|

Tom Ford

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

A major international male icon at the turn of the 2010s Tom Ford represents unparalleled design and fashion flair combined with great business acumen. His personal glamour (a focus for both the male and female gaze) and critically acclaimed breakthrough from fashion and branded commercial communication into mainstream film directing with A Single Man (2010) makes him one of the most powerful and intriguing male symbols of his time.

Tom Ford Grey Vetiver

All the more because Tom Ford a) pioneers for gay men the discrete privilege long enjoyed by heterosexual males that one’s sexuality need not necessarily be core to the definition of one’s character & identity and b) stands aside, in terms of critical intelligence and comments on public record, from an unthinking commercialism and love of consumption proverbially associated not only with his chosen métier in the fashion/luxury industry but also with the Sex And the City era’s unholy alliance of postfeminism with camp male culture (‘you go, girl’, ‘shop, shop. shop’). A 2010 US public radio interview in the link below, for example, critiques variously the vacuity of a culture in which everything has to be regarded a ‘brand’ and the excesses of a beauty industry whose ‘posthuman’ norms attempts to nurture in young women, among many other altered perceptions, a belief that breasts which are traditionally breast-shaped, rather than resembling the shape of a blown up half-grapefruit, are defective and therefore in need of being ‘fixed’ by cosmetic surgery.

As an icon of contemporary masculinity Tom Ford also signals a cultural shift from the dominance to the Alpha male image to that of a more evolved leader who incorporates positive Omega male characteristics (independence, resourcefulness, depth, a pride which can manifest itself in ways other than conventional ego gratification).

© Malcolm Evans  2010

Notes: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121405891

Posted in Americas, Categories, Consumer Culture, Emergence, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Whose line is it?

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

One would have thought that plagiarism is a serious business.   Certainly in literature.   This spring (2010) we learn from the German press, the leading publisher Ullstein and the young female author of the book Axolotl Roadkill, that plagiarism may actually be an important emerging code.  Especially in literature.

Whose line is it anyway

In this novel a 16-year old aspiring author, Helene Hegemann, writes about drugs & sex like a 38-year old nightlife junky and is instantly proclaimed the new literary star of Germany.  Bestseller listing follows.   Unfortunately, it turns out that most of her book is copied, often word for word, from many people, but most of it from the blogger Airens.  No credits, no footnote references, unequivocally plagiarised.

This sort of thing (apparent literary fraud) used to mean the end of the road. But not for everybody. Not for Tony Blair in the notorious ’Dodgy Dossier’ on Weapons of Mass Destruction, for example, used in UK to persuade Parliament to support the invasion of Iraq. And now not for Helene Hegemann.

Helene Hegemann, reportedly, is not only unrepentant but apparently proud.   She tells us we live in a word-of-mouth society where any content is everybody’s content. Therefore, content is about proliferation of information and re-shuffling of ideas, not about authorship or ownership.

Without diving into any unnecessary discussion around the ’art of intellectual referencing’ – either old (Shakespeare from numerous sources, Goethe copying Shakespeare, the phenomenon termed in German Weltmitschriften’, in English ’minutes of the world’) or more recent (music & song sampling, postmodern quotation as stock-in-trade of film, theatre and ad direction) –  the fact appears to remain: Helene Hegemann copied large chunks of prose from an internet author and sold that content at a premium.

How does she get away with this?

• The book industry wants to sell books – free content on the internet does not help that endeavour (unless it can be repackaged and sold at a price).

• The Über-author is a learned concept in mainstream popular culture since ist inception with scratching in the 1980s.

• It’s one of the dilemmas of the web itself, where thoughtlessness is more than tolerated, sometimes celebrated – and perceived worthlessness can be the result.

Bottom line: Axolotl Roadkill looks like a case of daylight robbery. But then Helene Hegemann is not legal age, yet. So a moral license for pupils and students to download their school assignments from online sources? Or symptomatic of much larger economic issues around counterfeiting, piracy and intellectual property guaranteed to keep the lawyers busy, perplexing the world of information commerce and the new creative classes for at least a few years yet?

