10 June 2009: "Just saw Kanye West shopping at Am Appy."

This post is about invidious comparison. Carles laments that celebrities sometimes fail to uphold their function in the structural system of fashion, instead deigning to stoop to brands that ordinary consumers can purchase. But Carles gives it a pointed racial spin, underscoring the apartheid dynamics that always are in play with the various species of fashion consciousness.

Can’t believe Kanye West shops at Am Appy. Not sure if this makes me want to wear it more/less. Not sure if this means that American Apparel is meant for people of all races, or that they are trying to be some sort of upscale blipster brand. Feeling very confused, like I want to burn all of my Am Appy/try to think of new conversion projects.

Fashion always striates society into classes and makes the striation seem arbitrary, thus masking its roots in various forms of race and class discrimination. From this perspective that Carles draws our attention toward here, Kanye West becomes the exception who proves the rule. In the process of achieving fame, he has not to serve as one of the most insidious kinds of collaborators.

I remember Kanye West had a song on his first album where he talked about being a black dude who worked at the Gap. He rapped about ‘murdering his boss’ and ’smoking blunts at work.’ He was just a disenfranchised black bro, still hungry to ‘transcend society.’

Now, the quisling West serves de facto apartheid as an alibi: His ability to wear American Apparel (the name itself captures some of the nationalistic fervor involved, and the trouble racialist history of the U.S.) disguises the fact that the brand typically serves as a whites-only marker. A double game is being played -- the brand can seem to symbolize postracial stylishness while retaining below the surface -- interwoven within it, as it were -- the racial codes society is alleged to have transcended. Carles shrewdly notes how the contradiction can't cohere for long: "Feel like I might need to find a new brand. Has any1 heard of Anthropologie / Hollister / Ammy Eagle?" The choices are not arbitrary; he evokes another nationalist symbol as well as an academic discipline known to have inscribed racialist notions into the very history of human genealogy. And Hollister, of course, refers to Hollister, California, home to one of the most dangerously unstable seismic faults in the country. Carles is making an obvious point: the fault line of race that divides America is about give way to an earthquake that could shake the foundations of American society to its core. "Can ppl change, or are they always the same?" Carles asks in this context, an ominous reference to the country's troubled racial past. One thing is for sure, Carles indicates. We cannot change our history by merely changing the labels on our designer clothing.