Vogue India and "runner-up-ization"
Sep. 2nd, 2008 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusHere's a photograph that appears in the August edition of Vogue India. The photograph -- and the controversy it's sparked -- is discussed in this New York Times article (thanks to Lord Whimsy for the link).
Although India's economic boom is decreasing its poverty levels (even as it raises the Gini coefficient which measures inequality), the nation still has some of the world's poorest people. According to the Wikipedia Poverty in India page, 75.6% of the Indian population are living on less than $2 a day (that's worse than sub-Saharan Africa, where 72.2% live on less than $2 a day). The richest 10% in India hog 33% of the nation's income.
It was probably the emergence of this rich 10% which led Conde Nast to launch Vogue India in October 2007, which in turn led to the August 2008 fashion shoot by Paris-based photographer Jean-Francois Campos. Here (left) is the cover of Vogue India's first issue, and (right) a page from Campos' shoot for the latest edition, featuring a child modeling a $100 Fendi bib.
The first thing to note is the racial hierarchy; Vogue India's first edition looks a bit like an Olympics dias in which a blonde caucasian woman who's apparently won the gold medal is flanked by two Indian women -- runners up, it seems, with silver and bronze. The Indian women wear coloured contact lenses and sport Western styles, but at least the ethnicity of the target market is represented: Vogue Nippon (like Numéro Japan) seems to have banished Japanese women from its covers altogether.
When Vogue India shows Indian women, it restyles them to look as Western as possible. A cover feature on Bollywood film star Gauri Khan saw her radically restyled; her usual bindi spot and traditional Indian fabrics were replaced by a little red mini dress and notably whiter skin shades (though her hair did darken a few shades, perhaps to emphasize this new pallor).
I think Jean-Francois Campos' photos in the current Vogue India are an advance on the bling values expressed in their transformation of Gauri Khan. You probably know by now how I feel about bling, and about Western values. I think our culture is an aesthetic and spiritual laggard. I think the world's poor dress, in general, better than the world's rich, whether it's the Tlicho people dressing better than most of my friends on Facebook, or the Turks in Neukolln dressing better than the affluent conformists in Prenzlauer Berg.
Campos is an interesting photographer: he seems to make it his trademark to juxtapose rich Western fashion models with poor developing world street people. Here are some shots from his portfolio at Michele Filomeno, the agency that represents him:
Now, these juxtapositions are provocative (they're what the New York Times article is all about), but they're also teasingly polysemous. Personally, I find the luxury products placed in these poverty contexts the least interesting things there. I'm not looking at the $200 Burberry umbrella, or, if I am, I'm noticing how remarkably similar to a $2 umbrella it is, and how seamlessly it fits into a cheap outfit. It certainly isn't stealing the show.
"The subjects of the Vogue shoot are the people that luxury goods manufacturers might hope to one day become their customers," the New York Times suggests. I totally disagree with that; who on earth would want to work their way "up" from a $2 bib or umbrella to a $200 bib or umbrella that looks and functions exactly like it? What would be the point? Who would benefit?
One possible answer appears in the Wikipedia entry on poverty in India under the heading The Developmentalist View. It's a process I'd call "runner-up-ization". Far from helping India to wealth, the British Empire set it back, industrially, by a century or so. "In 1830, India accounted for 17.6% of global industrial production against Britain's 9.5%, but by 1900 India's share was down to 1.7% against Britain's 18.5%... Not only was Indian industry losing out, but consumers were forced to rely on expensive (often monopoly produced) British manufactured goods, especially as barter, local crafts and subsistence agriculture was discouraged by law. The agricultural raw materials exported by Indians were subject to massive price swings and declining terms of trade... Those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today".
No wonder Japan wasn't that keen on opening up to trade with the West! (Here, by the way, are two images of Japanese traditional dress: a young Kahimi Karie with her grandmother -- taken from her post-materialist MyLohas blog -- and my favourite image from the Style from Tokyo blog we discussed yesterday, showing artist Kuniyoshi Kaneko.)
