This image was taken from Kendall Jenner’s Instagram profile. While it is not a traditional print advertisement that you might see in a magazine, I think this photo exposes the more insidious nature of capitalism in the digital age. As the social media influencer market expands, consumer products have transformed as well. With its lack of the hashtag “ad” or tagging the brand in the image, this photo is seemingly not directly sponsored by the brand itself. Rather, this image exemplifies the ways in which social media influencers develop person brands and subsequently become the product itself. Although at first glance, this may seem like an advertisement for Louis Vuitton, upon further analysis, I would argue that this is both an advertisement for Kendall Jenner as a brand, but further, an advertisement of a neoliberal dream sold to young women. However, despite the promise of influencer fame, this image simultaneously implies exclusionary conditions which I have made explicit in my jammed version of the image. What I find to be so problematic in this image, which I attempt to address in my version is the concept of ignorant privilege. Chandra Mohanty puts it most eloquently, “our visions of justice are more likely to be exclusionary because privilege nurtures blindness to those without the same privileges” (2003, p. 510). Although this image says nothing of justice, it is built upon injustice and exclusionary privilege. I am so critical of personal branding because of the way that it primarily targets young women into believing the falsity that this is empowered entrepreneurship. This rests blatantly and guiltlessly at the intersections of whiteness and wealth, maintaining the figure of the skinny, white woman as the image of beauty, and thus the natural inheritor of absurd wealth. Her nude body, hidden under luxury goods, is produced by the intertwining of women’s liberation and neoliberalism.
In my “jammed” image, I wanted to emphasize the absurdity of the kind of wealth that is flaunted in this image by naming the privileges that are present. Vaguely inspired by Peggy Mcintosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (1989, I wanted to demonstrate the ways that privilege is flaunted rather than reflected upon and deconstructed through social media by grafting the analogy of a knapsack on the literal luxury bags in the image. As I wrote in my analysis of the original image, becoming a social media influencer is made to seem achievable (much like the neoliberal idea of the American dream), however there are exclusionary conditions based on intersectionality. These conditions are implicit in the original image, but by replacing the brand name with these privileges, I wanted to make the conditions explicit. I chose to blur out Jenner’s face and replace it with the words, “not you” as a nod to the (“your ad here”) sale of public ad space, however I wanted to make it very obvious that the original image presents a false possibility of wealth and success. Instead, I wanted to subvert this myth by making it clear that unless you have all of these privileges, this likely will not be you. I chose to edit out the couch and replace it with a mural done by Jim Chuchu called “All Oppression is Connected” (2014) two signify two things. The first was to demonstrate that this figure of wealth and privilege was literally rested, obliviously, on top of histories of violent, interconnected oppressions. The second on was a nod to celebrity performativity in solidarity and allyship. This mural is likely something that a social media influencer would post on their Instagram during times of civil unrest around injustice, while not taking active steps to deconstruct their privileges and practicing meaningful solidarity.
References
Kendall Jenner. Feb 3rd 2020. “@kendalljenner and Louis Vuitton.” Accessed May 3rd 2020. Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8IR4dJjhLL/
Jim Chuchu, (2014). “All Oppression is Connected”. Source: https://www.jimchuchu.com/oppression
McIntosh, P. (2003). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. In S. Plous (Ed.), Understanding prejudice and discrimination (p. 191–196). McGraw-Hill.
Mohanty, C. (2003). “Under western eyes” revisited: Feminist solidarity through anticapitalist struggles. Signs, 28(2), 499-535. doi:10.1086/342914