Swipe up for my stola!
I normally love factually replete, behold-my-system-of-the-world books, and my inability to focus for more than a chapter or two at a time on a book has been a disquieting side effect of these times. All I seem to be able to sink into are easy-to-digest books utterly untethered from reality.
I started with celebrity autobiographies: I read Slash by Slash, It's So Easy (And Other Lies) by Duff McKagan and My Appetite for Destruction: Sex, Drugs and Guns'n'Roses by Steven Adler, spent two days thinking about the delightful contrasts between the three books, then sulked for two more because neither Izzy Stradlin nor Axl Rose have released autobiographies.
It was a short and slippery slope from celebrity autobiographies to Judith Krantz, and that's how I found myself rereading Mistral's Daughter one night this past week. I mention this because a book written in 1982 contains a passage that explains the resonance of influencers today:
From the time that she had been a little girl Berry Banning had saved every copy of Vogue and Mode and Bazaar and, recently, Charm and Glamour and Mademoiselle as well, and studied their pages as if they were her one and only prayer book and she were a cloistered nun.
It had never occurred to her that how a woman dressed could be a legitimate expression of the woman’s own personality that depended on her point of view toward life. Fashion to Berry was a law and the happiest of beings were those, like herself, who were rich enough to live under this law, who could dedicate themselves to carrying out every subtle shading of its marvelously inconstant dictates.
Reading that passage shocked me into wondering: I had loved the same magazines in college, because I did love identifying the rules that define something. So why did I stop?
The short answer is that I began tapering when I discovered zines like Bust and Bitch and the World Wide Web, nearly all at the same time. Why struggle to discern and follow the inconsistent edicts some commerce-driven publication pumped out when I could write my own rules by experimenting, learning, editing, iterating?
I still picked up magazines where it was clear that "women" were the general audience -- I loved reading Allure back when supermodels walked the Earth, and the rise of fun shelter titles in the 2000s allowed me to in indulge in pretty, light reading without the residual irritation I felt at the proscriptive "You're doing it WRONG, you frump" approaches many so-called "service" magazines had.
The last women's magazine I regularly read was Blueprint, back in 2006-2008. Recently, I revisited my cache of back issues to see what has held up and what has not. What struck me about the whole body of work was how meticulously and expertly curated it was; Blueprint had a consistent aesthetic, a consistent editorial voice and a consistent idea of who their audience was. You don't get that without actual skilled professionals who were accountable to something greater than their own careers.
This sense of accountability translates into an implicit promise of quality. And that, I think, is why I have never really warmed to influencers on blogs or via Instagram. There's no sense of accountability and the metrics used to confer some sense of impact are Exhibit A in argumentum ad populum. Some folks have argued that influencers' promises of authenticity -- replying to readers, taking alleged behind-the-scenes photos -- is better than the unidirectional dictates of "old media." But who's really arguing that "reading the comments" is up there with "there are consequences if someone screws up?"
It's too easy to conflate accountability -- with its sense of consequences and give-and-take to the other party -- with authenticity. And as anyone who's ever carefully cropped a mess out of a photo knows, "authenticity" is just as much an editorial construct as anything Martha Stewart's ever put together.
We've seen influencers struggling with how to remain relevant when the dream they're selling -- you too can have this pretty life if you swipe up to buy what you need to fulfill "every shading of its marvelously inconstant dictates" -- has been shown as a sham. The rich on Instagram can't hide their privilege any more and it's becoming apparent that sipping the same laxative teas is no guarantee of quarantining in the same Calabasas-style McMansions.
It's been fascinating watching influencers and their followers struggle with the notions of authenticity and accountability over the past month. Privileged people justify acting in selfish and antisocial ways as "I'm doing what's best for my family," thus telling the people from whom they make their living that their families matter less, so shut up and swipe up already.
Celebrities and influencers commodify their lives as aspirational, and that commodification depended on them not acknowledging their pleasure in privilege; it only required them to occasionally acknowledge it, a ritual meant to underscore that necessary component of American-style aspiration, authenticity or "keeping it real." Their lives are fairly unreal, however. All you had to do to realize this is look at them: the hoi polloi rarely looks as well-rested, as well-groomed, as healthy.
