Cerulean Blue
Mutti and I rented the movie "The Devil Wears Prada" this weekend. We enjoyed it. If you are not familar with the movie, Merly Streep is Miranda Priestly, editor of Runway (think Vogue) magazine, and Anne Hathaway is her newly hired assistant, Andy Sachs, who initially has little knowledge of or sympathy for the world of high fashion. One of the more interesting quotes from the movie goes as follows:
Miranda Priestly: [Miranda and some assistants are deciding between two similar belts for an outfit. Andy snickers because she thinks they look exactly the same] Something funny?
Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y'know, it's just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y'know, I'm still learning about all this stuff.
Miranda Priestly: This... “stuff”? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blindly unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff”.
This is interesting in the fashion context, but it also makes me wonder in a broader sense about the unknown background behind virtually everthing we have available as consumers in this world, be it clothes, automobiles, food, or even entertainment. I don't see conspiracy here, just a lot of history I was unaware of. Does it matter?
posted by Vatti @ 10:27 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I think it matters quite a lot. The exercise in tracing a garment's origins illustrated by Miranda's exchange with Andy can be done with any consumer item. I distincly recall one day looking at a can of tuna in the grocery store and trying to count up how many people it took to get that product to the store:
People to build boats
People to fish
people to process fish
People to package it
and people to make the packaging
People to design the lable
People to get the lable on the can
People to build trucks/trains
and People to load the tuna on to them
People to trasport it
People to chose to sell it in their store
People to put it on the shelf.
It really is a complicated mess, and it gets even worse when you consider the ethics of all this. Most of us would rather not think about how our consumer choices stack up ethically because there is likely an uncomfortable truth behind nearly everything we buy. This is one of the few reasons why I would feel comfortable paying a lot of money for a 'luxury' item--the real luxury is not the quality or the status--the luxury is knowing that it wasn't made by children, didn't involve exploitation of the weak, and more likely provides the good's produces with a living wage.
By the way, I would really like to read the book the movie was based on. I could tell that they were trying to show Andy going from original-good-self to new-evil-self, but I think that much was poorly done. I'd like to see if the book's author was able to carry it off.
Interesting.
One of my favorite stories as a child was "The Little Red Hen". In retrospect, I liked the idea of vertical diversification that the hen engaged in. How many of us anymore eat the bread we baked from flour we ground from grain we grew?
i remember having a conversation with one of my friends like that in high school. he had a hard time believing that the trends that people follow started on runways.
I was helping a friend pack up her kitchen in preparation for moving and learned that she saw this movie FIVE times in the theater! She also got and read the book. This is a woman with a PhD in pyschology as well as a PhD in sociology. She said that from her training in sociology, she was confident that the story had to have been written by someone who had actually experienced what went on--in her mind, no one would have had the imagination to have made up such a story. She learned that it is, in fact, based on a true story. Hollywood made "minor" changes: in real life, Andy did not live with her boyfriend nor did she sleep with the seductive designer. I had begun to wonder if Art and I were taking such an interest in this movie because we had the time or if it really was so worthy of discussion. Seems my friend would vote "worthy!"
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