Apathy is Balenciaga
There have been several instances in the last year where someone expressed a charged emotion while in my company and then immediately apologized for doing so.
"I'm sorry to keep talking about this."
"I'm sorry to act so excited about something so small."
"I'm sorry to dump all of this maybe it's too much."
I've found the charged emotions, whatever they are - grief, rage, giddiness, easier to respond to than the apology that follows. For all the times I've said, "that’s alright," or broken the tension with an ironic comment, I'd like to have actually said - I don't know why you apologize for having emotions, and I don't know what to do with your apology. I think I know why you do it though. Charged emotions are uncool and not very Balenciaga these days.
The more charged emotions are complex and messy, and we may not be good at accommodating complex realities in a post-internet world. The movie Triangle of Sadness opens with a scene where a group of men are auditioning to become models. The interviewer in the scene asks one of the characters if he is auditioning for a grumpy brand or a happy brand. He then explains that the grumpier brands are much more expensive and look down on the consumer, while the happier brands are cheaper and more inclusive. He calls it the Balenciaga vs H&M look. There you have the two emotions that are valid in polite society - one steeped in irony and apathy, the other in flatness and a certain kind of listless joy.
The Harry Potter Balenciaga video, created using AI-generated images and speech, has been doing the rounds in the last two weeks. It has spawned iterations across multiple other TV shows and films such as Breaking Bad Balenciaga and Star Wars Balenciaga. The genius of the original creator lies in identifying Balenciaga as the ideal brand to base these videos around. Highly recommend watching the Harry Potter one if you have not seen it.
AI art, while good and getting better, is not yet competent at expressing complex or heightened emotions. The eeriness of using heightened expressions is depicted well in “woman laughing with salad bowls” that someone posted on Twitter. Balenciaga, on the other hand, is a brand that perfected the apathetic high consumerist look in its aesthetics. While high fashion always has had snobbiness and apathy associated with it, Balenciaga's creative director from 2015, Demna, has taken it to its logical extreme conclusion. There is nothing subtle or complex about Demna's Balenciaga. Its only goal, one that it has achieved pretty well, is memetic contagion. It's the meme fashion brand that everyone knows about and can make fun of or admire, regardless of whether you are into fashion.
In Byung-Chul Han's 2022 book, Non-things, he describes how digital technology altered the role of physical objects:
"The informational content of things, for instance their brands, is more important than their use value. We perceive things primarily with regard to the information embedded in them…The aesthetic-cultural content of a commodity is the actual product."
Balenciaga perfected being a brand that produces physical artifacts in the digital age. The informational content of Balenciaga's clothes and ads are not subtle emotions like the ones Japanese designer Yohji Yamomoto uses to describe clothing. The information is the brand of Balenciaga and the new elite aesthetic of being ironically ugly and apathetic.
Balenciaga perfected the minimalist emotional aesthetic but it's the logical conclusion of an arc that began in the 2000s. I think other brands and aesthetics would get commodified easily and faster as AI art improves. Wes Anderson movies that are rich in detail and colors but fall flat on an emotional spectrum are ripe for AI memes. Sofia Coppola's depiction of a certain kind of ennui experienced by first-world women would be next. The more emotionally expressive but flat and polished brands such as H&M would follow after. A lot of 90s and 2000s rom-coms would fall into this category.
In this substack, Faustina describes how movies have become less emotionally expressive over time.
The stoic is a character who expresses rather little. He can be angry or bemused, otherwise he only holds a drink and looks into the middle distance. If it’s a serious drama, he may become frightening, particularly when he drinks his drink. He becomes enraged, so that he may overcome his trauma and rejoin good society either in emotional aporia or on the screen. The schlub is rarely frightening, but he’s allowed a somewhat richer sentimental variation. He’s allowed some feelings provided we know that they’re not really serious, provided there’s a joke to break the tension or a common understanding that it’s not all that important in the end. There is emotional content, but that’s not the purview of the actor, it’s the job of the writer: the dialogue is moving, while the speaker is not moved.
Perhaps as emotional minimalism gets automated using AI-generated art, artists would have to pay attention to the more complex and uncertain emotions. The culture around restrained emotional expressiveness and layered irony would slowly have to give way to something more interesting and complex.