Making 2:0

Lecture Two: Scenes of Contemporary Making

HCC Winter 2008

jrlupton@uci.edu

 

 

This lecture concludes our tour of forms of making (from Shakespeare to Shostakovich and beyond!) by looking at some scenes of contemporary making. In some cases, I’ve used examples provided by HCC students in order to indicate trends in contemporary vernacular (non-expert) making as reflected in the student body of this course. The first part of the lecture looks at T-shirts: their history in working class and popular culture; their new life in social media (Web 2.0), and their connection to global manufacturing. The second part of the lecture looks at “strange stuffies” and other weird toys that subsist at the edges of mainstream consumer culture. “Ugly toys,” monster toys, and other misshapen creatures that exemplify the anti-branding, grass-roots spirit of the D.I.Y. movement.

 

Case study 1: T-shirt talk

T-shirts are objects of clothing. They also often carry writing or other messages: they are things to be read. Some t-shirts brand companies or groups (a computer, a cell phone provider, a record label, a sneaker company). The t-shirt also brands the wearer, who identifies his or her brand affiliations and cultural tastes by choosing to wear the logo of a particular manufacturer, political party, or band. If the t-shirt is customized in some way (made by hand, ordered on line), it can make these self-branding decisions even more precise and focused.  Although the t-shirt comes to you as a usually inexpensive, even quasi-disposable item of intimate clothing, many people probably participated in its manufacture, from points all over the globe. The cotton may have been grown in Afghanistan, made into cloth and a shirt in China, screen printed in Los Angeles, and then sold to you at a concert, given away to you as a souvenir for a fundraising event, or purchased at Target.

 

Wearing

T-shirts began as simple undergarments in the nineteenth century. Gradually they began being worn as the main layer of clothing, first by artists, such as Japanese-born French painter Fugita, who wore a ribbed undershirt, called a marcel in 1925. Other artists in the French avant-garde copied him, enjoying the freedom of movement along with slight sense of scandal. It was also a piece of clothing favored by workers in the heat of modern factories, an image popularized by Charlie Chaplin in the film Modern Times (1936). Military personnel also wore regulation undershirts, which they began showing off as pieces of clothing during World War II. But it was movie stars like Marlon Brando and James Dean (and musicians like Elvis Presely) who made the t-shirt into a symbol of cool in the 1950s. Hippies added tie-dye, a technique developed in Africa and Asia, in the 1960s.

 

Branding

In the 1950s, Florida companies began decorating t-shirts with resort names and Disney characters. In the 1980s and 90s, designer-name logos start appearing on t-shirts, a bridging of “high” fashion with the lowly T. During this period, t-shirts became a major marketing tool of big companies, and consumers began paying for the privilege of advertisting brands like Coke.

 

T-shirts went to the polls in 1952, with the “I Like Ike” presidential campaign. In 1948, Governor Thomas E. Dewey had distributed a “Dew it for Dewey” shirt. In the political realm, t-shirts have also helped build “counter publics” (examples: Harlem T-shirt; t-shirts for gay rights).

 

Cool-hunting

Cool hunters are market-researchers who look for new trends, especially in underground youth subcultures such as hip hop, skateboarding, and snowboarding. We could call this “trickle up fashion,” whereby the informal art of marginal communities engaged in certain forms of intense physical and artistic expression ends up going mainstream. Lots of money gets made – but the brand eventually “cools off” as the subculture ceases to endorse the appropriation of its styles, and consumers search for the next hip thing.

 

T-shirts 2.0

There are increasing opportunities for consumers to make their own t-shirts or to buy from indie t-shirt designers. A case in point is Threadless.com, a “user-generated” Web 2.0 site. All the shirts sold on the site have been designed by users, and the digital marketplace is also a social media center for people who design shirts (and other stuff).

 

(See slide presentation for a sampling of t-shirts from Threadless.)

 

This model of cool-hunting works differently from the corporate model developed in the 1990s. The users of the site, whether they are submitting shirts or buying them, are seeking out the cool on their own, and helping to produce it. Cool-hunting is dispersed and decentralized (a form of “collective intelligence”). The cool of Threadless, however, won’t last forever either.

 

Prosumer

In “Making 2.0.” the consumer is also a producer, a “prosumer.” Although such prosumers are far outnumbered by mainstream consumers, and themselves constitute another market (for the purveyors of t-shirts, supplies, etc.), they can still affect the market through their choices, especially when they mobilize and affiliate through social media. For example, some prosumers become active in political movements concerning fair labor, including the labor practices that brought you the t-shirt on your back.

