A Baby for the Ultrarich
Plus, Anna Wintour lays off Condé Nast staff, and more from couture week.
In today’s issue of Back Row:
Schiaparelli once again presents the season’s most viral couture collection.
A word on the Condé Nast walkout — and Anna Wintour announcing layoffs while wearing her sunglasses.
More news highlights from couture and the Oscars nominations.
Schiaparelli’s Baby for the Ultrarich
If you didn’t look twice, you might have mistaken the baby’s outer crust for the kinds of jeweled embellishments you expect to see at a couture fashion show.
But the foam doll in look six of Schiaparelli’s couture collection was actually caked in gadget waste, or, as the show notes put it, “microchips and analog technology devices.” Clocks, switches, circuitboards, and dangling plugs of yore mingled with Swarovski crystals to create the most viral moment from a couture season that included the world’s biggest celebrities (did anyone not see Zendaya’s baby bangs?) and dozens of fabulous runway looks.
Model Maggie Maurer wore a simple (particularly by Schiaparelli standards) outfit including a tank top, cargo pants, and cowboy boots, and carried the baby at her hip, its hand clutched to her heart. From her ear facing the baby dripped a giant emerald statement earring, the kind a real mother of a real baby would probably avoid in the presence of said baby in order to keep her ear lobes intact. Unless, perhaps, you were the kind of mother who was so monied and well-resourced that you didn’t have to take care of your own baby. Then, you may as well wear the all-white outfit, with the shoulder-grazing earring begging to be yanked like the handle of a slot machine.
The baby was followed by a dress encrusted with the same motif of computer guts and sparkles. Here, the tech was unmistakable: an old black calculator appeared at the hip, a white flip phone nestled in around the collar bone. The full effect was fantastical and glittery and fun, and if Beyoncé was still on The Renaissance Tour, it’s easy to imagine her wearing this dress at the next show.
These two looks were written up in publications ranging from The Verge to Page Six. Many of these stories have noted that the flip phones nod to Y2K nostalgia, though Creative Director Daniel Roseberry said the baby was inspired by the Ripley character’s alien child in the movie Alien, which came out in 1979. (The show was titled Schiaparalien.)
Usually, no individual couture looks attract the attention these two have. The baby and the dress were mesmerizing as a visual trick, but also for their cultural interpretations. This isn’t just clever commentary on tech, it’s commentary on wealth. The people who can most easily afford to disengage with the attention economy and engage in this kind of tech are the wealthiest — the kinds of people who buy couture.
For instance, the ultra-rich don’t need social media, tools for promoting oneself and what one sells that may be free monetarily, but cost us, in just about every other way (time, self-esteem, focus) a great deal. They don’t need personal brands or a portfolio of work splayed across an Instagram grid, designed to appeal to a potential employer. They don’t need any online clout at all, really, because wealth is clout.
Unplugging from the modern internet, or going back in time to the age of Motorola Razrs, is a privilege. In her recent New York Times essay “I Was Addicted to My Smartphone, So I Switched to a Flip Phone for a Month,” Kashmir Hill writes that while her iPhone break had its benefits, it also had major inconveniences. She had to plan before she went anywhere she didn’t already know how to go because she didn’t have Google Maps on her phone. She couldn’t charge her electric vehicle at a public charging station without logging into an app. She couldn’t log into her New York Times account that allows her to use the content management system without the two-factor authentication provided by her smartphone.
These problems would seem to be things the ultrawealthy could avoid. Can’t navigate somewhere? Have a driver handle it. Can’t charge your EV? Take another car. Can’t log into your employer’s CMS? You probably don’t have an employer, but if you did — say, you were Kendall Roy or some other corporate nepo baby — would you be the one who has to use the content management system? Even the act of being instantly and constantly available to an employer who holds your economic security in the palm of their hand is made possible by a smartphone that alerts you to their every email and Slack message.
Smart devices can also be a crutch for taking care of children. In her terrific book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell notes that “while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically determined children’s content on YouTube, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children’s use of technology at home.”
Odell, whose book is all about rejecting the attention economy in order to engage with the real world in ways that enrich our communities and lives as individuals, adds:
As Paul Lewis reported for The Guardian, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the “like” button, had a parental-control feature set up on his phone by an assistant, to keep him from downloading apps. Loren Brichter, the engineer who invented the “pull-to-refresh” feature of Twitter feeds, regards his invention with penitence: “Pull-to-refresh is addictive. Twitter is addictive. These are not good things. When I was working on them, it was not something I was mature enough to think about.” In the meantime, he has “put his design work on the back burner while he focuses on building a house in New Jersey.” Without personal assistants to commandeer our phones, the rest of us keep on pulling to refresh, while overworked single parents juggling work and sanity find it necessary to stick iPads in front of their kids’ faces.
No wonder that Schiaparelli baby captivated so many of us. This idea of a wealthy woman, clutching obsolete tech like a literal baby to her breast, is a dazzling antithesis to those of us who are constantly plugged in, because of addiction or necessity or some combination thereof.
Ironically, by creating this viral moment, Schiaparelli employs the for-profit social media landscape from which many of us feel it would be a luxury to divorce. It also aligns itself with the high-luxury brands like Hermès that have proven more resilient in this economic landscape than those targeting aspirational shoppers. Aspirational brands like Balenciaga have sent models down the runway recently holding smartphones to their ears. Roseberry seems to dig deeper to discover what luxury can be, and I’d argue that that’s why, when he presents, everyone watches.
Anna Wintour Announces Layoffs Through Sunglasses; Condé Nast Workers Walk Out
On Tuesday, when the Oscar nominations were announced, Condé Nast unionized workers participated in a one-day walk-out and demonstration outside company headquarters at 1 World Trade Center in New York City to protest the company’s handling of layoffs. The union has said that Condé is breaking the law by rescinding a previous offer regarding the cuts.
In early November, CEO Roger Lynch announced the company would cut 5 percent of its staff. Just last week, Condé announced it would fold Pitchfork into GQ. Anna Wintour led a Zoom meeting with Pitchfork staff to inform them that this would result in the loss of jobs; the AP later reported that at least a dozen were cut.
A viral tweet/X by Allison Hussey revealed that Anna was wearing her sunglasses during this meeting:
When I was reporting Anna: The Biography, I heard of Anna wearing sunglasses in a host of strange situations.
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