Mass Consumption, Luxury, and Authenticity
American consumption drives social change. Innovation in production and retail restructure our culture and reshape social relations. Consumption is culture. Part of that culture is art. Art serves not only as a social commentary but also as a commodity market. Artistic points of view in music, fashion, and visual art are bought and sold for thousands of dollars. And art does not simply reflect social change. Art is the cause. In this paper I will examine two examples of art driving social change: Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement and Dapper Dan and hip hop fashion. In comparing the two examples, I will show that both served to change class structures in American society, not reflect them.
Following World War II, Fordism defined American manufacturing. The 1950s and early 1960s were a golden era of economic growth, production, and consumption. Goods were produced on a mass scale and consumed on a mass scale. Products were made by machines and standardized using assembly lines and unskilled labor. In the eyes of artists, everyone bought the same goods, wore the same clothes, and lived the same life. Naturally, the art world pushed back against this mass assimilation with abstract expressionism. Artists like Jackson Pollock and Arshile Gorky asserted the individuality of the artist in their unique paintings of spontaneous and subconscious creation. They emphasized the “universality of truth through color and a direct emotional connection between the art and the artist.” They strived to be iconoclastic and authentic in a world full of copies.
Andy Warhol and the Pop Art movement was a total reaction against this ahistorical postwar world. In a lot of ways, Warhol’s life reflected the homogenization of American culture. He was the son of Slovakian immigrants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and, as an artist, assumed a watered down version of himself—a white washed ethnic assimilated in mass consumer culture. He saw himself and his art as an interchangeable commodity. His pieces actively worked against the individuality and uniqueness of abstract expressionism. Whereas abstract expressionism is more personal, emotional, iconoclastic, and masculine, Andy Warhol and his Pop Art is anonymous, commercial, iconic, and androgynous.
Pop art is a celebration of popular culture, using celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor as modern day Madonnas in new age portraits. Warhol paints advertisements over and over again, most notably of Campbell’s soup cans, using repetition and uniformity to mimic the mass consumption of goods. He even “ripped off” his own art using silk screening techniques. He argued that if one piece is good, then two should be even better. This technique mocked the idea of authenticity and Warhol positioned himself as a sort of cultural mirror, regurgitating the corporate advertisements that bombarded American life.
In mocking authenticity, Warhol mocked class structures and the social norms of the art world. He argued that art is about displaying wealth writing, “say you were going to buy a $200,000 painting. I think you should take that money, tie it up, and hang it on the wall… I like money on the wall.” Art is market driven and is treated the same as any other commodity. Art has the potential to erase social divisions; art is about equivalence, equivalence to a dollar value. Warhol writes, “money is money. It doesn’t matter if I’ve worked hard or easy for it. I spend it just the same.” This is mass consumption—lumping Americans into a giant group of consumers with no account for difference. Difference doesn’t matter. History doesn’t matter. People become binary check marks, simply answering yes or no when asked to spend.
Warhol’s art and philosophy perfectly embodies the ways in which mass consumption and production defined American culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Lines of division surrounding class seemed to dissolve as people became dollar signs in the minds of Madison Avenue advertisers and in the mind of Andy Warhol. Pop Art reinforced equality of class identity in the market. All people pay the same price for the same good no matter how much money they have. Our consumer experience in buying mass produced goods is all the same.
However, in the 1970s, America faced political and economic crises and the American people become more fragmented. Different groups had different values, cultures, and shares of the economy. These groups were mostly divided along race and class lines. Nonwhite Americans were marginalized and certain white people claimed their marginalization lineages to distance themselves from a culture of white nationalism . This fragmentation is greatly manifested in the music of the 1970s. There was southern rock, glam rock, punk rock, disco, funk, and hip hop, each genre belonging and speaking to a different segment of the American people .
Into the 1980s, postwar economic growth really began to slow, and eventually stagnate . There was a lot of class insecurity and people began to yearn for more than what they had. The pursuit of luxury really became the defining point of consumer culture. There was a celebration of the rich and famous rather than the middle class, which was new. This longing for luxury was reflected in all segments of American culture, particularly in hip hop fashion.
Hip hop music developed during the fragmented 1970s as a reflection of the cultural divisions in society. Hip hop developed on the spatial margins of New York and sort of celebrated segregation. It was a genre created by black people for black people and quickly developed its own culture as it expanded into the 1980s, particularly its own fashion. One of the most notable hip hop fashion designers was Daniel “Dapper Dan” Day.” Dapper Dan was a self-described hustler. He observed Harlem fashion in the 1970s and eventually developed the idea for Dapper Dan’s Boutique in 1982. He learned where he could get his supply and eventually started selling the same fur and leather clothes as other shops in the Harlem neighborhood.
