—this becomes a financial asset. “Being known” is something that you can use to generate a significant amount of income in the future.
Do you think the desire to be famous today is more about financial gain than it is about being acknowledged for doing something culturally significant?
I think there is an underlying desire to be known and acknowledged. And there are actually some things happening on reality shows that go beyond the appeal of watching a train wreck. The shows also evoke a type of glamour for a certain portion of the audience that imagines being known and acknowledged. They promote the idea that your ordinary, everyday life could somehow be interesting to other people. But it’s also true that you can parlay being known into a considerable income-generating asset—if you handle the process correctly.
But I don’t think everybody who strives to be on a reality show is doing it because they want to be famous in the way that we might have thought of fame in the past, or even the way the audience thinks of fame. I think a lot of people believe, “I’ll get my show, then I’ll start my line of purses, and I’ll do my personal appearances. I’ll have a company, a company of me.” This is literally what Paris Hilton did. She didn’t even need to work, and now she has a business being Paris Hilton.
So, it’s not about being famous for “nothing”—it’s about being famous for being who you are.
Exactly. At the moment, one of the great puzzles in contemporary politics is Sarah Palin. Is she a celebrity or is she a politician? She is somebody who has taken this brand—the “Sarah Palin brand”—and she’s been playing it both ways. If she runs for president, she’ll have to be a politician and not so much a celebrity. But she’s got celebrity traction that I don’t think she wants to give up. Which is very different from Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan, who were celebrities first, and then became politicians later.
When Reagan and Schwarzenegger became politicians, they actually seemed to rein in their “personal” brands.
Exactly. I think if Palin really runs for president in a serious way, she would have to be less of a celebrity and more of a conventional politician. But right now, she’s able to do both, which is fascinating, and unique to our moment.
But what are political parties? Maybe what’s different in our time is how our perspective on parties has changed. The parties were once the brands, and these identities were fixed: “you’re the Democrat.” “you’re the Republican.” People voted straight-party tickets. In one sense, the politician is the brand more than the party is today. It’s similar to the way that a journalist is the brand more than the newspaper.
A brand is a promise of a certain kind of consistency and continuity over time. But that’s very different if you’re talking about a long-standing brand like Gold Medal flour or a newer brand like Nike or Apple. What is the promise of Gold Medal flour? The promise is that it’s consistent, it’s reliable, but it’s still flour. Whenever I talk about brands, I always start by talking about Gold Medal flour. It’s important to remember that mass consumer brands began as a way of assuring basic quality. But it’s no longer valuable to think about brands in that way, because we have so much quality in the choices available to us now in the United States.
Today, value is less about brand attributes, and more about brand meaning.
Brands like Nike or Apple associate themselves with a lot of cultural benefits in addition to promising consumers certain brand attributes. And that’s where conscious branding comes in: How do you make these cultural benefits cool at a given moment?
It seems like the whole notion of consciously making something cool would immediately disqualify it from being cool.
Exactly. It’s the art that conceals the art. I think there’s an element of magic to it, and it’s very hard to do consciously. It tends to be more organic when it truly happens. So, for example, what makes Apple products cool? Ultimately, it originates from the taste and the aesthetics of Steve Jobs and the organization that expresses his sensibilities. But this is a very tenuous situation, because he can’t live forever, and there are a lot of people who are worried about that. The people at Apple will have to figure out how to embed his DNA into the company. Over time, organizations can take on the founder’s DNA. It doesn’t happen often, but it can happen.
Quality and brand attributes are still important particularly in places like China or Brazil. Last spring, I went to Shanghai, and while I was there, I got my nails done. I brought along my own bottle of OPI nail polish, and the woman in the nail salon wanted to compare her bottle of OPI to mine so she could see if she was getting the real thing, and to make sure that her bottle wasn’t counterfeit. And in fact she did have the real thing.
The notion of a counterfeit brand is fascinating. People want so badly to project the image associated with a certain brand, so it doesn’t matter that the product they’re using to project that image is actually a “lie.” So a fraudulent projection is being perpetuated through a counterfeit totem.
Right. A counterfeit item is about projecting status, and status is equated with income. However, imagine a style created by a famous designer. Then imagine a knockoff of that style that has no tags or labels of identification. The items simply have the same form. The unidentified item would still project something about who you are, what you’re drawn to, and what you associate with “your eye,” even if nobody thought it was the “original.” But, the interesting thing is, it does still conjure those same associations. It really does.