A "developmentalist view" of what Vogue India seems intent on achieving, then, would see it displacing Indian ethnic role models to second and third positions, and encouraging a consumer appetite for much more expensive consumer goods imported from the West.
But I think other things may be at work. While Vogue India's shareholders and backers and editorial team may indeed be invested in "runner-up-izing" India, it's possible that a photographer like Campos has a different agenda. Being based in Paris, it's likely that Campos (who incidentally made his first breakthrough at a particularly pivotal moment of the "triumph" of the Western system: he photographed the collapse of the Berlin Wall) shares the French love of orientalist exoticisation, and is trying to make the magazine less bling, and more attuned to its local context.
That strategy is unlikely to play well to the magazine's newly-affluent Indian readers, who're undoubtedly trying to distance themselves as much as possible from the urban poor. But it does sit well with the post-materialist syndrome I reported a few years ago in an essay called Mongoloid.
That essay was triggered by a campaign Michiko Kitamura shot in Mongolia for Cocue. She dressed nomadic mountain tribespeople in Cocue clothes, mixing them in to very much the same effect Campos has achieved in India -- making very expensive clothes look like very cheap ones, and very cheap clothes look very expensive.
I expounded two ideas in the Mongoloid piece. Both proposed the circularity of materialist and post-materialist aspiration cycles -- like the Grand Old Duke of York, aspiration marches its armies to the top of the hill only to march them down again.
"Capitalism," I wrote, "builds an industrial base, blights all beauty in the process, then, finally, gets rich enough to make luxury products which re-capture the lost beauty. Most of us must live ugly and contingent lives in offices and traffic jams in order to afford the occasional glimpse of beauty. Many abandon the idea of beauty altogether on the way. It's just too grim trying to hold onto it when you're surrounded by toxic industrial amusements (speeding cars, football matches). But a few tender souls do cling to the hope that beauty and dignity may still be possible on this planet. Instinctively, they search for it in two places: at the very bottom and the very top. In that which is unworthy of capitalism, and that which transcends it."
Having posited the idea that beauty could exist amongst the very rich and the very poor (but rarely in between), I asked:
"Will these photographs cause a Japanese tourist influx into Mongolia? And if so, how will the Japanese react when they see the ugly chemical works of Ulan Bator? How will these tourists react when they see the urban and slightly more affluent cousins of our friends in the Cocue advertisement dressed in the ugliest synthetic sportsgear, pirated Nike and Tommy Hilfiger? And how many generations will pass before our nomad cousins climb the ladder of consumer sophistication high enough to want to enter a Cocue store and buy exactly the clothes their ancestors wore decades or centuries before?"
I answered my own unanswerable question with faux-scientific precision: "The correct answer is, of course, 4.8 generations given a 6% annual rise in GDP." But a sadder answer -- given the developmentalist view, and ongoing runner-up-ization, is "never". The Grand Old Duke of York will never reach the top of the hill, will never realize that the view is over-rated, and will never march down again. Instead of a marcher-up he'll be -- if the British effect on India is anything to go by -- a runner-up, forced to pay more and more for the same basic items, and to see himself confined to the edge of the picture rather than at its centre. Wearing coloured contact lenses.
Although India's economic boom is decreasing its poverty levels (even as it raises the Gini coefficient which measures inequality), the nation still has some of the world's poorest people. According to the Wikipedia Poverty in India page, 75.6% of the Indian population are living on less than $2 a day (that's worse than sub-Saharan Africa, where 72.2% live on less than $2 a day). The richest 10% in India hog 33% of the nation's income.
It was probably the emergence of this rich 10% which led Conde Nast to launch Vogue India in October 2007, which in turn led to the August 2008 fashion shoot by Paris-based photographer Jean-Francois Campos. Here (left) is the cover of Vogue India's first issue, and (right) a page from Campos' shoot for the latest edition, featuring a child modeling a $100 Fendi bib.
