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In sorting through my extremely large stack of things I want to scan today, I came across the Anthropologie holiday catalogue. The chain is a spin-off of Urban Outfitters, making it a "red state" enterprise, since the company's big-wigs donated primarily to the Republican cause. As it turns out, those donations were tiny -- less than $5000 total, according to the chart I read -- making the label seem overblown, especially compared to other "red state" concerns like Wal-Mart and Dell. This discovery doesn't change my feelings about Anthropologie, though. The company still disturbs me deeply.
The people going and out of Anthropologie retail outlets are bad enough. But it's the company's mail-order catalogue that really makes my skin crawl. It contains page after page of images designed to conjure up nostalgia for a past that never really existed, fleshed out with details worthy of soft-core pornography. Indeed, you could easily argue that Anthropologie markets nostalgia as pornography.
I suppose you could also make an argument for the store's catalogues on this basis. There's something intriguing about an image in which a woman's clothing and the furniture surrounding her generate a degree of salaciousness that is typically found only when private parts on display. Every time I look through one I think of John Berger's Ways of Seeing. What's naked in Anthropolgie catalogues are not the sultrily sullen women who grace their pages but the nexus of sex and property itself. "Buy this outfit," a typical spread says, "and you can have the body inside it."
As distressing as the regular Anthropologie catalogues are, though, the holiday one I'd set aside to scan is unparalleled in its creepiness. In addition to the usual tight-lipped women, it features children arrayed with the same coldness as pillows and drapes. Many of the "family" images in the catalogue also have festive captions. Take this one, for example:
That's right, this cheery picture is accompanied by the phrase, "visions of sugarplums." The mind reels.
Who, precisely, is having these visions? The woman, who holds the boy with the same affection she extends to the various machines she uses at her gym? The man, whose gaze comes from above the frame with the full weight of patriarchy? The boy, who looks as happy as the latest victim of extraordinary rendition? Or is it the target market for the Anthropologie catalogue that is given the gift of sugary sight, masking the bitterness of the tableau with simulacral nostalgia?
To be fair, I must admit that, for all the fury that images like this one provoke in me, they have a curious power. Maybe the answer is to regard them the same way one would a Douglas Sirk melodrama, where the pleasures of plot are subtended by a menace that cannot be contained by any narrative cage. Although it is unlikely that the photographer intended this photo to function as a critique of the catalogue, that possibility is worth exploring. And, even if the photographer didn't have any such intention, the photographs seem to have an agency of their own. Someone or something is hard at work deconstructing the upper-middle-class American dream.
The people going and out of Anthropologie retail outlets are bad enough. But it's the company's mail-order catalogue that really makes my skin crawl. It contains page after page of images designed to conjure up nostalgia for a past that never really existed, fleshed out with details worthy of soft-core pornography. Indeed, you could easily argue that Anthropologie markets nostalgia as pornography.
I suppose you could also make an argument for the store's catalogues on this basis. There's something intriguing about an image in which a woman's clothing and the furniture surrounding her generate a degree of salaciousness that is typically found only when private parts on display. Every time I look through one I think of John Berger's Ways of Seeing. What's naked in Anthropolgie catalogues are not the sultrily sullen women who grace their pages but the nexus of sex and property itself. "Buy this outfit," a typical spread says, "and you can have the body inside it."
As distressing as the regular Anthropologie catalogues are, though, the holiday one I'd set aside to scan is unparalleled in its creepiness. In addition to the usual tight-lipped women, it features children arrayed with the same coldness as pillows and drapes. Many of the "family" images in the catalogue also have festive captions. Take this one, for example:
That's right, this cheery picture is accompanied by the phrase, "visions of sugarplums." The mind reels. Who, precisely, is having these visions? The woman, who holds the boy with the same affection she extends to the various machines she uses at her gym? The man, whose gaze comes from above the frame with the full weight of patriarchy? The boy, who looks as happy as the latest victim of extraordinary rendition? Or is it the target market for the Anthropologie catalogue that is given the gift of sugary sight, masking the bitterness of the tableau with simulacral nostalgia?
