The synergising of two industries that make stuff that no one needs, yet thanks to their ceaseless advertising and branding saturation everyone somehow desperately wants.
By Francis Nicholson
Fashion and Tech industries do a have a lot in common in way they successful create false needs, wants and desires in the citizenry. All so Joe Public just mindlessly and continuously buys more and more useless shit at the price of destroying our earth and undermining our personal sense of worth and value.
The fact that these industries partner and cross synergise makes sense. This way they can compliment each other in achieving their solitary goal: to make more money, whilst pretending to add value to people’s lives.
That was especially true of the major players in each industry. With Apple strengthening its ties to the fashion world at large, LVMH’s Tag Heuer teaming up with Intel and Google to put out a luxury smartwatch, and Facebook-owned Instagram hiring Eva Chen as its first head of fashion partnerships. Clearly, we have a lot to look forward to in 2016 as these industries gear up and find effective ways to for us consumers to justify wasting our money.
The challenge every multinational corporation has is how to get people to want things they don’t need or feel they need things that they don’t want. Companies like Apple and clothing brands create this on two levels of planned obsolescence. You know the thing when your washing machine breaks down after few years and that breakdown has been planned and built into the production so you’re forced to go out a buy a new one.
This is big in the tech industry and the same with clothing manufacturers. Ensuring clothes eventually but unnecessarily fall apart and that gadgets eventually malfunction is all part of the numbers game. It’s just subtler, and I think even more insidious form of planned obsolescence is created in the consumers mind. Last year’s Lacoste T-shirt is made obsolete by this year’s being made slightly different. Last year’s spring fashion is obsolete thanks to this winter’s new range. The iPhone 5 is made obsolete by the amazing new feature of the iPhone 6 and so on. Like Gillette knows in 2023 there will be 12 blades and detachable vibrating butt plugs on all razors, so to do these fashion and tech companies when it comes to the hamster wheel to ensure perpetual and unquestioned robotic consumption. The cost of making people think they need things they don’t affects people’s mental and emotional health and causes none of these sociopathic conglomerates to even blink an eye. Then environmental costs of making all these useless garments (80 billion a year get produced annually) and unneeded tech is greenwashed and given token consideration.
Apple reveals its new Apple Watch and is featured in a 12 page spread in the fashion magazine, Vogue, as if everything in the world is dandy and that somehow getting the latest useless gadget that for the previous 50, 000 years humans managed without, is a really important thing. This creates the massive illusion that the world isn’t being fucked and that people aren’t caught in ceaseless suffering and poverty—thanks to companies like Apple and major fashion labels. Let’s not be seduced, hypnotised and wooed by these kinds of industries. Let’s step back and take stock of what matters, what counts and what’s really important, of which fashion shows and Apple billions in profit do not.
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