 

Making

 Cotton is the main raw material in most t-shirts. It is grown in the United States (where it was an important crop in the plantation culture of the American South), but also in China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Turkey, Greece, Syria, Egypt, Mali, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Argentina, and other developing economies.

 

The case of American Apparel

Founded by Dov Charney, now 37 years old; a sweat-shop free t-shirt company based in Los Angeles, supplying many wholesale t-shirt designers, but also sold in small storefront boutiques in fashionable shopping areas. American Apparel sells its products through “provocative” advertising – both extremely sexual, often raw images of men and women in revealing shirts and underwear, and politically provocative ads that argue for the liberalization of US immigration policies as well as for fair labor, “sweat shop free” practices. It is an increasingly appealing business model for young entrepreneurs, who want to make money but also create a safer and fairer work environment and also do their part to support environmental safeguards and sustainable agriculture. Charney’s gotten in trouble, though, with a slew of sexual harassment complaints. CEO’s are made, not born?

 

Making 2.0: Lupton’s Take
Young people are increasingly interested in hunting down their own cool. Often their prosumer practices are linked to new forms of politics (politics of the everday, that work globally and locally around issues such as labor and the environment), but not necessarily within traditional civic frameworks). Young entreprenuers with prosumer backgrounds and commitments are creating powerful new business models --but sometimes with growing pains.

 

 

Case study 2: Strange stuffies

In our age of mass production, it is perhaps a surprise that handicrafts are hip. Crafting has become an expressive social mainstay of many young people, who are knitting, sewing, and quilting in coffee houses and their parents’ basements everywhere. Although crafting may seem opposed to digital virtuality, in fact the new crafting movement has been sustained by social media. Sites like Etsy.com provide a marketplace for individual craftspeople to sell their wares. Blogging and other forums allow artisans to share pictures, tips, and techniques, building a crafting community.

 

 

Toys are a classic branding object in mass marketing. Most mainstream toys are heavily “branded” (Mattel, Hasbro). The most popular toys become in effect their own brands, their names epitomizing a whole product line and ethos (Barbie, Thomas the Tank Engine, WebKinz). Disposable toys have become key marketing tools for promoting children’s movies (the Happy Meal phenomenon). Such toys are three-dimensional embodiments of their brands, miniature manifestations of marketing missions. Toys are natural objects of identification – young players “become” the plaything, adopting the toy as an ideal representation of themselves. Branded toys, then, invite young consumers to identify with the brand, to adopt the brand into their own developing ego-maps.

 

In a consumer landscape in which toys and brands are fused in the minds of both children and adult consumers, handmade toys, especially “ugly,” “uncute,” or monstrous ones, constitute a critique of mainstream branding, an attempt to delink toys and brands, and an effort to reappropriate the power of mass branding for smaller, more personal, and more counter-cultural expressive and economic enterprises. These toys remain branding objects, but they are put in the service of self-branding activities. By playing with non-normative creaturely shapes and forms, these self-branding objects reclaim the identificatory potential of toys in order to build a more flexible social and psychic vocabulary for those who make, view, or play with the toys.

 

Crafters sell or exchange one-of-a-kind objects through various social networks, both digital and embodied. This one-of-kind production, however, can also become a platform for artists hoping to sell their designs to larger companies. Digital marketplaces like Etsy, Threadless, and Supernaturale are fertile grounds for “cool hunters” studying new trends and looking for new product ideas. Creating a distinctive toy or toy-style is closely linked to creating a new brand; the toys embody an ethos, a style, or an idea that, when successful, can gather together a whole world of related toys or other products (such as comic books, pillows, or videos).

 

Although many small toymakers are interested in making money, most are not supporting themselves on these activities. Instead, they are building communities and developing a discourse, one that turns political when it addresses issues of sustainability and fair trade, flash points for many younger people disengaged from classical party politics of their parents and grandparents, but eager to make a difference on local and global scenes. Issues that resonate strongly with crafters are fair labor and trade practices as well as sustainability and the environment. People who make their own clothes, toys, or icons may also be interested in “slow food” (locally grown produce). Pierre Levy would describe these kinds of issues, as well as the digital networks used to organize around them, as “molecular” or “granular” politics: a politics of networked groups, around issues that connect up people across the globe, not only within the boundaries of traditional territories, in response to problems perceived as impacting daily life (what we wear, what we eat, and who makes the stuff we buy).

 

[See slide lecture for examples.]