To be fair, I must admit that, for all the fury that images like this one provoke in me, they have a curious power. Maybe the answer is to regard them the same way one would a Douglas Sirk melodrama, where the pleasures of plot are subtended by a menace that cannot be contained by any narrative cage. Although it is unlikely that the photographer intended this photo to function as a critique of the catalogue, that possibility is worth exploring. And, even if the photographer didn't have any such intention, the photographs seem to have an agency of their own. Someone or something is hard at work deconstructing the upper-middle-class American dream.
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the images they use tend to be rural upper class, not in the american sense, but in a 'effortless' aristocratic way, where things don't necessarily look expensive, but you still have to be rich to have them. lots of girls in floaty dresses and wellington boots and such
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the link is not as 'good' as the catalogue, but i expect you can get the general drift.
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my vanity knows no bounds, but luckily, apart from the camera shake due to low light and my hatred of flash, my friend david is a good photographer, and he has a good strike rate. but i still have to have veto.
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Hmmm....
As a sibling shot, I think it's fab. It doesn't, however, induce me to buy any clothes if that's its purpose.
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Re: Hmmm....
But also bear in mind that I'm a bit biased because photographs of this type (composition-wise) are exactly the sort I like and hang on my wall. I get in no end of arguments with my MIL because she's of the "everyone must stop what they are doing, look up at the the camera and smile" school of photography. Jet always rebels, I back him up, and all those photos end up getting thrown in a box by me because they don't interest me because, as I tell her, that's not what any of us look like. Yes, they are good representations of how we all looked age-wise, appearance-wise, etc.-wise in that space in time, but they are completely personality-less. I'm more a fan of the photo that's actually representative of what's going on at the time which, to me, the above-type of photo captures perfectly. You can tell by that kid's clenched fist that the pre-holiday-with-relatives-stress-induced-arguments are going to flare right up again after the photo is done and to me, that's fabulous.
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::laughing:: Blame the chat on my finally being well rested.
:) I'll be sure to post more the next time a thought flits through my brain!
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Re: Hmmm....
What really gets me riled up, though, is the way that this image is being deployed. Whether it works or not -- for you it apparently doesn't -- the purpose of the image is to get people to buy the items worn in it. Catalogues typically have details that aren't for sale, scene-setting ones meant to anchor the for-sale items in a context that elevates them above the status of mere commodities. That's how advertising works, for the most part.
My issue is not with how advertising works -- I'm susceptible to it as much as the next person -- but how the mode of advertising in Anthropologie catalogues works. I realize that the image I wrote about is more complex than I made it sound. I was going for the polemical approach. But I still hold that, taken together with the caption and other pages in that same catalogue, that image is targeted at people who are supposed to respond to it with the desire to buy one or more of the items represented. And that, in turn, suggests that there are people out there whose consumer desire will be turned on by these "visions of sugarplums."
Anyway, I'm writing a follow-up entry. Thanks so much for the thoughtful responses!
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Re: Hmmm....
Yeah, I was thinking later that my comments were probably way off the mark as far as the context of your post went because I've never seen an Anthropologie catalog, wasn't seeing this photo in the context of a *catalog* and instead only seeing it as a stand alone 'family photo', etc. etc.
As I said, personally I can't see what I would be compelled to buy in that photo unless, as you brushed upon, I *would* be buying for nostalgia only... that kid looks remarkably like my brother in all the photos of him that age so I can *barely*, if I stretch, see myself thinking "ooooooohhhhhh! If I buy Jet this shirt and tie he can look just like Kenny did in all the old family photos". (er, minus of course the crew cut.)
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Re: Hmmm....
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Can't wait to read it!
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See this is what comes of making art. I should have listened to my grandma.
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oooooooooooh. I never even mentally went this route. I heard "holiday", saw the photo, thought "that indeed looks like the holidays" and on and on from there. Now I see it as a *pre-* shoot shot, last minute adjustments, before they all turn and smile and the *real* photo gets taken.
Gah. Now all day I'm going to be looking at this photo in one of those "do you see two men or a vase" kind of ways!
(Still not tempted to buy any of the clothes. However, I went to their site due to this post and they *did* tempt me with a pair of pants, if they wouldn't have been $138!)
::amused::
And what was her advice?
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"$138 sweater and *still* no one is smiling"
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she may also have a spot on her right side.
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