I'm nostalgic for things that happened yesterday
In other T-shirt annoyance news, I'm sick of brand new T-shirts advertising products from the 80s: Nintendo, Thundercats, Strawberry Shortcake, Tab. It's a double layer of capitalist branding and consumer need-creation, a corporation slurping up the backwash from the marketing done by an unrelated corporation 20 years ago. I can't decide what's worse, the cynicism of the Target or Gadzooks in selling the shirts and milking our too-precious twentysomething nostalgia, or my generation's uncritical purchasing of said products -- i.e., the demonstration that the corporate cynicism was literally right on the money. Why should my generation choose to define itself in terms of cheap mass-marketed ephemera? It was terrible the first time around and we ate it up because we were six years old. How are we proud that our formative experiences were of disposable yuppie crap, some company contracting out the production of meaning and memories to the lowest bidder and then marketing it to us as our childhood? Why are we not outraged about that? Why, instead, do we happily buy it all over again twenty years later when we ought to have developed the critical capacity to see through it?!
What does it mean to advertise a brand that no longer exists? It means that the brand has taken on a life of its own. We're now well beyond the corporation as legal person; we've arrived at the brand as cultural person. More than most historical figures, the story and significance of Atari lives on in the hearts and minds of America's youth.
Picking up a falling-apart T-shirt with a defunct brand from Goodwill for fifty cents was an ironic statement (however limited) on the transience of popular culture. For Abercrombie and Fitch to take a brand-new T-shirt, beat the crap out of it using pumice gotten by destroying a mountain, reprint an obsolete logo on it and sell it for twenty bucks to people who have no critical eye is a twisted and retwisted symbol of the way we live now. Nothing means anything. Fake is the new real.
Let's not forget the classed and raced aspect of these things: you're advertising your lifelong membership in middle-class white America. If you grew up outside white middle-class America, your experience of these things would have been of not being able to afford them and not belonging to the culture they were selling.
Yes, I grew up with Get In Shape Girl!, an Easy Bake Oven and Shrinky-Dinks. But I am not proud of that. I have no desire to literally advertise that as a badge of pride, to laud the corporate genesis of the experience of my childhood by giving money to another corporation who's iteratively generating yet more profit from the fact that my lived experience was already a corporate cash-in from the moment I was conceived.
What does it mean to advertise a brand that no longer exists? It means that the brand has taken on a life of its own. We're now well beyond the corporation as legal person; we've arrived at the brand as cultural person. More than most historical figures, the story and significance of Atari lives on in the hearts and minds of America's youth.
Picking up a falling-apart T-shirt with a defunct brand from Goodwill for fifty cents was an ironic statement (however limited) on the transience of popular culture. For Abercrombie and Fitch to take a brand-new T-shirt, beat the crap out of it using pumice gotten by destroying a mountain, reprint an obsolete logo on it and sell it for twenty bucks to people who have no critical eye is a twisted and retwisted symbol of the way we live now. Nothing means anything. Fake is the new real.
Let's not forget the classed and raced aspect of these things: you're advertising your lifelong membership in middle-class white America. If you grew up outside white middle-class America, your experience of these things would have been of not being able to afford them and not belonging to the culture they were selling.
Yes, I grew up with Get In Shape Girl!, an Easy Bake Oven and Shrinky-Dinks. But I am not proud of that. I have no desire to literally advertise that as a badge of pride, to laud the corporate genesis of the experience of my childhood by giving money to another corporation who's iteratively generating yet more profit from the fact that my lived experience was already a corporate cash-in from the moment I was conceived.