CI 5150 Week 3 - Surf's Up in MN... Dude!

Although I in no way intend to under-represent, dishonor, and / or otherwise offend individuals that have experienced indescribable suffering during times of war, I would like to share with you all a previous experience related to this week’s assignment that has been shell-shockingly traumatic within my own limited, and undoubtedly ignorant, frame of reference – working as a 23 year old, white, upper-middle class, male manager for a retail chain. And not just any retailer, but the Hollister Clothing Corporation. In short, there is no doubt in my mind that students in this class who are also mothers and fathers of adolescent children experienced the same amount of “shell shock” as I did when Matt Snyders discusses the “high-decibel music… killing one’s ability to think” that one experiences when getting anywhere near the store (4). Not to mention the napalm-esque, choking fragrances, flashing lights, labyrinth of clothing racks and displays, and store workings ambushing you at every turn! Students in this class who are also mothers and fathers of adolescent children, YOU know exactly what I’m talking about.

All humor aside, I accepted a job as store manager for a Twin City’s branch of Hollister Co. (child of parent corporation Abercrombie and Fitch), following my college graduation. To this day, I’m still not sure why I made this decision, but I’m glad I did (“Now he REALLY must be crazy,” you probably just decided for yourself). In addition to Hollister Co. acting as yet another life changing experience responsible for my return back into graduate school, it serves as THE perfect “text” to re-read (and unfortunately re-live), through the lens of today’s assigned article titled Transforming Social Spaces: Female Identity and the Mall.

Although not unique to the following discussion, Hollister Co. is one of the many teen “life style” brands that relies heavily, and I mean HEAVILY, on image to appeal to adolescent males AND females. Today’s article engages the importance that image holds in promoting this type of “life style” brand as the author states,

“One must only look at the disproportionate amount of money that marketers invest in creating and promoting “image” as compared with the often significantly lower cost of production to understand the importance of fetishization to the ‘capitol logic’ process” (3).

In other words, the clothing commodities that companies like Hollister Co., Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle, and the list goes on and on, produce costs virtually NOTHING to produce as production materials are beyond junk, and the actual construction of said materials are largely done in overseas manufacturing plants where labor is virtually free. With that said, the products that Hollister Co. sells are literally worthless junk, with virtually no value in and of themselves. Therefore, Hollister puts the money that they DIDN’T spend on manufacturing costs to create a fictional image that appeals to adolescents in order to sell this literally worthless junk. And what is this image? See for yourself:








Being a former “soldier” in the Hollister Co. army, and with a little help from Wikipedia, I’ll provide a little bit of back-story on the specific identity which the above images work to construct (if you haven’t already guessed). To make a long, not to mention stupid, story short, the fictional character of John M. Hollister refuses to accept the pre-packaged lifestyle his father has created for him in up-scale Manhattan. To “fight the man,” John travels to California to instead to pursue his life-long dream of becoming a surfer (for the complete asinine story, visit the specific Wikipedia page linked here). Given this back-story, Hollister Co. then creates their clothing and overall image to capture values inherent in John’s identity development such as being a free-spirit / not subject to authority, young, hip, athletic, attractive, risk taker, and so on; basically, an overall frame of mind and developmental stage which adolescents currently inhabit! As the author of today’s article continues,

“Through the process of purchasing, Americans are encouraged to assume a “consumer self” identity, or to identify themselves with the commodities they consume” (3).

When adolescents purchase, or perhaps more appropriately when parents purchase, Hollister Co. clothing, they do so to assume the “surfer” identity of fictional John Hollister, along with all of the aforementioned values associated with his fictional story. And frankly, given adolescent’s natural process of “trying” on multiple identities, particularly the identity that is considered “cool” and reflective of the current status quo, getting adolescents and their parents to literally buy into the identity associated with their clothing is like shooting fish in a barrel!

And if the ridiculous above advertisements aren’t enough, Hollister Co. visually utilizes an even more elaborate, calculated design to make the illusory association between their clothing and the “surfer” lifestyle as concrete as possible. As the author of today’s article supports, Hollister intentionally utilizes “…the process of figuration, or the ‘transportation’ of the store into a fantasy world… bringing the spectator close to another (real or imaginary) location” (10). Don’t believe me? See for yourself:



As you can clearly see by these pictures, Hollister Co. goes through the elaborate process of making their store fronts look like some sort of beach villa, complete with clay awning / architecture, palm trees, open windows, and oh yeah… surf boards! And that’s just the outside of the store! When adolescents enter, they are bombarded by even more palm trees, surfboards, images of young people on the beach, sand, and in some stores, a giant television receiving a live, yes LIVE, feed of California’s South Beach! Overall, in every way that they POSSIBLY can, Hollister Co. engineers there stores to “…remove the spectator from the mundane world of retailing… to symbolically position him or her in a somehow more empowering space” (10).