The first thing to note is the racial hierarchy; Vogue India's first edition looks a bit like an Olympics dias in which a blonde caucasian woman who's apparently won the gold medal is flanked by two Indian women -- runners up, it seems, with silver and bronze. The Indian women wear coloured contact lenses and sport Western styles, but at least the ethnicity of the target market is represented: Vogue Nippon (like Numéro Japan) seems to have banished Japanese women from its covers altogether.
When Vogue India shows Indian women, it restyles them to look as Western as possible. A cover feature on Bollywood film star Gauri Khan saw her radically restyled; her usual bindi spot and traditional Indian fabrics were replaced by a little red mini dress and notably whiter skin shades (though her hair did darken a few shades, perhaps to emphasize this new pallor). I think Jean-Francois Campos' photos in the current Vogue India are an advance on the bling values expressed in their transformation of Gauri Khan. You probably know by now how I feel about bling, and about Western values. I think our culture is an aesthetic and spiritual laggard. I think the world's poor dress, in general, better than the world's rich, whether it's the Tlicho people dressing better than most of my friends on Facebook, or the Turks in Neukolln dressing better than the affluent conformists in Prenzlauer Berg.
Campos is an interesting photographer: he seems to make it his trademark to juxtapose rich Western fashion models with poor developing world street people. Here are some shots from his portfolio at Michele Filomeno, the agency that represents him:
Now, these juxtapositions are provocative (they're what the New York Times article is all about), but they're also teasingly polysemous. Personally, I find the luxury products placed in these poverty contexts the least interesting things there. I'm not looking at the $200 Burberry umbrella, or, if I am, I'm noticing how remarkably similar to a $2 umbrella it is, and how seamlessly it fits into a cheap outfit. It certainly isn't stealing the show.
"The subjects of the Vogue shoot are the people that luxury goods manufacturers might hope to one day become their customers," the New York Times suggests. I totally disagree with that; who on earth would want to work their way "up" from a $2 bib or umbrella to a $200 bib or umbrella that looks and functions exactly like it? What would be the point? Who would benefit?
One possible answer appears in the Wikipedia entry on poverty in India under the heading The Developmentalist View. It's a process I'd call "runner-up-ization". Far from helping India to wealth, the British Empire set it back, industrially, by a century or so. "In 1830, India accounted for 17.6% of global industrial production against Britain's 9.5%, but by 1900 India's share was down to 1.7% against Britain's 18.5%... Not only was Indian industry losing out, but consumers were forced to rely on expensive (often monopoly produced) British manufactured goods, especially as barter, local crafts and subsistence agriculture was discouraged by law. The agricultural raw materials exported by Indians were subject to massive price swings and declining terms of trade... Those parts of India which have been longest under British rule are the poorest today".
No wonder Japan wasn't that keen on opening up to trade with the West! (Here, by the way, are two images of Japanese traditional dress: a young Kahimi Karie with her grandmother -- taken from her post-materialist MyLohas blog -- and my favourite image from the Style from Tokyo blog we discussed yesterday, showing artist Kuniyoshi Kaneko.)
A "developmentalist view" of what Vogue India seems intent on achieving, then, would see it displacing Indian ethnic role models to second and third positions, and encouraging a consumer appetite for much more expensive consumer goods imported from the West.
But I think other things may be at work. While Vogue India's shareholders and backers and editorial team may indeed be invested in "runner-up-izing" India, it's possible that a photographer like Campos has a different agenda. Being based in Paris, it's likely that Campos (who incidentally made his first breakthrough at a particularly pivotal moment of the "triumph" of the Western system: he photographed the collapse of the Berlin Wall) shares the French love of orientalist exoticisation, and is trying to make the magazine less bling, and more attuned to its local context.