© Oliver Litten 2010

Posted in Culture, Europe, Making Sense, Technology | No Comments »

Hinglish Lyrics

Monday, July 19th, 2010

A recent trend in the lyrics of songs in Hindi movies is the juxtaposition of English and Hindi lyrics to create bi-lingual songs. It can take the form of a refrain in English that intersects Hindi stanzas or the presence of bi-lingual sentences. The adoption of this genre of song writing by leading lyricists as well as the growing popularity of this format with several hit songs, calls out for a semiotic interpretation of this new phenomenon. 

Hinglish Lyrics

Of course the songs are trendy and cool and targeted at youth. And “Hinglish” is an old phenomenon in advertising, used for well over a decade. So, what’s with the “Hinglish” lyrics now? One explanation that suggests itself is that, we now have a  post-liberalization generation (born after 1990) that is coming of age. This is a generation who are the children of a global and materialistic age, who believe that they are simultaneously global and Indian. “Global” is sexiness, glamour, fun, challenging authority, freedom of choice, action orientation. “Indian” is sentiment, romanticism, gentleness, family values and tradition.   This is a generation that is exploring dating and the mating game, new life possibilities and risks in a way that no previous generation in modern India has done before. They are seeking a new language with which to describe their angst and their thrills, the highs and lows of their love life and indeed their life itself.

The bi-lingual song whether a romantic ballad or a youth anthem, talks directly to the contradictory impulses of their fusion soul. So, the English lines are often suggestive of action and movement while the Hindi lyrics explore inner feelings in a more descriptive, metaphorical and romantic manner.   Sexy is fun and cool in English, while it is the fire of a burning lust in its Hindi expression. 

What would a philosopher or a psychoanalyst make of the fusion soul? It is hard to place this soul into an elitist cultural hierarchy or indeed on to a salvation quest that follows the dictum of “Know thyself” in order to be true to yourself. Is their story to be written as one of eternal angst, forever caught between two places? Or is it to be a story of freedom and choice and a celebration of the human spirit in a new avatar?

© Hamsini Shivakumar 2010

Posted in Asia, Culture, Global Vectors, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Living Autopsies

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

Once, the body was text: a second surface for the inscription and production of identity. But now, a host of technologies and practices are cutting through this outer skin, opening up the body's third interior for all to see.

While postmodern codes of the body revelled in its outwardness (its ability to encode identity through costume and appearance), we’re now delving into its inner landscape, with airport body scanners, biometric market research and even ‘neuro lit crit’ all re-framing the body as ‘content’ rather than as ‘form’.

Showing how advertising is picking up on this drive to get ‘under the skin’, a recent UK Department of Health campaign to curb alcohol abuse features scan-like images of the ‘damage you can’t see’.

Meanwhile, last year’s BBC 3 reality TV show ‘Make my body younger’ put participants through a ‘living autopsy’, scanning their insides to reveal the impact of their unhealthy lifestyles.

The overt codes here draw on the Enlightenment discourse of anatomy and dissection, in which the opening up of the body stands for the heroic scientific elucidation of its dark secrets.

But, just as the Enlightenment theatres of dissection played to shock, disgust and fear as much as to noble scientific rationalism, so today’s ‘living autopsies’ find echoes in darker cultural material. For instance, films like Hostel, Captivity and the whole ‘torture porn’ genre provide a stage for the theatrical cutting (or more likely slashing) open of the body and the revelation of what’s within.

These films may seem worlds away from a Department of Health campaign – but, like all the examples mentioned here, they belong to a context in which the body’s interior is increasingly being put on display.  The theme is even extending to the nature-documentary genre, with the UK TV series 'Inside Nature's Giants' opening up animal corpses to look at them anatomically.

© Louise Jolly 2010

Posted in Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense | No Comments »

Hilfiger in China

Monday, June 28th, 2010

In order for advertising to be effective, it must convey the intended message. Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols and their meaning, offers valuable tools for analyzing advertising to uncover strengths or weaknesses of ad campaigns within different cultural contexts. However, since the codes used in this example of fragrance advertising are not dominant codes in the category of lifestyle/perfume in China, there is a disconnect between the codes as they would communicate in the Western and Chinese cultural contexts.

