Her speech, when she was not talking about pouring baby powder over a Prada jacket, or sending an off-color text message to Ms. Wintour, was really quite touching. She spoke of her fans and the transformative power of fashion, saying: “They wake up in the morning, and it’s their leather jacket that makes them feel like they can be anyone. Or it’s that YSL blazer that they saw in the window that makes them feel like they could be president one day.”
slap me silly and call me het, but i find this disturbing. it's your leather jacket that makes you feel like you can be anyone? (a) you can't be anyone (remember last week when you born that way?). and if you could be, would that be good? like say you were a mass of unformed protoplasm, a can of human play-doh. i wonder whether, no matter what she's wearing or not etc, stephani germanotta also feels condemned to be herself. ain't no escape! then again, her two self-help rhetorics: have the courage to be yourself! and you can be anyone! actually are not compatible, even if they are both commencement-speaker cliches. (the third of her self-help strategies - drink heavily all the time - makes the transformative landscape even richer.) (2) a ysl blazer makes you feel like you can be president. but it had better not be a knock-off or a store brand, i guess. it's going to take cash money to feel as though you could be president. even if you still have a good credit card: how worthwhile, i wonder, is it to 'feel like you can be president''? obviously, it's not going to make you president: there's only one at a time, and a seething mass of persons in ysl blazers. and once your blazer takes you to the top, what's your policy going to be? ysl blazers for the poor? do you think if we gave every child a ysl blazer, that would obviate the need for, i don't know, work? how substantially, really, does a good jacket enhance your self-esteem deep inside? and if it actually did, how much would that really help? each excellent blazer is going to make you more insufferable and less capable of self-reflection, though the concept of self-reflection is anachronistic, i know. it only now means gazing at yourself approvingly in the mirror.
look i understand that the appearance/reality distinction is over, though you might want to ask yourself if you've ever looked good (well, for you) and felt bad, or ever successfully deceived anyone, like maybe yourself. no one ever looked more like a president, or had more self-esteem or a better haircut and blazer than john edwards, e.g.
