Picture yourself in a quiet neighborhood in Echo Park. You're at a buddy's dinner party, and one of his coworkers, Janine, is there, and she seems pretty cool. Then she announces to the table that “ she doesn’t really watch TV.” She continues on: she doesn't watch TikTok; her boyfriend reads fiction, but only the Fitzarraldo editions.
Janine is definitely a real person, but for our purposes she’s a character created by Oren John. His original video is linked below, where he introduces this whole idea:
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I love this concept of ‘Aesthetic Distance’ and how brands so often try to use it to signal how important and cool they are. Originally this comes from this guy named Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote the book Distinction in 1979. The whole thesis is really about how people develop their taste: that our taste is not personal; it’s all positioning. Basically, the things you like (and the things you refuse to like) all announce your position.
Enjoying popular things is cheap and easy. Anybody can do it, and there’s a low barrier to entry. It also doesn’t really signal anything about you.
Not needing the popular things requires additional resources. You had to have time available to develop other, unique and different tastes. Maybe you have access to education that gave you a lens to better understand what would be seen (or signal) prestigious-ness.
When Janine says she doesn’t watch TV, she’s displaying the money and the time and the schooling that made it possible not to need what everybody else needs. The refusal to buy into what would be considered mainstream is the flex.
Now, to make all this pretenious-ness actually work, you have to have two elements (according to Bourdieu):
The thing itself doesn’t really matter, only the distance. The things that are considered “good taste” will always be changing. That’s part of the game. It’s really all about cost. If it’s free and easy to access, it’s mainstream. If it’s hard to access and expensive, it’s prestigious and exclusive (duh).
Your refusal to participate in the mainstream has to be witnessed. Someone has to know that you don't watch ‘Summer House’ or don't have a TV to make it matter. It’s a performance (at the end of the day).
Brands do stuff like this all the time to signal how elite and important they are (and we fall for it).
In January 2021, Bottega Veneta deleted all its social accounts, millions of followers gone, and created a news story. Their CEO told WWD the brand was “merely using their [social channels] differently.” A fan account called newbottega basically became the brand’s new unofficial Instagram.
Lush announced a global Anti-Social media Policy in November 2021, and stepped away from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat. The Row banned phones at its Fall 2024 show in Paris, and gave guests notebooks and pencils instead.
This is all Janine logic at use by brands.
“We don't really do social.”
“We don’t really do press.”
Not needing the channels is creating a clear message about being above it all. But not everybody gets to do that. A DTC startup can't opt out of social; they need to be in the conversation, they need to be present every day. Opting out of something like social media is a “luxury good.”
I would like to pretend I don't engage in this performance of having taste and pretending to be a tastemaker, but I write a Substack about advertising, so draw your own conclusions.
Oren ends his video on what he calls the last true flex: a genuine lust for life. I believe him, but I’m just not sure anyone in advertising can afford to lean into that.
If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.
Every Monday, Below the Fold talks through the stories behind the brands.
Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.
As a writer, I do recognize I run on pretentiousness as my core fuel.
I'm in love with Oren, just saying.