For both males AND females (and believe me, from my anecdotal experience of working in these stores, males and females both drool over this brand), the cumulative effect / reasoning equals something like the following… In order to be cool, I must assume the identity of a Hollister Co. surfer. But, I live in MN thousands of miles away from any surf. BUT, through purchasing Hollister Co. clothing, I’ll be that much closer to actually being a “real” surfer, and experiencing the lifestyle that being a “real” surfer entails!

However, in regards to malls, and specifically Hollister Co. constructing female identity, there are some pretty startling anecdotes that I’d like to share with you. As a store manager, it was my job to “recruit” new “models” to work in the store (NOTE: although it may sound fictitious, the terminology that I’m using was standard company jargon, no joke). Because the job was so discriminatory (I’ll get more into that in a moment), I found myself being required to recruit A LOT of new models as the store’s turn-around was astounding (without a joke, dozens of workers per week would up and quit). However, when approaching “new recruits” in the store, I couldn’t just approach anyone. During my orientation, as well as printed in the company manual (if I can dig it up, I’ll scan and send this to everyone, it’s truly amazing), I was informed that I could ONLY recruit young people who “accurately represented” the brand’s “life-style.” In other words, I could ONLY approach young people who portrayed the fictitious aforementioned “surfer” lifestyle, and all of the values such a lifestyle implies. Imagine the covert implications such hiring instructions had! Although the these specific qualifications were never explicitly spelled out for me, imagine what “accurately representing” the surfer lifestyle might mean… In the case of the above visual advertisements, does this mean that young people had to be White? Thin? Upper-middle class? Athletic? And so on and so forth? Basically, representations of the current status quo and all it entails?

Again, although I was never explicitly told what it meant to “accurately represent” the brand, an experience with having to “dismiss” a worker made the above suspicions all too real. To make a long, and frankly sickening, story short, I once hired a young girl who I believed to be exceptionally intelligent, friendly, and easy to talk to vs. the hoards of female and male meat-heads that I frequently interviewed. Because she was such a good communicator, I enthusiastically offered her the job. However, vs. the hoard of meat-heads that I routinely interviewed, this girl did not look like she had an eating disorder. She was not tan in February. On her free time, she dressed in a mono-chromatic T and blue jeans. And so on. For the brief time she was in my store, I believed that I made the right decision to hire her. For example, when she would work, I always stationed her in the front room to greet “guests” as she was so damn friendly. In fact, I frequently received feedback from people that the “young woman working in the front of the store” really made for a nice shopping experience.

However, on one of her routine visits to my store, my district manager approached me asking in a disapproving sort of tone, “Who is the girl working in the front?” After telling the DM who she was, the DM proceeded to say the something similar to the following words, “Well, she seems like a nice girl, but I’m not sure that she’s ‘Hollister Co.’ material.” At first, I did not know what to say. I asked the DM why she thought that, and she made up so non-sense about her appearing “too young” to represent the companies targeted age range (which in itself is discriminatory enough!). But, I knew what she meant. The DM meant she wasn’t THIN enough. Wasn’t TAN enough (but, TOO tan would be bad as well, I argue). Wasn’t DUMB enough. Wasn’t PASSIVE enough. And the list goes on and on. Although I knew it was wrong, I told the young girl that I hired the week before that I had to “dismiss” her because “things weren’t working out.” She didn’t understand, and I didn’t either. She felt terrible, and I did too. Shortly after this incident, I don’t the DM to close up herself as I was DONE. I never returned. As the author of today’s article continues,

“Many different audiences are not addressed in mainstream marketing messages... others argue that the visuals there only address limited segments of the population… even young children are aware that somehow they have been excluded from the capitalist ‘message’ system” (12-15).

As both the young girl and I learned when I was forced to “dismiss” her, she did not possess, and most likely did not wish to possess, the particular identity that Hollister Co. attempts to manufacture. Similarly, many other adolescent are discriminated against at not only Hollister Co., but companies across the map, as they have chosen to pursue identities that do not completely reinforce the status quo.

Overall, this awful experience made the abstract theories that I have been exposed to across my graduate program to be as real as it gets. Too real, if you ask me. In short, the story above represents the non candy-coated, real world manifestation of the ideologies making not only women, but young people in general, believe that they are expected to look a certain way, behave a certain way, talk a certain way, and the list goes on and on, otherwise they are discriminated against and not considered human. While working at Hollister Co., I’m sad to say that I contributed to the appropriation of such ideologies. In fact, I frequently still see this girl’s face in my mind’s eye and feel awful about it. Because I was who I was working in the companies hierarchy (not only store manager, but young, white, male…), I was literally USED as a tool to appropriate an ideology that trains young women to grow up to be the passive, petite shells which companies such as Hollister Co. train them through their clothing to be. However, this WILL NOT happen again, and I will instead attempt to challenge these caustic ideologies and teach young people that there is more to life than a fake “surfer” identity. That they can be something more. That they can make change.

