behind the scenes
Last week I sat in beautiful rooms with very beautiful, very young women and asked them very simple questions. "Why did you want to partner with this brand?" "What's your favorite piece in the new collection?" The young women were sweet, but anxious. They started and skittered like colts, or like children, which in some sense, they were. They turned their eyes to their agents imploringly, asking to be fed the right answer, or assured they had already delivered it.
Sometimes in interviews I'm trying to get people to say something they don't exactly mean to tell me, but in this case, I was basically on their side. I had ten to fifteen minutes with each of them, in which I had to procure quotes for a piece I was writing on a tight deadline; there was no time to get fancy or tricky. This was a media event, a press junket; I was, I thought, really only asking them to say their lines.
But these were influencers, not actors. Being an influencer means that you are used to having direct control over the way you are perceived: you shoot something on your phone and then, if you don't like it, you shoot it again. You edit it and filter it and post it. You are unused to having to hand off elements of your brand to someone-- anyone-- else. In some sense, they were right not to trust me. Whatever else I was, I was simply not them. I had my own ideas about how they should be portrayed, and even if they weren't mean, they also weren't known.
After the interviews there was a party where I didn't know anyone. But I'd been at this event all day and I was hungry, and there was food, so I walked up and down a narrow downtown alley that had been spray-painted hot pink, snatching pieces of octopus-stuffed okonomiyaki and slices of kimchi grilled cheese out of tepid hotel pans and watching these same women pose for photographs.
There's a lot to say about what it feels like to be in rooms that exist only to be packaged and broadcasted, to communicate a brand identity that will, at some point, sell a product. To realize that you're walking around, basically, a very big expensive experiential ad! It felt like I'd walked straight into my phone screen, and I kept looking around marveling while everyone else looked back out, still happily selling.
Were they happy? I have no idea. There was no way to breach the wall between us. I was a journalist and they were there to enact their brands on behalf of another brand. I talked to people all day and did not have one substantive conversation. It was not anyone's fault. Those were the jobs we were there to do.
Which is crazy!!!!!!!!!! It's crazy to watch people subsume themselves into the brands they work for, to address themselves to an invisible audience instead of the human bodies around them. It's unsettling in a way I can't explain, but that I wish everyone had the opportunity to witness, to experience and then understand for themselves.
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The brand loved the piece I wrote about this event. I never know how to feel about it when that happens.
More fun and less conflicted: I interviewed Mary HK Choi about her second book, PERMANENT RECORD, which is out now, for Longreads.
You can hear me talk about momaging and, what else, my beloved Kardashians, on this week's episode of the podcast This is Uncomfortable.
And IRL, I'm hosting a panel for Art Women Art Week on Monday, September 16, on the roof of EP LP in West Hollywood. We're gonna talk about herbs and florals in cooking and gardening! It's gonna get... wild?
& last but never least, I'm going back to my roots and teaching YA Fiction for the fall session at Writing Workshops LA.