The Body Bourgeois

You know that billboard at the end of the 55? The one that's always rented out by Banana Republic, and always features some ultra-thin model in a pastoral setting? The image changes every month or so, but even so, you can always grass in it, usually sunlight. I commented to Bonny that it seemed to me that Banana Republic was consciously trying to court an upper-class clientele. I was thinking about how the urban poor would feel alienated by images of a carefully cultivated nature that only exists at country clubs and in the expansive yards of those who own fine houses. I was thinking also about how class implies a certain body type, how economic class actually fundamentally affects one's flesh--and that rich folks with their fad diets and personal trainers and yoga classes and plastic surgeons are probably model thin a lot more often than poor folks who are too busy dealing with economic stressors to spend time cultivating the perfect body and who, for lack of education or lack of options, eat shitty fast food and pre-packaged food and basically spend most of their lives awash in high-fructose corn syrup. Funny how the cheapest foods are often the highest in calories, meaning that you pay less for more energy (in an absolute sense), while more expensive foods involve things like garlic and herbs, using flavoring agents other than sugar and fat to be appealing. Health as a luxury item, health as conspicuous consumption; the fat cats are thin now while the workers are fat. It makes me hate my own conceptualization of beauty, seeing it as a contrived imposition from the top-down and reinforced by the heavily-edited images I see every day in advertising, as much as I fail in my struggle to subvert it. It makes me loathe my self-loathing, seeing my hatred of my own body as being a piece with that self-hatred that depressed ethnic groups experience when they measure themselves by the metrics of the ruling class and inevitably find themselves wanting. So yeah, this shot reeked of richness.

She informed that yes, this was true. Banana Republic is for rich people, while Old Navy and the Gap, which were owned by the same parent company, appealed to the lower and middle classes, respectively. I was a bit stunned. I was not aware that class distinctions in this country were so concrete. I would not have thought that a corporation would be so obvious in its efforts to say "Yes, this is for poor people" and "Yes, this is for the rich." Or rather, I might've assumed that a company like BMW would make a product that is the best it can possibly be and charge as much as possible for that product, but then, after achieving that threshold, I wouldn't think that company would pull back on its efforts and make a product that's just okay for the the rest of us (or a product that's really kind of crappy for those who can't even afford that)

I don't know why I wouldn't have thought that; I guess, being a person who wants options and experiences to transcend boundaries of ethnicity and class, I don't want to think about such boundaries as being rigid and clearly defined. Clearly price is a huge determinant, and as a member of the upper-lower-middle class I recognize that more than most, but it was still strange to me to think of the aesthetics of women's clothing--which I figured were all more or less decadent and an expression of conspicuous consumption--were actually graded along class lines. Is Banana Republic clothing the ideal to which Gap and Old Navy clothing aspires but falls short--and is this falling short a calculated thing intended to make Old Navy and Gap shoppers feel inferior? Or does each clothing store promote a distinct aesthetic, making the most of the styles and materials (and traditions?) within that set price range--"We're here, we're poor, get used to it!"

I don't know. I think it's all ugly, and when I say that I'm not really talking about the clothes themselves. Which is why I will persist in spending as little on my clothes as I possibly can, and in buying clothing that does not compromise comfort for the sake of class vanity, and is otherwise as non-descript as possible.

Not that I think that Banana Republic would have anything that would fit me, anyway.