Buying In - (Page 12) 12 rob walker iconic image of Che Guevara. It also offered Lenin shirts, Mao shirts, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and Geronimo shirts. Fashion Victim’s website explained: “Join the revolution with us here at Fashion Victim! These are revolutionary times, so where better to get the gear you need. We have all the latest designs in the world of propaganda and revolution, not to mention we are the only licensed retailers of Che Guevara shirts in the US of A.” Even this brief tour of the Magic trade show suggests that those four and a half rational factors aren’t going to be quite enough to steer Consumer Economicus to a decision. We say we make choices based on factors like value and comfort—but what happens when we face a nearly infinite variety of things that are close to identical on a functional level? Perhaps, like Miuccia Prada, Consumer Economicus thinks that buying a “symbol” is a sign of “weakness.” But in the real world of the Pretty Good Problem, symbols are more important than ever. ecko unltd.’s cul-de-sac cred The knee-jerk bias against logos that consumers display when quizzed by pollsters should be no surprise. Even if we concede that, yes, some symbols and objects really are important to us after all, we remain suspicious that symbolic meaning can be invented—by, for example, professional branders and logo makers. Valuing an object just because it’s a symbol—of status or anything else—sounds fake, contrived, phony. This is why most descriptions of the new consumer emphasize our demand for authenticity. While evoked constantly, the word is seldom defined. But one can presume that the authentic symbol is grounded in
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.