My Body the Billboard
by
Ian Johnston
[This document is in the public domain,
released June 1998]
Okay,
here’s a scenario. You get a letter from a multimillion dollar multinational
retail company selling beer and clothes. They want to use your home and your
car to advertise their products by displaying their name, logo, and slogan
prominently where people passing by can see them clearly. What would you do? My
guess is that you would first ask them how much they were willing to pay.
Suppose they replied as follows: “We don’t pay for this service. In fact you
pay us for the cost of producing the advertising material and a whole lot more.”
I suspect that you would tell them to get lost and stay away until they were
ready to talk about some serious money coming your way.
This
behaviour seems entirely appropriate, given the circumstances. Why should you
serve the multinational’s commercial interests without receiving payment, let
alone having to pay handsomely for the service you provide them? Well, if this is
the case, then it’s all the more curious that so many people are perfectly
willing to shell out lots of money to purchase clothes that are little more
than large public advertisements for a particular company. Any stroll through a
mall or a college campus reveals just how much people think it is cool and
stylish to turn themselves into, in effect, posters advertising clothing lines,
beer, shoes, resorts, cars, stereos, sports teams, or whatever. And in many
cases, there is no particular financial saving to be had for such promotion. In
fact, the authentic display clothes are often much more expensive than
non-brand-name goods of the same quality. The custom is so common that when I
shop at the local Thrift store for my spring wardrobe, I have real trouble
finding any tee shirts or sweat shirts that don’t carry some commercial label
prominently on display.
I
know I’m old fashioned, but I find this trend distinctly odd. It’s true that
people have always liked in their clothing or accessories to declare their
connection to something outside themselves. Things like kilts, old school ties,
blazers with crests, pullovers with special designs, special pins, rings, hats
with badges, and so on have been around for ever. Somewhere in a cupboard I have stowed an old baseball
jacket indicating the name of the school team and my participation in the
semi-finals of a softball tournament in 1964. And we are all familiar with
religious icons, like crucifixes or Stars of David, on a necklace or a lapel.
These things announced our connection to something outside ourselves, our sense
of a shared community of interest, experience, or belief. We wore them for all
sorts of reasons--they declared something we had achieved or something we
believed or some institution to which we had given and perhaps still gave a
certain allegiance. What did not seem particularly common was to carry such a
sign if one was not entitled to it. So the presence of the sign told us
something of the person wearing it.
That
traditional body signage seems largely to have disappeared. Well, many of the
old symbols and names are still around, of course, but they are part of the
commercial range of options. Seeing someone in a Harvard or Oxford sweatshirt
or a kilt or a military tie now communicates nothing at all significant about
that person’s life other than the personal choice of a particular consumer.
Religious signs are still evocative, to be sure, but are far less common than
they used to be. Why should this be? I suspect one reason may be that we have
lost a sense of significant connection to the various things indicated by such
signs. Proclaiming our high school or university or our athletic team or our
community has a much lower priority nowadays, in part because we live such
rapidly changing lives in a society marked by constant motion that the
stability essential to confer significance on such signs has largely gone.
But
we still must attach ourselves to something. Lacking the conviction that the
traditional things matter, we turn to the last resort of the modern world: the
market. Here there is a vast array of options, all equally meaningless in terms
of traditional values, all equally important in identifying the one thing left
to us for declaring our identity publicly, our fashion sense and disposable
income. The market naturally manipulates the labels, making sure we keep
purchasing what will most quickly declare us excellent consumers. If this year
a Chicago Bulls jacket or Air Jordan shoes are so popular that we are prepared
to spend our way into a trendy identity, then next year there will be something
else. People will, of course, want them, because they will be massaged by
constant advertising (which accounts for the exorbitant pricing, according to
which, for example, Michael Jordan earns more from endorsing Nike than the
entire payroll of the factory which makes the shoes which bear his name). Don’t
resist the urge, now; just do it.
It’s
a sign of the times, I guess. Lacking a sufficiently vigorous sense of a
traditional commitment to faith, community, family, and country, we define
ourselves in terms of our allegiance to market labels. Maybe it’s a good thing.
After all, people used to fight each other over flags and religious symbols.
And there are still pitched battles in some places in Europe over soccer
colours. Except for exceptionally aggressive school children ready to kill for
a new pair of shoes, however, who is going to fight a fellow citizen over a BUM
shirt, a tee shirt with a Calvin Klein logo, or a New York Yankees hat? Since
the signs indicate nothing personal or passionate, they generate no passionate
response.
All
that may be true, but there’s still something rather sad about it. The choices
may be colourful and varied, but the sense that in our public presentation of
ourselves to the world our major concern has become the appropriate commercial
flavour of the week, that all we can imagine as a communal image of ourselves
is what the market makes available at a stiff price, this strikes me as a
significant loss. I’d feel a whole lot better if people would opt for original
art designs on their clothes or even something funny or marginally interesting.
That clearly is too much to hope for.
Maybe
the scenario I started with is wrong. Perhaps it is the case that we are being
prepared slowly for the day when we will willingly pay to have these labels
which now decorate our bodies also cover our homes, cars, baby carriages, and
what not. It is a great mistake to underestimate the power of the market. Given
that people have already handed so much over to the service of that company
which will soon be knocking at the door, it is perhaps rash to predict that
people will not be eager to fork over big money to turn their homes and their
possessions into what they themselves have already become, commercial
billboards.