These celebrities and influencers remind me, in some aspects, of religious figures. Let's briefly acknowledge glib comparisons between fitness influencers and the Christian saints who mortified their flesh for spiritual purity, then move on: What I'm thinking of are the temple attendants in the Roman empire.
The bargain these attendants made was simple: Agree to these rules, embody these principles, and you shall live extraordinary lives where you are revered by the common people. Vestal virgins -- the women pledged to the temple of the domestic goddess Hestia (of the hearth), a.k.a Vesta -- were not like other women in Roman society. They foreswore married for 30 years (not hard to do when you began service at age 6), their word was unaccountable to anyone else, their very presence conferred legitimacy upon civic and legal goings-on in the Republic.
And they wore clothing that was blatantly aspirational for Roman women: vestal virgins wore the bridal hairstyle known as the vesti crinas, but they were also allowed to wear the stola, a long garment reserved typically for Roman matrons. These women presented as both model bride and model matron, and in turn were allowed extraordinary power in society. Also notable: Because being a vestal virgin was a desirable gig, it was mostly something rich people could set up for their children. Vestal virgins honestly remind me of influencers: Have some money so you have access to opportunity, comply with the dictates of the divinity you serve and your public will see you enjoy things they can't ever expect for themselves.
Christianity eventually wiped out the worship of Roman gods and thus stripped the vestal virgins of their power; they were gone by 394 C.E., by order of the Emperor Flavius Theodosius, one of Rome's Christian emperors. Christianity had been legitimized by the Roman Empire via Emperor Constantine in 313 C.E.; it took less than a century before it had superseded the empire as the dominant social system of law and education. Helping the cause were, of course, forces outside the empire like the Germanic tribes, which were exceedingly good at attacking the very infrastructure that made the Roman empire the empire and exceedingly good at making everyday citizens and subjects all too aware of the resources they lacked.
Perhaps what we're seeing now is the beginning of the end of the vestal virgins of Instagram. It doesn't matter how well you follow the rules when the code you've chosen to serve -- in this case, the idea that one can comply with the inconstant laws of acceptable lifestyles via the right purchases -- is no longer acknowledged by the rule of law or the will of the people.
FURTHER READING
"Will The Coronavirus Be The Tipping Point That Makes People See Influencers As The Small Businesses They Are?" (Buzzfeed, April 3, 2020) -- Tanya Chen and Stephanie McNeal are doing good coverage on the influencer beat for Buzzfeed News, and it's worth following them.
"Reading Judith Krantz in the Age of Donald Trump" (Jezebel, July 2, 2019) -- "Krantz’s books are often dismissed as trash, but as any archeologist will tell you, there are few resources so valuable for reconstructing a historical era as a nicely overflowing dump."
"I’ll Take Manhattan: Judith Krantz, Donald Trump, and the Long, Long 1980s" (Los Angeles Review of Books, July 26, 2018) -- "In retrospect, it’s clear that Krantz was dramatizing a gravely consequential event in the moral history of capitalism: the replacement of one cardinal virtue, ambition, by another, aspiration."
The Shortest History of Europe, by John Hirst -- One of those little factually replete, behold-my-system-of-the-world books, and a fun skim through the larger forces that created and shaped the very idea of "Europe." I am bereft that the installment The Shortest History of England, by James Hawes, appears to have been pulled from the market because Brexit just keeps rewriting what could be a decent stopping point.
AND A RECOMMENDED BINGE-WATCH
I really enjoyed Britannia (streaming on Amazon Prime), for three reasons: The subject matter -- how Roman Britain got going -- is of endless interest; the series has fun performances from Kelly Reilly, Zoe Wanamaker, David Morse and Julian Rhind-Tutt; and it's got a great point of view explaining what motivates people whose sense of knowledge has absolutely nothing to do with Enlightenment-era reasoning or the scientific method. It's gory and gorgeous and escapist. The Guardian review warns you what to expect.
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On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).