ABSTRACT
In recent years, wannabe fashion has almost become synonymous with designer labels – from pop stars to urban elites, just about anybody who is anybody, or wants to be somebody, aspires to labelled goods whether cars, dresses or technical devices. This “desire to aspire” is, in some senses, nothing new and as old as the finery of European kings, queens and figures of state whether secular or religious. Yet its growth into something way beyond the preserve of the few and into a mass market of an ever increasing array of fashion goods requires some investigation and indeed explanation. In addition, the world of aspirational design and high end yet mass market fashion is now next to inseparable from celebrity. Magazines, television reports and advertisements are full of who’s wearing what and where and how you can have it too, even on the cheap. Of repeated pertinence here is the fact of the desire itself – the near lust for status transposed onto all sorts of commodities that somehow thrill, enrapture and entice in one almighty seductive “come on”. My point here, as will become clear as this final chapter develops, is that
desire itself is increasingly separated from what one might normally see as its more usual targets – other human beings or subjects – into a fascination with, longing for, and sometimes downright obsession about – objects. This is hardly an entirely original argument – it is one made by Marxists, new and old, along the well worn theme of alienation and the separation of subject and object under capitalism (see Chapter 2). Yet there is something of a twist here – for fashion has always fascinated, if not all then at least many, and that process started way before the industrial revolution. In addition, from the other end of the telescope, the contemporary aspira-
tional vortex into which most western, if not all, societies find themselves sucked has a far more insidious feel about it, precisely because it hardly stops at wanting objects but becomes about wanting (to be) other people. We come, in a sense, full circle – in losing the contact with desire for “real” people we put it onto objects but those objects become human subjects in themselves. Thus it becomes, in an example played out year on year in my classes with numerous students, not “here’s an advert for razors that shows a picture of David Beckham so I want to have them because if they’re good enough for him then
they must be good enough for me” but “buy this razor and be Beckham”. Thus it is not the razors that are being bought and sold but Beckham or perhaps more accurately “Beckhamness”. A further twist of the knife here is the way this world of wanting object-subjects turns into an entire lifestyle, a set of values, or morals and codes to live by – hence Chanelle Hayes of Big Brother fame in the UK wanted not only to look like Victoria Beckham but be her and find her David. The increasing tendency of many an advert to tell you next to zero about the product but to try to sell you an idea of something that goes with it is further evidence of this tendency, namely abstracting desire. This terminology draws on, yet develops differently from, that of Rojek discussed later (Rojek, 2001). In light of this hors d’oeuvre for discussion there are three courses: the
first considers design, the designer label and its antecedents; the second connects this with a now growing literature on celebrity and democracy; whilst the third attempts to pull things together in a case study of those oh-so-fashionable designer label donning celebrities par excellence, the Beckhams themselves.
