[INDIFFERENCE] STEVE OKLYN

NOT VOGUE perceives FASHIONWORLD’s contracted designers, their contracted photographers, their contracted models, their contracted celebrities, their contracted bloggers as a single hive-minded and organized conspiratorial act. NOT VOGUE takes the view that FASHIONWORLD’s propaganda structure, strategy, and objectives are pathological in nature.

Their narrative and their physical global network of boutiques are organized strategically to support their various corporate directives: COMMANDS. The macro system connects all the narrative pathways within the advertising campaigns [military terminology], the society pages and, finally in the fashion pages of the international editions of VOGUE. The grand narrative [propaganda] is presented as inspired and inspirational [natural] fashion history.

There is nothing inspirational and nothing natural about any of this staged grand fashion narrative. It’s a fabricated society and spectacle. Their history is not history. It’s a highly organized, bureaucratic, and fictional corporate directive disguised as an intuitive creative process.

It is presented as culture. Note: the Arnaults, Pinaults, and Pradas are also involved in actively controlling the contemporary art world’s message and stratification of societal influence. Nothing is farther from the discernible truth. To be brutally confrontational it is all FASHION-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX BRAINWASHING.

The individual has one very powerful personal defense mechanism against this assault on their identity. That weapon is INDIFFERENCE. So poetic. So effective. They need you. You do not need them.

Your life, your personal journey to reveal and define your identity is more important than their narrative by 100 fold. Our era does not need more narratives. Our era needs better tools.

NOT VOGUE has a phrase to describe this unique chapter in VOGUE’s last 25 years of Fashionspeak : THE SILVER ERA. The entire VOGUE editorial and promotional enterprise is as real and glamorous as one of Andy Warhol’s wigs.

STEVE OKLYN
Topanga Canyon
June 30, 2016