Sunday, July 14, 2019

Why do people keep on trying to market self expression?

The third principle of Burning Man:
Decommodification
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
The website that was just advertised to me on facebook sells the 'Desert Utopia' line in three 'looks'; Mechanical Goddess, Desert Goddess, and Dark Dessert Goddess which are made up of amalgams of international brand names. The linguistics of these categories are as problematic as the accompanying pictures of homogenized female models with a singular body type. The clothes on them are from mass production companies based out of china. The style is extravagantly consumerist,  a look that in origin was at best uniquely freeing in its irony and at worst a statement on the dystopic culture of the eighties.  If a club kid had an orgi with Pris from Blade Runner, Trinity from The Matrix, and Lilu from The Fifth Element then did a quick shoot in the Mojave desert before bursting in to flames from exposure to the elements you'd have your 'Desert Utopia Goddess.' She is a silent, violent, omniscient, impossibly perfect, sex robot (with a preference for bondage).  She has been bought and sold to self conscious or otherwise unwitting femmes trying to express themselves for extravagant prices. She is a piece of plastic that an underpaid individual overseas went to town on with a gromiter.
I love fashion, I love club kid mentality, clothes and outrageous gestures at consumerism.  I love the bondage wear designed to make someone look like a speechless mannequin from the 5th element. I also find the look disturbingly sexy, something I will come to terms with in a later article. Regardless of my superficial preferences and joys to these ends, people should dress however they want to even if that means conformist rave gear.  It is also true that outside of burners, thieves, and communes we can not abandon commercial ends entirely because people have to make money, including seamstresses and fashion designers. What I can't tolerate is using corporate brands to profit unfairly off of workers in order to milk a crowd that is explicitly working to overcome the negative consequences of consumer culture.  The freshly produced plastics adorn a crowd that takes pride in leaving no trace with their activities. 
It's not what you wear it's how you wear it, which is entangled in how you came to wear it.  This website is branding the lack of a brand, naming the unknown, labeling the other, and it's not even close to the first of its kind. It's kind of a 'Hot Topic', eh hem, ahaha.  If we encourage this market and feed their advertising beast by succumbing to those sexy pictures that use facebook regional burn networks and private fetish facebook groups to target patrons then people will subsequently be made to feel like they are forced to buy acceptance rather than inhabit the spirit of it.  Acceptance stops being an individual's liberty and becomes something attached to a prototype. 
If you're going to buy clothing buy it because you love it and/or it's practical, regardless of who it's marketed to. Buy it cheaply second hand, make it, or if you have more money buy it from an independent seamstress that you know is paid fairly, can exercise artistic liberty and loves their work. Anything else bought in order to look anti-commerical without feeling like it, or sold targeting the richer class of burners and anti commercial thinkers involves multiple layers of exploitation; the fact of making use of a situation to gain unfair advantage for oneself.
If you buy from these companies you are actively destroying not only burning man, but hope that we can improve the socio-economics in this country, that we can stop using conspicuous wealth, clothing, brands, and appearances to define each other.  It is crushing the belief that we can not be bought and sold, we can not be fake, our vision can not be reduced to a paycheck that isn't even ours.  Every penny towards these companies blinds us from our desire to use our funds for ends that encourage a community where no one is a passenger and no one is a consumer, where we are all producers.   Whether or not you think burning man accomplishes this entirely or not at all in its better moments is up to you. My point is that it is a good dream and one that shouldn't be shat on, even if improvements need to be made in how people try to attain it.  And fuck that website.  I won't even name it, you don't need to see it. We've all had to defend our 'authenticity' in the face of commodification of ideals.  It has nothing to do with when we were born, what we know, or what we like, it has to do with the greed for wealth and social power of people who have lost hope and our surrender to their manipulations. 
Some have been inspired to ignore me because they believe brands can be more trustworthy in their craftmenship than independent seamstresses, thrift and vintage items.  Most independent seamstresses with propper equipment have stronger stitch patterns and better fabrics. Advertisements for companies high quality garments have been feeding everyone lines like we're sobs at a used car dealership with very few exceptions.  Some may be disuaded from abandoning corporate fashion because they are unfairly disadvantaged at thrifting and shopping in general because of their body type.  This is when independent seamstresses are much more preferable to major clothing lines. Something from a thrift store altered specifically for an individual will fit better and ultimately will be the same price as buying something new minus the cost of contributing to our own hell on earth.  Shoes can be fixed by local tailors to accommodate your wildest fantasies. It takes time and patience to develop a wardrobe this way, lots of clothing swaps with people who have similar bodies and fashion types, lots of phone calls around town. If it seems like too much time, I wonder for those folks how much time they spend returning stuff online that didn't fit right, or who window shop and spend hours in fitting rooms to buy something that falls apart within a year. Undergarments and the soles of shoes are reasonable exceptions. However, maybe wardrobe shopping with a social conscience is just not a doable vision for some folks for reasons or circumstances I've failed to properly grasp.  That being said I think the majority of people who have supported our current international fashion enterprise are the exact people best suited to shop with a social conscience.  People who dedicate time, money, and personality in to their wardrobe on a regular basis with the hope of wearing themselves out the door everyday.
For those worries about bankrupting the folks at the bottom of the totem poles of these exploitive companies, does the business they offer their workers forgive their abuse? If their was anything else we could do to change how this system works than please fill me in.  These are the best solutions I can currently think of.

1 comment:

  1. After I originally wrote this my roommate said to me, " you can't take something away with out something to replace it, or you will only perpetuate the very hardships that motivated you to get rid of it in the first place."
    Do not boycot, change. So when we change our options in America are we are effectively doing that, but in the synergistic and picture that has humanity , we are fucking hundreds of thousands of poeple out of a servitude that is fucked but their only way to send their children or siblings to school. It is their only hope. So what can American retailers and corporations do to provide independent possibilities where we've left... Is that even a question we should ask ourselves, otherwise it will be like leaving the middle east I'm bomb shreds of our own making. I don't know the answer
    But it's not good enough to just say we're not there yet, cause there has to be a better option than this. Right in front of all of us

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