Let’s take a look at a global advertising campaign by Tommy Hilfiger. Hilfiger promotes his cologne using the image of a rugged, handsome man driving a vintage motorcycle alone in the desert. From a Western perspective, this image expresses individuality, independence, freedom, and adventure. The codes inspired by each image, or “sign”, in the advertisement are shown below:

Let’s compare the message being conveyed in both the Western and the Chinese context.

* Motorcycle: Whereas in a Western context a motorcycle represents freedom, adventure, and speed, in a Chinese context it is considered dangerous, noisy, and low status.
* Open Landscape: For Westerners, the open landscape portrays independence and lifestyle enhancement. From the Chinese view, the countryside may be perceived as dirty and dusty.

So, in order to convey the intended message to Chinese male consumers, the following switches from Western to Chinese cultural codes could be used: (Old) Motorcycle to (New) Car/Jeep; Alone to With friends; Speed to Leisure; Rough to Smooth; Freedom to Responsibility; Satisfaction (personal) to Status (acknowledgement).

By using semiotic analysis as a tool, companies can more effectively assess whether their advertising campaigns will be successful or not in different cultural contexts. In addition, for campaigns that have already been run, they can analyze why they were successes or failures in local markets.

© Vladimir Djurovic 2010

Posted in Asia, Clients & Brands, Culture, Global Vectors, Making Sense | No Comments »

IPL’s Cheerleaders

Monday, June 28th, 2010

The stupendous success of IPL demonstrates the transformation of cricket from sport to pure entertainment. Every piece of the IPL mix has contributed to making it a heady cocktail of money, power, sport and glamour on a never-seen-before scale. 

IPL's cheerleaders

Into this mix has been dropped a piece of exotica imported from America, cheer leaders as an additional source of glamour and entertainment. From the moment they arrived in IPL 1, they generated controversy. Their skimpy attire and sexy dance movements, performed live and telecast in real time to millions raised the ire of the culture custodian political parties. There is also controversy around the fact that these are white American girls who have been flown in all the way from the USA, to dance and perform at the IPL matches. The Indian blogosphere is buzzing with views both for and against and every single viewer of IPL has an opinion on them. Simply put, they are a feature of IPL that cannot be ignored.

The level of controversy surrounding the introduction of cheer leaders means that what these girls signify to the average Indian viewer of IPL on TV is controversial. Clearly they do not signal wholesome fun, celebratory enjoyment and good cheer as they do in American basket ball games. Through their attire and sexy dance display, they suggest the insertion of a live version of the Bollywood “Item Number” (cabaret routine) into the game. This blatant insertion of sex to sizzle up the game of cricket in its avatar as entertainment has riled all audiences, from cricket purists and fans to culture guardians. 

What about the future role for cheer leaders in the next IPL seasons? Some predict that cheer leading as a feature will wither away as a passing fad, as they are extraneous to the game. Others wish to build a group of Indian girls as cheer leaders and recruit them through a reality TV show and contest.

If indeed, the financial and marketing might of the IPL succeeds in creating a new occupation for young women – cheer leading, what could cheer leaders really signify? In a modernizing society like urban India, would they be a symbol of empowered women who exercise their personal choice to successfully market themselves for personal gain? Or would they have traded positions from being men’s possessions and slaves to sexual commodities being provided for men’s titillation and pleasure?

© Hamsini Shivakumar 2010

Posted in Asia, Clients & Brands, Culture, Global Vectors, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

The Peace Symbol

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Anti-Nuclear or Peace Sign.  Designed in 1958 and based on the semaphore signals for letters N & D.  Created by Harvard Physics and History of Science professor Gerald Holton it first appeared at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) march from Aldermaston to London in February 1958.  It then spread to the U.S. when an American student who was on the March took a bag of the badges back home.  Blogspot from 2008 celebrating 50th birthday.

