Mercedes Bunz

When I finally reached the office this morning, Leon Bailey Green’s post about fashion on the eConsultancy blog attacted me from my Google reader and made me think. His text about “The blurring of online fashion retail” concentrates some fact about editorial and promotional content mixing more than ever as fashion retailers publish their own magazines, have a blog or pay writers to create some content around their brands. I recently had a similar discussion with Edmund Roussel of Telegraph.co.uk as his site also goes into that direction. Now Leon wrote about the same:

“The strongest examples of blurring we have seen are; ASOS with its own print magazine, News International and Bauer Media entering the world of retail, with Brand Alley and Cocosa respectively, and Grazia which launched a collection of accessories through a range of fashion stores.”

I don’t even have to look that far. Back in Berlin where I just flew in from this morning, some of my best friends make a living of that, and we had discussed the issue already over different Sunday brunches.

Fashion shootings have been paid for a long time by product placement, and the line has been blurred for quite a while. No, you can’t blame this shift on the retailers. I remember very well the Sunday I flipped with my photographer friend Gene through ID magazine and he taught me to spot the product placements. There wasn’t one photo shooting without it. Yes, the mixing of editorial content and promotion has a not so much talked about history in journalism, too.

Here you can say we shouldn’t worry so much about fashion, as it is only the softer side of journalism. However, every morning when I get up fashion is at least partly about who I choose to be instead of being told who I am, so it is as much a personal as a political matter. Me at least, I take what it is very serious, and not only in terms of brands.

Anyway, I am very sure that the blurring of editorial content and promotion is something that will pretty soon move beyond fashion and affect journalism in general. It will happen to all editorial content, and maybe it will happen to all PR, too.

So a couple of questions woke me up as they started to talk lively across each other.

Isn’t public relations becoming smarter and smarter? Isn’t there a reason to prefer charismatic, good paid PR content to sloppily done, uninformed badly paid journalism? Mad Men, anyone? However, if you give into that, don’t you give in to the power of money streams and economy, an economy who is the new politics?

This is exactly why I would say with blurring the lines between promotion and editorial content, fashion is doing much more. Its change is a trace of a deeper transformation of society.

I was thinking about it this morning while taking the red eye morning flight back from Berlin to London, when I denied the horrible Lufthansa sandwich and bit instead in their wonderful richness of papers. The Financial Times, the German FAZ, and the International Herald Tribune, which I always appreciate most. Suddenly I it hit me like a blitz, and I knew that we needed to bring back the economical perspective that my most beloved economist Walter Eucken was focussing on: Economy needs to be discussed again as a political issue, and not as fate like we did with the actual financial crisis. We know that economy is never simply there but made; we do need so much more reporting on economical relations, so much more reporting about how political decisions shape or fail to shape economical opportunities.

I quickly wrote it down in my black small notebook, and thanks to the plane flying very calmly above the clouds the Stabilo I used nearly didn’t wobble. When I read the eConsultancy blog, I decided that the fact that superb editorial content is financed by retailers, is telling us a bigger story. It is telling us about an economical shift. It is re-formulating what alternative projects are about, and alternative projects were always badly needed by all creative industries as they live from new creations.

So here is the thing. Up till now, independent production always had one problem. It couldn’t became successful without tearing itself apart asking: Is this a sell out? And are we being bought? A lot of time it was. Sometimes it was just tearing itself apart.

However, now I am not sure anymore if this is still the right question. Maybe the problem of today’s projects isn’t about being sold out. What if the question that has to be asked today is different? What if we have to ask: How can we afford to realise that? How can we make it happen? And if we make it happen, is the line not blurred in a wonderful way?

To be continued…

PS: If you want an example what doesn’t work out, have a look here. Google shows how the lines are not blurred but stabbing each other as fashion gets killed by a horrible presentation/appropriation.

