Column #19 - What came first: the judgment or the context?

If it’s not the name, is it the jacket? But the name, as it turns out, has Bourdieu, Walton, and Barthes all agreeing it was never really about the jacket. 

One clown is one clown. Two clowns are two clowns. Ten thousand clowns become difficult to criticize without sounding under-read. Is that the new way of fashion? A piece survives long enough, gets photographed enough, cited and archived enough, and eventually, your dislike starts to feel embarrassingly literal. You see a piece, you hate it, then you learn it’s archive Chanel and suddenly you begin approaching it with the caution usually reserved for contemporary art and natural wine. Is this taste? Is this growth? Is this just Bourdieu’s worst nightmare?

The clever case of improved vision

Pierre Bourdieu, the same man who turned “you just think you like that” into a 600-page academic event, had a word for this, and it wasn’t flattering. In “Distinction” (1979), he argued that taste is never innocent, never personal, never the pure, disinterested response Kant spent decades insisting it was. It’s cultural capital doing what cultural capital does: performing. Knowing that a jacket is archivally significant isn’t necessary sensitivity. It’s class reproduction with a press release. The habitus doesn’t encounter the garment. It encounters a signal. Files it accordingly. Feels smug about it later at dinner. Or so he says.

Read also >>> Column #18 - Now you see the boycott, now you don’t…

The philosopher Kendall Walton argued in “Categories of Art” (1970) that what aesthetic properties an object seems to have depends entirely on which category you’re perceiving it within. Same jacket. Different frame. Different object, aesthetically speaking. It's not that the label changes your mind. It’s that the label gives you the correct category, which gives you the correct perception, which means you weren’t wrong before so much as you were uninformed. Have I shocked you? The philosophy department is on your side. 

Barthes, who understood fashion better than almost anyone and enjoyed it approximately not at all, put it most usefully: “It’s not the object but the name that creates desire; it is not the dream but the meaning that sells.” He was describing fashion magazines in 1967. He could have been describing every showroom conversation where someone says, “But do you know what period this is from?” and watches your face rearrange itself. The name doesn’t describe the garment, it just restructures your perception of it. It’s all semiotics. It’s also, less glamourously, how marketing works, and the line between the two is thin and not very well constructed. 

Is knowing neutral?

The distinction that saves this from being entirely bleak is between context and deference. Context is the archive, the history, the argument the piece is making with everything that came before it. Deference is seeing the name and feeling something you didn't feel thirty seconds ago, for no reason you could defend in daylight. One is reading. The other is exactly what Bourdieu was describing, and he was not, to be clear, paying you a compliment.

Read also >>> Column #17 - Are there too many interns in fashion or not enough work?

So: normal to revise your opinion once you know where something's from? Yes. Intellectually defensible? Only if you actually read the thing rather than just clocking the logo. Going to stop happening to perfectly intelligent people in sample sales and friends’ wardrobes and the kind of galleries where the art is also technically a jacket? Not a chance. Taste is a practice. The archive doesn't change the garment. It just tells you what you were looking at. I still wouldn't wear it. But at least now I have sources.