Posted in Americas, Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Global Vectors, Making Sense | 2 Comments »

Erotic Capital

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Erotic Capital.  Beautiful people not only get more (romantic and sexual) attention but make more money.  A new concept (in April 2010) to join the lexicon of emotional capital, cultural capital etc.  Derived from the work of Dr Catherine Hakim, a sociologist at the London School of Economics. Applied not just to the world of celebrity but public relations, marketing, television, the law and banking too.  April 2010 newspaper feature from UK.

Posted in Culture, Emergence, Fuzzy Sets, Socioeconomics | No Comments »

The Land of Mothers

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Is Russia really as patriarchal? Some signs from social advertising.

For almost a year Moscow citizens and it’s guests can observe this cute picture in the underground. This is a social advertising aimed at strengthening the institution of family in Russia. It quotes Francis Bacon: ‘Love to motherland begins with the family’. Matrioshka signifies both parts of the quote: it is the obvious sign of  ‘Rusianness’ and has well-known meaning of fertility.

The Land of Mothers

What is interesting here is  the gender profile of the family. The biggest, the central doll is female and there are just 2 male figures, the role of which is unclear. Is the bigger one a husband? Then he is presented in the subordinate position to his wife (significantly smaller, childish shapes, stays on the side). Or a son? In this case she is a single mother.

The picture may be interpreted as a reflection of modern life. Crisis of masculinity is a popular topic in Russia. It is usually explained by the events of 20-th century, including huge loss of male population during wars and repressions, peculiarities of communistic social system and global processes of feminism. The family picture with dominant figure of mother is almost a norm in contemporary Russian culture. 

On the other hand, old historical symbols are used in the picture. The characters are shaped and dressed far from modern standards. They are not Barbie-dolls, they are Russian dolls. This is how Russian people looked two centuries ago. The background reminds a tablecloth in great grandmothers’ kitchen. As a matter of fact, return to local traditions has been an important social trend of the last decade and national symbols have become very popular. In this context, the ad actually says ‘this is the traditional Russian family, how it should be’. Is this an example of how modern views change perception of the past? Or does this advertisement represent archetypal image of the Russian family?

Here are some links about matriarchal traditions and image of Mother in Russia:

http://eng.plakaty.ru/posters?cid=5&full=1&page=6&id=40
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Motherland
http://eng.plakaty.ru/posters?cid=1&id=773
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-66355314.html
http://www.berdyaev.com/skobtsova/veneratio_Bogomater.html

Notes:
Joanna Hubbs “Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture”
Ireneusz Szarycz “Morsels on the Tongue: Evidence of a Pre-Christian Matriarchy in Russian Fairy Tales”

© Maria Papanthymou 2010

Posted in Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence, Europe, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Snake in hand

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

X-ray and infra-red technology revealed, beneath roses held by Queen Elizabeth I in anonymous sixteenth-century painting displayed at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2010 for the first time in 90 years, an earlier depiction of her right hand clutching what appears to be a black snake with blue-green highlights. ;What’s going on here we wonder. Artistic subversion of royal iconography? A Tudor Dan Brown moment of some kind? Clearly an enigma to set the popular semiotics machine in motion.

Snake in hand

Some possible explanations:

• Historian David Starkey identified the serpent as being a symbol of wisdom at that time, and an apparent favourite of Elizabeth’s from the evidence of a discrete green serpents on an orange taffeta dress in another portrait.

• Why then the revision and painting out? The posy replacing the snake may have expressed second thoughts, at the time or later, around the serpent being an ambiguous image also strongly associated in Christian iconography with evil and original sin. 

• Roses, in contrast, would have been an unproblematic icon of the Tudor dynasty, as well as the posy being a conventional female prop in portraiture.  

With Freud and by now a decade or two of graphic online porn between us and the occluded serpent it’s hard to overlook the phallic connotation noted by art history blogs and press coverage of a snake “coiled suggestively around her right hand” (Arifa Akbar in The Independent). But donning our semiotic hats and trying to look at all human beings (including us in our own times and places) as aliens it can be salutary to look at the hand and snake trying to think ‘wisdom’ or ‘evil’ rather than the sense that might strike us first as obvious, natural and universal. 