That strategy is unlikely to play well to the magazine's newly-affluent Indian readers, who're undoubtedly trying to distance themselves as much as possible from the urban poor. But it does sit well with the post-materialist syndrome I reported a few years ago in an essay called Mongoloid.
That essay was triggered by a campaign Michiko Kitamura shot in Mongolia for Cocue. She dressed nomadic mountain tribespeople in Cocue clothes, mixing them in to very much the same effect Campos has achieved in India -- making very expensive clothes look like very cheap ones, and very cheap clothes look very expensive.
I expounded two ideas in the Mongoloid piece. Both proposed the circularity of materialist and post-materialist aspiration cycles -- like the Grand Old Duke of York, aspiration marches its armies to the top of the hill only to march them down again.
"Capitalism," I wrote, "builds an industrial base, blights all beauty in the process, then, finally, gets rich enough to make luxury products which re-capture the lost beauty. Most of us must live ugly and contingent lives in offices and traffic jams in order to afford the occasional glimpse of beauty. Many abandon the idea of beauty altogether on the way. It's just too grim trying to hold onto it when you're surrounded by toxic industrial amusements (speeding cars, football matches). But a few tender souls do cling to the hope that beauty and dignity may still be possible on this planet. Instinctively, they search for it in two places: at the very bottom and the very top. In that which is unworthy of capitalism, and that which transcends it."
Having posited the idea that beauty could exist amongst the very rich and the very poor (but rarely in between), I asked:
"Will these photographs cause a Japanese tourist influx into Mongolia? And if so, how will the Japanese react when they see the ugly chemical works of Ulan Bator? How will these tourists react when they see the urban and slightly more affluent cousins of our friends in the Cocue advertisement dressed in the ugliest synthetic sportsgear, pirated Nike and Tommy Hilfiger? And how many generations will pass before our nomad cousins climb the ladder of consumer sophistication high enough to want to enter a Cocue store and buy exactly the clothes their ancestors wore decades or centuries before?"
I answered my own unanswerable question with faux-scientific precision: "The correct answer is, of course, 4.8 generations given a 6% annual rise in GDP." But a sadder answer -- given the developmentalist view, and ongoing runner-up-ization, is "never". The Grand Old Duke of York will never reach the top of the hill, will never realize that the view is over-rated, and will never march down again. Instead of a marcher-up he'll be -- if the British effect on India is anything to go by -- a runner-up, forced to pay more and more for the same basic items, and to see himself confined to the edge of the picture rather than at its centre. Wearing coloured contact lenses.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 04:32 pm (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
"Vogue Nippon (like Numéro Japan) seems to have banished Japanese women from its covers altogether."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgmental_language
"When Vogue India shows Indian women, it restyles them to look as Western as possible."
Vogue is a western fashion magazine. People buy it for the western fashion.
"her usual bindi spot and traditional Indian fabrics were replaced by a little red mini dress and notably whiter skin shades"
I'm currently reading No Longer Human (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_longer_human) by Osamu Dazai. I'm going to quote Donald Keene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Keene)'s introduction to the book, where he discusses this idea of cultural purity being expected in all cultures but our own:
"I must say I find this parochialism curious in the United States. Here where our suburbs are jammed with a variety of architecture which bears no relation to the antecedents of either the builders or the dwellers; ...(numerous examples of cultural borrowing)... can we with honesty rebuke the Japanese for a lack of purity in their modern culture? And can we criticize them for borrowing from us when we are almost as conspicuously in their debt? We drink tea, their beverage, but would find it curious they would drink whiskey, ours...(numerous examples of cultural exchange)... Why does it seem so strange that another country should have a culture as conglomerate as our own?