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TEACHING AND LEARNING IMPLICATIONS

In our article assigned for today, the author discusses their research methods as they state,

“The modern mall, including its semiotics, structure, and ideologies are largely treated and read like a text for the purposes of this project” (3).

For the purposes of our current classrooms, I argue that the mall can be critically “read” alongside any other “text” we present to students. Where we have discussed critical analyses of video, audio, and textual texts to lay bare, explore, analyze, and question pervasive ideologies, the mall can, and I argue SHOULD be used the same. After all, for the same reason that we argue using other texts to explore pervasive ideologies (more specifically the predominant argument that students have become “de-sensitized” to these ideologies), critical analysis of the mall affords yet another opportunity for students to be critical of ideologies operating in the structures they encounter OUTSIDE of school walls. Which is ultimately one of our goals? Isn’t it?!?

Given the above reasoning, here are some of the ideas that I have… Feel free to comment and add more!

Treat a trip to the mall as a sort of ethnography project:

-Assign groups of students to visit different stores in a local mall, or across different malls for that matter, and conduct research in the form of note taking, pictures, video, audio interviews, whatever they want! Then have the students “report” back to the classroom, using their field notes to analyze things such as the ideological foundations of the store, what assumptions the store has about consumers, how democratic these ideologies / assumptions are, and the list goes on and on.

Analyzing advertisements and images:

-Similar to what I do in this blog entry, collect a number of print, video, text, and so on advertisements from different retailers. Assign students to similarly deconstruct the ideological foundations of these ads.

BUILD a truly “democratic” mall:

-Perhaps after the above activities have been completed and students have a handle on the process of ideology analysis, put students into teams to build a sort of mall that is truly representative of the diversity of its consumer base. Teams could include architects, advertisers, food workers, retail workers, service workers, and so on and so forth.

Basically, the possibilities here are endless. What does everyone else think?

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MY OWN ETHNOGRAPHY

Location: Maplewood Mall Caribou Coffee; located next to Solarex Sunglasses kiosk
Date: 9/27/09
Time: ~2:10 - 2:30 pm

Keeping with the shopping mall focus of this blog entry, I decided to venture over to my nearest shopping mall and park myself at the ground level Caribou Coffee to people watch. Although not brave enough to venture into the Hollister Co. situated directly above me on the second level of the mall, this location provided me with an equally interesting “text” to critically observe and analyze; the Solarex Sunglasses kiosk.


One of the first interesting observations I noticed about the sunglasses kiosk itself was the lack of women’s styles. Across the two kiosks devoted to Solarex, only a very small section of frames was devoted to women’s styles, with the remainder being the gaudy, overly reflective style that you would expect to see on either A.) young men while cruising around with their “crew,” or B.) older men while driving around town in some sort of mid life crisis mobile (most likely some sort of Corvette). As such, for the entire 20 or so minutes that I sat nearby, the kiosk seemed to act like a magnet to males of all ages, drawing them in to literally “model” different styles for their friends and significant others. And when I say “model,” I mean it in the most Hollywood-esque sense of the word.


For example, I observed a group of 3 young men, most likely around 16-18 years old, approach the kiosk and begin to try on different styles. While doing this, I could overhear the boys asking each other questions such as “Dude, how do I look? Be honest,” all the while tilting their heads in different angles to assure that their male observers could make the best assessment. The friends would then provide honest, critical feedback in teen-speak (e.g., “Nah man, those make you look gay”), offering yet another pair for their peer to model for them. Similarly, another ~16-18 year old and his girlfriend approached the stand, and the boy began modeling different styles for her. However, unlike the previous group, the boy’s girlfriend did not provide the same, let alone any, feedback. In fact, she had had enough of the experience when the boy modeled the Kanye West “Shutter Shades” (the sort of shades I tried out, pictured right), pulling him along by the arm to remove him from the kiosk.

Overall, this display of behavior struck me as extremely interesting because such overt concern about one’s image, not to mention the very act of enjoying the experience of “modeling” various accessories, is often associated with a more feminine connotation. In other words, it’s stereotypically assumed that when a man takes his female significant other to the mall, SHE will be the one modeling everything for HIM, and HE will be the one doing the assessing. But, as this example illustrates, there appears to be an interesting sort of reversal of this norm, perhaps given the perceived masculinity of the product. Because sunglasses can be used as yet another means to emphasize a male’s “badassness” (another word I heard the group of boys use), perhaps such a product is then perceived as “safe” to model in an otherwise less masculine, more feminine sort of way. After all, I didn’t see any young men similarly interact with any products on display at the nearby “My Pillow Pets” kiosk!

And finally, because I thought it was just so ridiculous given this week’s assignment, bellow is a picture I snapped of a bunch of men, sitting around a “living room” sort of setup, watching football, in the middle of the mall... Beautiful, just beautiful…