Lack of Authenticity Doesn't Make Things Uninteresting
Lack of precision does
Prada’s first campaign of 2025 features Carey Mulligan transforming from one kooky character to another in an attempt to “explore the notion of plurality” and “celebrate individuality” as well as “the multitudes that can be contained within a single whole.” Translated from marketing speak, it means that unlike other brands with a stagnant signature look and philosophy, Prada sees you for who you are — a complex and dynamic individual — and embraces contradiction and evolution to create special pieces for every side and version of you. They’d hate to put you in a box unless it has a Prada logo on it — in which case, the more boxes, the merrier.
On a serious note, what Parada is playing with here aren’t just the tired tropes and roles that women rotate through on a daily basis — a mom, a boss, an inner little girl, an athlete, or a hot lover. Neither are they playing into any kind of trends — excessive trinkets and layers as markers of individuality, ribbons and sequins as signals of femininity, or boxy shoulders and wide trousers as a play on gender fluidity. The bold makeup and the obvious wigs make Mulligan’s characters feel less commercial and more theatrical and even vaguely sinister in a Cindy Sherman kind of way. I don’t know if these women are nice, smart, angry, or even pretty, but I do keep looking at them, desperately trying to break them down and piece them back together in a way that would make them more readable.
Sherman’s life-long act of surrendering her body and personal identity to a series of nameless, fleeting characters feels unfavorable in a culture that’s obsessed with individuality, authenticity, and personal branding. And yet, some of the strongest and most captivating photography, character building, and creative direction of the past few years exists in some sort of reference to her work. Collier Schorr photographed Amelia Gray playing a series of theatrical characters for a The Face feature exploring her position as “a body in a world of images rarely accompanied by words.” Nadia Lee Cohen’s rise to mainstream fame started with series of portraits, including My Name Is in which she transformed herself into 33 nostalgic characters, and continued with her breaking the internet by photographing famous women, like Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, and Chloe Sevigny, as cinematic and slightly unsettling retro characters. In collaboration with Warby Parker and Jared Ellener, Emma Chamberlain has morphed into a slew of alter-egos, some more surprising and illusive than others. And every time Julia Fox steps out of her house for an event or a pap walk, she could resemble anything from a lucha libre wrestler to a glammed-up poodle.
We applaud these women’s ability to transform and defy our collective expectations of who they are and what they are capable of. So perhaps, the very act of constant transformation isn’t as exhausting and uninteresting as our limited ability to invent and spot characters that don’t come off as caricatures. There is a huge difference, for example, between the world and character building in Nathan Fielder’s and Benny Safdie’s The Curse and Conrad Kay’s and Mickey Down’s Industry even though the goal of both shows is to portray characters that are representative of a larger cultural demographic and poke holes in them as they move through the plot, blissfully unaware of their flaws. One leans heavily into cliches and obvious contradictions, like excessive eclectic jewelry on the hands of a slimy reality TV producer and no-name vintage styled together with Gabriella Hearst pieces by an eco-concerned nepo baby. And the other is full of neat little details, like slightly too short belt loops, stealth-wealth tie hierarchy, and the ultra rich ski resort merch that go largely unnoticed unless you are a Reddit freak who breaks down scenes for entertainment, but at the same time, add up together into delightful portraits that makes sense on an almost metaphysical level.
There is a similar difference between how certain brands and influencers think about their target audiences and how detailed the characters they create for their campaigns and content are. The reason why Reformation has tried and failed to replicate SSENSE’s character universe and Overheard NY and Pathetic Fashion memes don’t hit as hard as Starter Packs of NYC and Nolita Dirtbag is the lack of precision — surface-level observations about camo hats, tabi flats, and gorpcore turn outdated and cringy just as quickly as the people they are making fun of. So do the brands whose creative direction leans heavily into generational and socioeconomic stereotypes — for example, I am convinces that there is a huge untapped opportunity for a luxury activewear brand that looks beyond the country club tennis courts and gentrified millennial neighborhoods for inspiration (my money is on Live The Process).
Ever since the rise of the “type of guy” anthropology that puts the products and brands we consume in close association with certain lifestyles and characters, everyone has been quick to pick up and poke fun at the obvious visual and consumption-based traits of certain demographics — the logos they wear (or don’t), the cafes they inhabit, and the places where they vacation. That, in return, made certain people so anal about personalization and individualism that they started dressing like “a lost-and-found box charmed with life” and patronizing under-the-radar establishments to avoid logging into Instagram and seeing themselves in a Nolita Dirtbag meme. In that sense, leaning into characters and transformation might be more authentic than crafting an "over-editorialised jumble” of stuff that’s supposed to be a physical representation of just how unique your interests are. After all, the reason why Cindy Sherman’s wigs, prosthetics, and makeup were always peeling and melting off in certain places was to show that all intentional identity construction is artificial.
In When Fashion No Longer Sells Clothes, Tony Wang and Michael Yeung argue that when luxury fashion brands started expanding their businesses by playing into trends and selling abstract culture and brand symbols over styles, they diluted their creative points of view and cultural power. Their proposed solution is to build a self-contained brand world first and then invite the culture in on their own, proactive rather than reactive, terms. And even though closing yourself off from trends and pop culture, looking inwards, and leaning into the niches sounds like a reasonable response to accelerating speed of trend cycles, there is an equal power in observing the broader cultural landscape through an almost microscopic lens and and picking up on subtle wind shifts and details that most people, like characters of a well-written TV show, remain blissfully unaware of, caught up in main discourse.
The very act of constant transformation and using your art and self-expression as a channel to respond to the culture around you doesn’t mean that you or your brand have no personality. But keeping it interesting requires an almost surgical level of observation and precision that very few creatives are capable of. There is nothing more delicious than characters, objects, places, and worlds that feel both familiar and foreign and slip away the second you think you cracked them. We’ve been looking at Cindy Sherman’s untitled stills for decades, waiting for the characters to turn around, speak, and notice us, revealing something that would help us file them into familiar boxes and put away into the archive of dead characters that our culture so mercilessly steps over and moves on from. And yet, they live on — both in their original form and other people’s art — made-up characters that are deeply intriguing despite lacking authenticity.
IN THE MARGINS:
A whole lot of additions to Busy Corner this week:
Four new stores in the Independent Retail list
Three more magazines in the Indie Media list
And a bunch of new references in the Reference Bank, including a glass accessories maker, grandma street style, and chic evil baby pottery.
I don't know how to explain how I felt reading this other than it scratched an itch in my brain... This was so thoughtful and so on point. And that brooch at the end will now consume my every waking thought
Great piece! Still absorbing all of it. I love the way your mind thinks!