No Japanese thinks of his business suit as an outlandish or affected garb; it is not only what he usually wears but was probably also the costume of his father and grandfather. To wear Japanese garments would be strange and uncomfortable for most Japanese men. The majority of modern Japanese today wear western modern culture as they also wear their clothes, and to keep reminding them their ancestors originally attired themselves otherwise is at once bad manners and foolish"
...Where's your kilt, Momus?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 05:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 07:19 pm (UTC)「背広」is the oldest Japanese word for business suit. It's ateji (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji) (which the Japanese almost never create anymore), combining kanji to make the sound "sebiro", phonetically replicating the name of London's famous saville row (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saville_Row)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 05:47 pm (UTC)And, as I've said here before (http://imomus.livejournal.com/164207.html), I disagree because Kaufmann's model presupposes a level playing field that simply doesn't exist, and an equality and reciprocity between cultures that's far from reality. When he demands the same treatment for Bhutan as for California, say, he fails to take into account the differences of power, wealth and influence between our culture and theirs. He doesn't take into account the one-way culture flows (http://imomus.livejournal.com/273386.html) spreading our culture and not theirs. His proposed "equality of treatment" therefore just perpetuates injustice and further endangers the many cultures, languages, religions, ways of life and codes of dress threatened by the monoculturally-multicultural, monopolistic, evangelical West.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 05:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 06:53 pm (UTC)To further quote him in the translator's introduction of 'No Longer Human':
"We might like to reprimand the Japanese for the neglect of their own traditional culture, or insist that Japanese writers should be proud to be associated with other Asians, but such advice comes too late: as the result of our repeated and forcible intrusions in the past, western tastes are coming to dominate letters everywhere. The most we have reason to expect in the future are world variations of a single literature, of the kind which already exists in Europe."
Keene's position on this matter is obvious: European culture dominates. The west desires cultural conglomeration - to import and consume exoticisms; is it so strange other cultures desire this? can you deny the rest of the world of this?
In fact, good old zenicurean (constantly a source of reason on this blog) elaborates along this vein and asks "what is the alternative?" (http://imomus.livejournal.com/273386.html?thread=10390762#t10390762) unfortunately, the alternative is one of cultural stagnation, which is just as bad as cultural homogeny.
I also resent the way you disingenuously try to turn this into a
rightbad vsleftgood struggle, it really isnt that black and white.(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 07:05 pm (UTC)I prefer Uberdionysus' points in that exchange to Zenicurean's.
European culture dominates. The west desires cultural conglomeration - to import and consume exoticisms; is it so strange other cultures desire this?
We'd have to talk about individual cultures, not just generalize. Japan and Saudi Arabia clearly have completely different attitudes to "cultural conglomeration".
(no subject)
Date: 2008-09-02 08:21 pm (UTC)"The example of Hebrew... is certainly part of a nefarious wave across the world, where disproportionate and too often introverted campaigns for linguistic revival and assertion have sprouted across the 20th century - in Ireland, for example, or Euzkadi (the Spanish Basque country). Even in the Canary Islands, on the basis of what are said to be 250 known words from an earlier pre-Spanish language called Guanche, a revival movement arose in the 1970s with, inevitably, the slogan Patria Guanche o Muerte, Venceremos ('Our Homeland, Guanche or Death: We Shall Prevail')...[I can almost see Halliday yawning!]... The cost of all this linguistic obsession, in a world where the cultural and economic, let alone human, imperative is to learn the major tongues, has yet to be calculated."
BTW Mumbai/Bombay was British sovereign territory from 1661 to 1947, and it was Portuguese for over 100 years before that. According to Wikipedia it accounts for 25% of India's industrial output, 40% of its maritime trade, and 70% of its capital transactions. It contradicts the "Developmentalist View" you quote. Its film industry has probably done more than anything any Indian government could ever do, to buttress Hindi as a viable Indian "national" language in opposition to English. Then again, with all those call centres, isn't English India's ultimate secret revenge weapon against the British Empire?
It's important to remember that there was a major imperialism in India before British imperialism. K.S. Lal has written about the devastation it caused.
As always, your opinions are 180 degrees opposite from those of Karl Marx:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm