Fashion and Propaganda

original creation date: 1 September 2008 [labour day]

fashion is a fashionable idea in our society (pun intended) and has been so in most every other culture in the world as a form of sociological intra- and inter-communication, a visual rhetoric about the society's aura, its projections in relations to how people should look and what is considered desirable and essential in a person of either sex.

as such, fashion has an increasingly important and powerful motivation in cultural assimilation, visual rhetoric and communication, and gives a unique view into a society's collective cultural psyche.



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a religion with a state. how crazy is this idea?
christianity has one.
judaism has one.
islam has unofficially several. officially, i'm not sure, but probably several as well.

christianity... the thing about catholicism and hierarchical arrangements in society based on that kind of rank is that they are a bit... dangerous. and yet, they are also inevitable societal structures. it is basically a military arrangement. the military feeds on fear; religious states feed on intolerance and ignorance, and sometimes faith. government feeds on both, and is thus the most efficient.

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the only sort of sad thing about childhood is that since emotions are so raw and intense the bad memories are that much worse. so if you have a rough childhood, you're basically scarred for life somehow, and life depends on whether you can successfully get past it or are trapped by it. on the other hand if you have a happy childhood, you may be a perfectly well-adjusted individual as an adult but you'll also have what people call chronic dissatisfaction, never having really experienced the 'real world' in all its rawness and base. individuals who have known pain, real pain, have a totally different, more intense, more primitive view of life than those who have not. people that have not known pain are generally more beautiful, more social, and appear more successful and happy. yet some lead miserable lives, or so they would have us believe--for since they know not pain, their lives are bogged down with minor worries and they become depressed for mostly silly reasons, and do not realise what a beautiful life they have and how blessed they are that they have never known real pain.

this is also a reason people are keen on fashion as a method for visual rhetoric. because everything you wear symbolises something, those who have never known pain indulge in beautiful clothing, while the truly miserable, those in real pain, have no time or desire to deal with anything but their pain. only if the pain disappears do they wake up into the world of the superficial, the world of society, the so-called 'real world' which is actually nothing but a fiction. and when entering or re-entering pain, human beings lose all these things and become literally animals, monkeys that will stop at nothing to secure their own survival above all else. this is why the romans loved the coliseum so much--they gave humans a glimpse of the primitive world at a safely controlled distance; they reminded them of what they were avoiding and how lucky they were to live in the roman empire as roman citizens, as a civilised people, as a lawful people. and thus the beautiful people of the roman empire, and of the greek city-states, and of countless other civilizations from ashanti to zulus, chinese and korean and thai and aboriginal and maya and aztec and inca and inuit and the whites and blacks and everything in between and the entire beautiful human race, turned to fashion to explain their lives to each other.

what symbolises a dress? perhaps beauty, and femininity, and mystery. different dresses will symbolise different things, down to the minutest detail. the more intricate and beautiful, the more value is attached, and the more expensive the item becomes, either in financial or in socio-political importance. and people must be able to read--to be fashion-literate. the more a culture advertises its fashion, the more successful it becomes in voluntary assimilation.

obviously the advertisement must actually advertise something as opposed to propagandise it. the differences are very subtle, but they do exist. advertisement is, by definition, always convincing, while propaganda, by definition, is not. that is, when something is advertised, the cultural processes behind the impetus to communicate are always different than those in propaganda. in addition, when something is said to be "advertised", it is meant that not only are people getting paid to propagandise, but that some people are paying to be informed about the issue or product: they are paying for the privilege of being propagandised to. therefore, the propaganda becomes a bona-fide advertisement: if an advertisement does not successfully convince people, it is not an advertisement--it is propaganda. how people view the world is coloured by this very difference, because one person's propaganda is another's advertisement. in the end, they are really just beliefs about the perfect state of an imaginary world of social constructs created by the society for people to communicate visually and for beautiful people to pass time talking about.

is an ad of a beautiful blonde businesswoman with a fendi or vuitton bag in china not a form of cultural propaganda and visual rhetoric? it symbolises capitalist culture, which values beauty and conformity above all else. do chinese and russian portraits of workers in the fields qualify as advertisements, or are they merely propaganda? communism/statism did manage to raise trillions of dollars, but the thing being sold was merely an idea, like christianity or islam, like scientology or the culture of work, like italian renaissance literature or economics, like capitalism and feudalism. on the other hand, the blonde businesswoman is trying to sell one thing, and imparting the other for free as an externality, and whether it is positive or negative depends on individual perspective. you could say capitalism basically subsidises cultural meme export, and the importing nations must deal with it as a single package when considering its importation.