Appropriation vs. Representation
The unexpected Venn diagram of Pharrell, Virgil Abloh, archaeologists, and anthropologists.
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In a post-show interview for his latest Louis Vuitton collection, Pharrell was asked how his approach to cowboy style would differ from the countless interpretations that preceded his (Raf Simons, Karl Lagerfeld, and Ralph Lauren, among many others). His response was, arguably and refreshingly, backhanded:
“One of the things that I'm supposed to do is to take the house to places and tell stories and give a platform to the different destinations that we go to, and how they inspire us not to take anything or appropriate,” he said. “That's not what we are here to do. We are here to appreciate where we go and what we learn, and come back and share those stories in the way that we do when I express myself through the clothes and the show.”
The show included music composed by Lakota “Hokie” Clairmont and performed by Native Voices of Resistance, Lakota members on the runway, bags embroidered by both the Dakota and Lakota tribes, stone turquoise sourced from Arizona, flared pants over cowboy boots, and so on. There was also a Timberland collaboration, including a boot with 18-carat gold eyelets, which was seen as a modern luxury play on cowboy workwear.
The reaction has been mixed, with some saying “the references were too obvious” and others calling out the contradictions, particularly combining inclusive messaging with a $1 million handbag. I’m not particularly interested in the shows, but in recent years, I have taken a perverse pleasure in watching trade media grapple with creative directors like Pharrell and his late predecessor Virgil Abloh — outside talents who toy with the insular nature of the industry.
When I say Pharrell’s response was backhanded, I really mean he, like Abloh, uses the internet-fueled, tapestry-like nature of creativity today to surface industry contradictions. In 2018, Thom Bettridge called Abloh’s use of quotation marks “one of the many tools that Abloh uses to operate in a mode of ironic detachment,” adding:
He describes Marcel Duchamp as his ‘lawyer,’ the art-historical grounds onto which he can absorb pre-existing intellectual property into his reference system. Abloh rejects the who-did-it-first mentality of previous generations in favor of the copy-paste logic of the Internet and its inhabitants. His new order is protected by a fortress of irony.
Abloh’s transition from streetwear to Louis Vuitton was seen as an overdue recognition of streetwear’s influence on luxury, which allowed him to more overtly articulate the idea that an LVMH label gives commercial value to something that already exists (à la Duchamp) or may not need to exist at all. Pharrell isn’t playing with irony in the same way, but he is citing his sources with a similar directness.
In the case of this particular show, though, he applied this logic within the context of historical interpretation, and the outcome is a reconsideration of that period. He counters the methodical oversimplification of history that’s designed to benefit the narrator, most often in the pursuit of power or defensive revision. In fields like fashion, this process seems to run up against those defensive tendencies — that mirror that Abloh constructed — or an inability to comprehend the complexity of the story being told.
In fairness, even academia grapples with that cognitive limit. Only three years ago, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow published The Dawn of Everything to argue against the long-held idea that society has transitioned in some linear fashion from primitive to civilized. Instead, they say, complex societies existed in multiple forms long before Europeans began to claim themselves as the enlightened ones (literally).
Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible.
Let me be clear that I’m aware of the absurdity of an arc that begins at Paris Fashion Week and ends at the Dawn of Everything, but when I see a critic call a reference “too obvious,” I ask myself where they would prefer the line be drawn. Should Pharrell continue the process of reducing everything to a cartoon, or should he start by giving space to different voices without trying to stretch himself beyond the cognitive boundaries of his audience?
By giving space to different voices, the multitude of voices itself becomes the story — or the story is a reminder that history is one of stories. To call any of them “obvious” is almost absurd. Are editors suffering from overexposure to Lakota songs? Alternatively, are they confused because it’s a retelling of something they thought they understood? Worse still, is the issue that someone is surfacing appropriation rather than burying subjugated voices in a cacophony of their own?
Obviously, Abloh and Pharrell are doing somewhat different things here. Abloh pointed the industry directly back at itself so it could see what it had already taken. Pharrell isn’t looking directly inward in the same way, but he is indirectly making clear that the copy-paste logic of the internet is an opportunity for us to democratize access to the microphone. Not condensing every contribution into a digestible, homogenous bite is the point.
Yes, I realize the range of contradictions in suggesting this is a purely altruistic exercise — there’s the $1 million handbags, to start, and a lack of clarity on how the tribes involved will benefit. That said, if the alternative is to simply continue obfuscating sources when the online world — the world where we all spend most of our time — enables us to do the opposite, I’d argue commerce is as good a starting point as any others.
After all, as Pharrell pointed out in that same interview, it’s through entertainment that perception is often engrained:
When you see cowboys portrayed you see only a few versions. You never really get to see what some of the original cowboys looked like. They looked like us, they looked like me. They looked Black. They looked Native American.