Natasha Stagg - Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019

Copyright 2019 by Natasha Stagg

This edition Semiotext(e) 2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Semiotext(e)

PO BOX 629, South Pasadena, CA 91031

www.semiotexte.com

Special thanks to John Ebert and Janique Vigier.

Cover Art: Josephine Pryde, Sorry Not Sorry, 2016.

Design: Hedi El Kholti

ISBN: 978-1-63590-096-5

Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England Printed in the United States of America Sleeveless

Fashion, Image, Media, New York 20112019

Natasha Stagg

semiotext(e)

Contents

Foreword

Since publishing my first novel, Survey s, Ive been placed in the unique position of being asked to think about its implications as they evolve around me. Survey s is a coming-of-age story, but its central themes are jealousy, fame, and statistics, and its release coincided with an explosion of new terms that better define and obfuscate those themes as felt today. The word influencer has a different meaning than it did while I was writing a character that many reviews have named an influencer, for example.

New ways of branding, and of defining branded interactions, are unquestionably informing the ways in which we think. In other words, it is ever more difficult to imagine ourselves the way we once did, before we were made to feel so implicit in advertising.

I started to write these essays and stories upon moving to New York in 2011. They were inspired by my jobs here, mostly, but also by my friends: their jobs, their joblessness in the face of career paths being redefined by digital marketing, their incidental or planned star statuses, and their waning popularity. Ive learned valuable lessons from meeting and interviewing my idols, dating my celebrity crush, getting put on a thousand press lists, slipping in and out of literary and fashion spheres, contributing to publications I care (7)

about, and watching print media devolve. Its fun to talk about certain New York things once being better than they are now, as if I can really claim something like that.

These entriessome fiction, some notare not presented in chronological order, because once I started to organize them, I saw that the perspective I held back then was perhaps more clear-sighted than the one I have today. Right now, I write more advertorial work than anything else, and that means that I participate in a structure that inhibits my own creative writing while informing it. Every day, I must think about advertising strategies based on a quickly changing consumer landscape. I must gauge my own ideas of individuality, persona, and authenticity, while I internally negotiate the monetization of my generation, my identity, my space, myself. I critique fashion and I also work for fashion brands. I write about the processes of promotion and I also write ad copy. Im skeptical of the influencer epidemic and the popularity of my writing puts me at risk of becoming influential. At times, consumerisms close breath feels like fresh air.

And so, the following is a collection of thoughts about fashion, perception, publishing, image-making, gender biases, and reputation, from inside the think tanks about those things. If I look at it in a dystopian way, this might be the last chance I have to thoughtfully speak on these subjects, before I forget them, like a dream, because of their very own projections. Id rather see this book as a personal account of a very strange time, though, and an attempt to identify the invisible strings pulling us in directions we never thought possible.

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Public Relations

Cafeteria

They meet at Cafeteria because the characters in Sex and the City did that. The New York of that era is not the same as the New York of today, but even while the show aired, viewers argued that it wasnt of a real New York. So the collective citythe idea that became known as another main character, which was New York in quotes, or female friendship, or whatever was under your nose the whole timeis as real as anything on TV, and therefore hasnt changed.

The group of friends is two men who have been dating for some time, a woman who has known them each for longer, and a recent transplant to the city who met the other three two weeks agoa guy each member of the group would like to fuck.

The week is New York Fashion Week Fall 2012, which happens in icy February but people are wearing the Spring collections. Its early but everyone orders tequila cocktails. The menu boasts that Cafeteria is a haven for the stars of New York nightlife, the ones who still get name checked in magazine stories, effusively described as legendary, the original versions of the new somethings.

In the days of interview expense accounts, said one of the friends, a journalist would take a club kid out all day and get trashed, making sure the story only described how magnetic and charismatic this person wasthe world was her oyster type things.

But the writer got something out of this, too. The scam was that the parties were cooler because they were getting written up, while the (11)

writers were getting to go to the coolest parties because they had the power to make them so.

That was when parties were cool.

Parties are still cool, said the recent transplant. I went to a cool one last night. Im still kind of fucked up from it, oh my god.

Getting fucked up is cool, said the woman.

Never wont be, will it?

I can see it going out of style.

I was sitting at an adjacent table, eavesdropping and looking at my laptop. I caught a few names and ended up finding all of them. The woman was a curator, the two men music producers, and the younger man worked at a second-hand store. They talked about how none of them ever wanted to be famous, how they were disappointed by a recent collaboration between an artist famous for critiquing capitalist values and Topshop, and how broke they all were.

I didnt know of that artist or which lower-rung nightlife stars they were avoiding eye contact with in the booth across the restaurant, or whether, when they said interview expense, accounts theyd meant the magazine, Interview. In the days of interview accounts, though, they said, everything could be expensed, including helicopters to the Hamptons. I guessed that every single one of them wanted to be stars, with the sky as the limit.

I saved all of their information and waited until the next day to email one of them, starting with the curator. I know now that I was correct and that I am closer to all of them for it. I understand that the best thing to be in New York is watched and heard, and that if those chats around cosmos in the TV show werent written for an audience, they wouldnt be so optimistic. No character was doing so well that the city could feel like a supportive friend to her. You cant (12)

move here and expect to be able to live the way the locals do, relaxing into their adult lives, frequenting their favorite Manhattan haunts, maintaining deep-rooted friendships. Instead, the best you can hope for is to make friends who make time for you, and who would not disagree when you publicized your closeness. Would they put you on a guest list? Depends.

The curator was kind and opened up to me quickly. She couldnt wait to meet me and to introduce me to the artists she worked with.

She had been to the part of New Jersey where my family was from because shed been a last minute date to a wedding there. She loved it, she said.

The parties in New York, I told the group, they could still be good, as long as theyre sponsored well. Yes, they said, and who cares about a little advertising? They are my friends now. I am their publicist.