This post is about metonymy. What happens when you become a walking metaphor? Carles seizes upon the phenomenon of a preteen fashion commentator Tavi Gevinson to illustrate a larger point about the acceleration of the fashion cycle to the point where it has become self-consuming; it seems to have lapped itself, so that its dictates are invalid even before they can be promulgated and trickle down through the various castes of capitalist society.
Carles describes Gevinson as being prized for "her ‘youthful spirit’, ‘honesty’, and other generic positive elements that people in the fashion world use/value." Note the pun at the end on use value. Of course, fashion most distinctly has nothing to do with use value; it is about generating exchange value through obsolescence. Just as use value has been obliterated by late capitalism's emphasis on shifting criteria of value, the character traits that might once have adhered to an authentic, transcendental identity -- the ones which Carles puts in ironic quotation marks -- are now reified commodities in a media market for pseudosincerity, which has taken to exploiting child labor in pursuit of those ever-ephemeral of innocence and artlessness.
Sans use value, or beyond use value, as Baudrillard woudl say, there is only the relative value ascertained in a given moment, or in the proverbial 15 minutes of fame we all are alleged to be owed. Having exhausted teenagers in the pursuit of fresh material to exploit to connote "youth", the fashion industry has begun to seize upon ever younger recruits, willing victims fashionized far before their time. Bled of their individuality by the parasitic industry, these victims are left for "generic," as Carles puts it. He takes this logic to its endpoint, opening it to the reader's judgment whether or not Gevinson is "overated as a human." So thorough is her premature objectification at the hands of her manipulators, one is tempted to answer in the affirmative. As a fashion-world shill, she has become subhuman, in danger of becoming abject.
Where will the exploitation stop? Carles is being only partially facetious when he makes this remark with regard to the photographer who had taken the photos of the youngster: "we can only assume that his night was a failure after Tavi did not take off her top and show more skin." Child pornography is certainly not beyond the pale in the fashion industry, which routinely sexualizes its underage models. This connection sheds some light on Carles's cryptic parting challenge: "Are party pix worthless when there are ‘no tits’ in the photos?" Again, the question of value in a world that has mobilized exchange value and purged any essential truths. This bound to the question of scopophilia: what do we see when we see breasts? The image of a sexuality beyond the reach of fashion, or the ultimate expression of fashion's ability to condition our desires? Carles is asking: What sort of party are we at? What are we willing to be a party to in the pursuit of the ultimate "pix"?
I just never get tired of these. I wish you could do all of Carles's posts. Keep up the good work (no scare quotes!).
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