Dan knew what people in Harlem wanted to buy and eventually started to design more playful pieces. He knew that his clients wanted luxury so he would use “designer leather trim to turn a generic garment—even a generic mink coat—into a name brand one.” He would buy up Gucci garment bags and use the logos as accents on his pieces. He was borrowing the luxurious name of other brands to boost his own clothes. He even developed a method of silk screening logos on his own leather material to create all-over print jackets. Dan said he “Africanized it, took it away from that Madison Avenue look.” Dan knew that his clients wanted to be associated with specific brands to elevate themselves in hip hop culture and his pieces became the staple look.
Dapper Dan was playing with brand authenticity. He was not necessarily ripping off brands; in his eyes, he was doing the brands a favor. He made the logos of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Fendi stand for much more than they otherwise would have in hip hop . Big names wanted to associate themselves with certain brands as a means of attaining a social class of luxury and Dapper Dan helped them do just that. His story is about reshaping class structures in this particular segment of the market. His art is about redefining wealth in an age of luxury.
Dapper Dan’s remixing of fashion is very similar to the work of Andy Warhol. Both commodified commercial art and repackaged it for the consumer. Both borrowed from other brands to create and express mocking ideas of authenticity. Both mimicked the repetition of logos and advertisements using silk screening techniques, not as a means of production, but as an art form. Both grappled with the question of what is real and what is fake. For the purposes of creating their art, copies are the “real thing.”
Both Warhol and Dapper Dan are indirectly critiquing the American class system during times of idolized excess. For Warhol, excess and surplus were defined by mass production and “look alike” goods—how do our class differences fit into copy culture. For Dapper Dan, excess was defined by the overwhelming luxury of 1980s consumer culture where uniqueness and authenticity thrived as he ripped off brands.
Warhol and Dapper Dan both cause and comment on changing class structures. They both realize that consumption and the pursuit of upward mobility are linked. Whether its having what everyone else has in the 1950s or having something luxurious that no one else had in the 1980s, everyone was striving for a higher class in their social environment.
In the words of Warhol, both played with idea of “think rich, look poor.” For Warhol, “money is suspicious, because people think you’re not supposed to have it, even if you have it.” This same idea applied in hip hop culture. No one suspected black people in Harlem would have any kind of money, which is why so many people wanted to adorn themselves in designer brand logos to flash their lives of wealth and luxury. And in doing so, this type of association made black people look poor to upper class whites. Co-opting brands was seen as tacky and cheap outside of the hip hop segment, but inside the community were strutting wealth—thinking rich and looking poor.
While the two artists really blurred class lines, there is an important difference in their critiques and in some ways, Warhol’s led to Dapper Dan’s. Warhol’s interpretation of mass consumption hinged on the idea that we are all the same and that we experience the same consumer culture. In the case of lumping all white people from different backgrounds together, this was true in the 1950s and 1960s. But as Warhol’s chosen successor, Jean-Michel Basquait, asserts, there is a dichotomy in the market between blacks and whites . Basquait reinterpreted mass culture like a DJ and pushed back against bland advertising. He claimed that an outside world was possible and that we exist in a new world of inequality, a new world of segments .
Dapper Dan’s art existed in this world of segmentation and inequality. His art existed in the dichotomy of black and white, wealth and poverty. Dapper Dan only existed as an artist in his segment of American culture, not outside of it. And while he created and recycled the big brands in the way Warhol did, he created an outside world all his own. This outside world belonged to hip hop and Harlem.
Though different, both Andy Warhol and Dapper Dan exemplify the power of consumption to drive social change and restructure social relations. Their artistic commentaries on social class existed in a commodity market—it was bought and sold. Their influences in consumption did not simply reflect social change but were the driving force in creating new spheres class relations. Their contributions changed the way we interact with products. They changed the way we view the authenticity of the things we own and the authenticity of ourselves. Their art is part of American consumption and, as such, permanently impacted American culture.
Notes
Hyman, Louis. Lecture 22: Mass Consumption and Its Fragmentation, 2018
Hyman, Louis. Lecture 24: Lifestyle, Luxury and Inequality in the 1980s and 90s, 2018
Kalefa Sanneh. “Harlem Chic: How a hip-hop legend remixed name-brand fashion.” The
New York Times, March 25, 2013
Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1975.