Imagine a future time when the cultural orthodoxy shares with Jorge Luis Borges this view of our psychoanalytic received wisdom today: “I have read Jung with great interest but with no conviction. At best he was an imaginative, exploratory writer. More than one can say for Freud: such rubbish!” Then we would look at the symbol interpreted as a phallic suggestively uncoiling snake and, with Foucault responding to the classification of animals in Borges’s Chinese Encyclopaedia, wonder at “the exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

© Malcolm Evans 2010

NOTES
Arifa Akbar, “The Virgin Queen, the serpent and the doctored portrait”, The Independent, 5 March 2010, p.3

Posted in Art & Design, Culture, Europe, Fuzzy Sets, Making Sense | 1 Comment »

Double Exposure

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

Middlebrow Enlightenment. Analysis of a Sun Chips print ad from U.S. showing how the ideal American woman is in search of a contemporary middlebrow version of enlightenment characterised by a clear un-anxious head, healthy heart, toned legs, tight abs and pretty toes.  How to "live brightly" according to a media version (Oprah, Eckhart Tolle) characterised here by cultural commentator Joshua Glenn. 2009 Hilobrow blogspot.

Posted in Americas, Categories, Consumer Culture, Culture, Emergence | 1 Comment »

Chinese Encyclopaedia

Saturday, June 26th, 2010

If you gave someone a paragraph to complete, starting with the words “Animals are divided into…” various types of creature might immediately leap to mind – cats, dogs, elephants, male, female, tame, wild, edible, inedible, cold blooded, warm blooded, etc. A further refinement to this exercise might be to specify the number of divisions your contestant has to play with: just 2 (likely answers might include male/female perhaps or wild/domesticated, or vertebrate/invertebrate), 6 (mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, amphibians, insects). And so on. This is an interesting one to try out with young children. Human beings and cultures are always dividing things – animals, objects, people – into groups and sub-groups. The need to segment your market (“Consumers are divided into…”, or product/service offers, occasions, distribution channels) and target your offer to the appropriate segment(s) is a fundamental rule of marketing – just as understanding the time, place and kind of people you were talking to was the basis of classical rhetoric.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote of a Chinese encyclopaedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which animals are divided into:

a.    belonging to the Emperor,
b.    embalmed,
c.    tame,
d.    suckling pigs,
e.    sirens,
f.     fabulous,
g.    stray dogs,
h.    included in the present classification,
i.      frenzied,
j.     innumerable,
k.    drawn with a fine camelhair brush,
l.      etc.,
m.   having just broken the water pitcher,
n.    that from a long way off look like flies.

This is an excellent text for flipping us out of the familiar daze in which the cut on reality our cultures and ideologies present us with seem simply given, natural, true. A great moment of defamiliarisation which gives us a glimpse into culture’s constructedness and relativity. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault describes the effect this passage can have – of shattering “all the familiar landmarks of thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography”, “breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old definitions”, while evoking “the exotic charm of another system of thought” and “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

The passage on animal types comes from Borges’s “Essay on the Analytical Language of John Wilkins”. Wilkins was the author of Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language (1688), an attempt to impose a mathematical certainty and objective scientific transparency on language and writing systems – in effect abolishing the distance and (often) cultural arbitariness in the divides between ‘things’, ‘thoughts’, ‘words’, and ‘characters’ or writing systems. Something akin to the Wilkins view of representation as strictly secondary to a world of concepts, reason and empirical reality became a Western cultural norm lasting well into the Twentieth Century. Borges’s response graphically summarises the turn from this to acknowledging the role of language and culture in producing meaning – and signals the re-emergence of semiotics in academic and cultural life from the 1950s and 60s on.   With the application of semiotics to understanding and guiding the development of brands, the master methodology emerging from this “turn to language” engages with some of its most characteristic cultural expressions – in the new emotional, metaphorical and totemic meanings of contemporary consumer culture.

© Malcolm Evans 2010

NOTES
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Tavistock, 1970, p.xv
J.L. Borges, Selected Nonfictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger, Penguin, 1999

Posted in Americas, Asia, Culture, Fuzzy Sets | No Comments »