This is the reason I went to the Guardian. If you are interested in what is going on in journalism, read it. It is Alan Rusbridger’s recent lecture “Does journalism exist?” (accompanied by a video podcast). In it, the editor of the Guardian covers new forms like linked reporting and layer reporting, paywalls, business models, and sketches where we could go from here.

As we all know there is a lot of change going on. In the lecture, Alan takes all this into account uncovering that there are new chances, too. This isn’t the downturn of journalism. The industry of journalism is changing, however journalism won’t just survive. There are new fields waiting to be discovered out there. To put it with the German journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, we need a new “poetry of curiosity” in journalism. And on the way, we are going to take this along…

“… journalistic virtues – courage, campaigning, toughness, compassion, humour, irreverence; a serious engagement with serious things; a sense of fairness; an eye for injustice; a passion for explaining; knowing how to achieve impact; a connection with readers.”

Yes.

A couple of days ago, Kate Moss said in an interview that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels is her motto, and I posted the sentence right away on Facebook. I found it beautiful in its own way as it is provocative; pointing precisely to the inner logic of today’s politics of the body.

When the furor of Kate Moss saying that how can she reached Germany, a couple of my friends got back at me asking if I really think posting that was a good idea, because it was always a motto anorectic girls cling on to. However, I think I like the sentence exactly for that reason. It is a dangerous sentence because it is interwoven with this subject. It makes us think about the way we live and understand life. That’s why I like it. And that’s why I always loved Kate Moss. Apart from being beautiful, the way she takes live makes me think.

Yes, there are anorectic people out there, and I had one anorectic among my friends and another one among my acquaintances. It is a horrible disease leaving you and anybody else around totally helpless. A person who is actually clear in his/her head, destroys herself/himself in front of your eyes and is actually willing to starve to death. 20 per cent of anorectic people die. They rather die than let loose the only control about the world they think they have.

So let’s face it, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels first of all describes a certain kind of power you feel when you overcome the inner self, despite of some people who think we shouldn’t talk about it. No. We should talk about it. More as there is a thin line between overcoming and destroying. Being on a diet can be fun, that’s why it is so dangerous.

Now, personally I think you should decide what you want to look like and then go with it. First of all, because a lot of bodies don’t look good when the person that wears it is thin. Secondly, it can be a subversive decision not to count calories and watch the fat and sugar.

That was the other thing I liked about the sentence. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels reveals that Kate Moss is not naturally thin. Well she is, but in a world where you can buy Gü even in a Tesco supermarket, you bet there is always something that tastes as good as skinny feels around the corner. Indeed Kate Moss thinks so, too, as her motto was accompanied by her saying: “You try and remember, but it never works.”

So all this assuring of models who eat normal is a joke. They fight. Yes they eat, but nearly all of them are constantly on a diet, whatever they tell you. Is Kate Moss really to blame for saying that? What is the furor all about? Is a diet an eating disorder? And are we discussing this issue with the same verve when we talk about premier league football players? Why has everybody a say with models while we discuss doping as a medical mistake? Politics of gender anyone?

Fashion is a sphere of beauty. It creates an ideal, and an ideal is never about the real world. As I like ideals, I am actually not sure whether models should look normal, or people should be capable of being more reflective. Fashion creates an image and this is something art did for centuries. Fashion is fiction. It uses real people for it and a lot of photoshop. But its industry is not less brutal than football.

Maybe instead of locating the discourse in the female body, we should consider making the process more transparent. Get magazines to cover the process with every shooting, and consider teaching the mechanisms of media as a curriculum in school. In modelling as in being a professional football player, only some bodies can be part of the production of beauty, and we should deal openly with this situation. This is not about what we all should look like, this is a mean of production.

In fact, I find it interesting that the discourse is ranting about the thin issue all the time while being tall is as important as thin but no one finds that too much of an exclusion. Clearly, the thin issue is where the politics of the body are happening today and meanwhile it reached the male body, too. But whatever. A diet is not going to make anyone more beautiful. Being confident will. Kate, thanks for bringing it up.