Cultural analysis of fashion gatekeepersfrom @alexgreifeld

Transcript

Lauren Santo Domingo skipped the Met Ball this year to protest Jeff Bezos sponsoring it. Tier years ago, someone like Lauren could have vetoed this before it even became a conversation. She's a fashion insider, the founder of a $400,000,000 retail business, and the closest thing this generation has to an old school social authority. So what changed tier? For most of the nineteenth century, taste was controlled by a small group of socially prominent families. In the twentieth, it was gradually outsourced to a collection of cultural experts, editors, critics, curators, people like Anna Wintour at both. Taste became a product, an expensive exclusive product, but a product. And when taste becomes a product, we are faced with a massive coordination problem. Taste retains value through exclusivity, the refusal to sell out. So the first gatekeeper to sell out receives a massive payout, and then that payout diminishes as more gate keepers take the best. When the first domino falls, the rest tumble very quickly. That era is over. There are no gatekeepers. The only access criteria left is money. Here is what the current taste discourse is missing. Taste didn't save the metall from Jeff Bezos, and it's not going to save you from the permanent underclass. The quality you actually want to be cultivating, if that's your objective, is efficacy. Your appreciation for Arthur Russell won't get the median scroller to download your app, but a viral clipping campaign just might.