Fashion, Taste, and the Options the Culture Industry Has to Offer

Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception and Ouellette’s Makeover TV: Labors of Reinvention both work to understand the relationship of media consumption as an act of reinforcing capitalism through categorizing viewers as both consumers and employees. However, Oulette’s discussion on Makeover TV provides a nuanced description of how one area of media, makeover tv, takes a gendered approach at this process of the industrialization of media.

In The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that media production is a replication of capitalism that in turn teaches those consuming media to not question anything that lies outside of the system that works to produce the media they consume. They argue that capitalism and media create a system in which expression is limited by what is offered to them, excluding what can be considered new and creative (Adorno and Horkheimer 5) In turn, the feelings, sensibilities, and aspects of culture are commodified into an industrious form of media consumption that works to constantly reinvent itself in the name of profit (Adorno and Horkheimer 9). The authors make this claim of the degeneration of creativity saying “[m]ovies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1). This quote serves as an explanation as to why the media produced under the culture industry lacks the ability to be considered artistic expression seeing that this expression is limited by the constraints of the businesses they promote. However, the consumer is encouraged to intake this media through a lens of fun, amusement, and pseudo creativity, for “[t]he deception is not that the culture industry supplies amusement but that it ruins the fun by allowing business considerations to involve it in the ideological cliches of a culture in the process of self liquidation” (Adorno & Horkheimer 9). This deception works to make the industry of culture seamless, naturalized, and hidden from the viewer.

Alternatively, Makeover tv is an instance in which this process of industrializing culture is at the forefront of the content it produces. Ouellette’s Makeover TV: Labors of Reinvention Argues that Makeover TV like programs such as What Not to Wear use personal style, appearance, consumption, and professionality in the same ways that neoliberalism demands a specific kind of worker that is flexible, with the trends, and able to shift their identity alongside the needs of the work one does (Oulette 99-100). Working on the self, creates a false narrative that suggests that through fashion individuality, creativity, and expression would be prioritized, but in a similar way that the culture industry makes creativity nonexistent, this process also falls short to the promises of real expression. Ouellette understands this process through the way that “What Not to Wear illustrates the paradox of makeover TV, in that it prepares the worker to taker on burdens of insecurity and disposability in the name of her/his own freedom, and provides them with tenuous resources for navigating the impossibility of this task” (Ouellette 101). Shows like What Not to Wear and the various other makeover media are mechanisms that the culture industry uses to appease audiences and promote the comfortability of their identity being reduced to consumer and employee.

Looking at these two pieces in tandem allows us to understand the mechanisms that make the culture industry run by providing a case study into how media consumption makes this process palatable to viewers. The culture industry and makeover tv both work in similar ways to undermine creativity and promote the form of individuality that neoliberalism prefers. The faults of the culture industry lie in the way that the consumer is stripped of its uniqueness to fit into the categories in which one can be a fitting consumer, while makeover tv undermines this same uniqueness by regulating those who do not fit into the dominant template of a professional within a capitalist society. The formulaic practices of makeover tv, emphasizes points that Adorno and Horkheimer make in the deterioration of creative individuality saying: “[n]ow any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy. As an individual he is completely expendable and utterly insignificant, and this is just what he finds out when time deprives him of this similarity. (Adorno and Horkheimer 14). Makeover tv serves as a how-to guide in which one can regulate their own expression and make themselves a productive copy. They further go on to reinforce this idea of formulaic expression saying “[i]ndustry is interested in people merely as customers and employees, and has in fact reduced mankind as a whole and each of its elements to this all-embracing formula... As employees, men are reminded of the rational organization and urged to fit in like sensible people. As customers, the freedom of choice, the charm of novelty, is demonstrated to them on the screen or in the press by means of the human and personal anecdote. In either case they remain objects. (Adorno and Horkheimer 14). This quote serves to understand how the culture industry interacts alongside the mechanisms of makeover tv. Both serve to regulate people into categories of customers and employees that creates a cycle of those who work within the capitalist system to afford to consume the media that the system has created for them.

To add further nuance, it is interesting to explore how Makeover tv, though similar to the nature of the culture industry, prioritizes working within a neoliberal framework that is inherently gendered. Makeover TV seems intrinsically tied with the way women are socialized and can be complicated when we consider the way that women did not always have access to the promises that neoliberalism has to offer, and thus need a how-to program on professionality to integrate them into this society. But again, that is suggesting that that this is an improved form of individuality that one can strategically uncover when it, in reality, is once again categorizing one as both the consumer and the employee. It seems as if the feminization of this show emphasizes the way that consumption can create a better employee further tying together this theory of false identity categorization. So, while the culture industry works to disarm creativity and limits expression, rendering all media production to that of the consumer to enjoy and the employee to purchase, makeover TV is a case in which this industry takes a gendered approach in using the false sense of creativity that fashion promises to welcome women to serve as cogs in the culture industry machine.

Introducing Wilson’s Lets Talk about Who’s Got Bad Taste, allows us to further dive into the way that the culture industry works to reinforce media consumption through an industrial lens; however, Wilson revises this argument to understand how the management of different tastes again provides an illusion of creativity and individuality. Wilson’s piece, informed by the works of Pierre Bourdieu, argues that what people consider to be good and bad taste do not exist objectively as a result of the quality of media, but rather as an amalgamation of social, cultural, and economic capital. He puts this idea in conversation with the way that our society has shifted to one influenced by neoliberalism, globalization, and multiculturalism, but ultimately still finds the distinction of taste as a product of capital.

Within Wilson and Bourdieu’s works there is an idea that the producers of media create pieces that are produced for your economic level, meaning that within the realm of media, there is something different for all. This makes one dependent on the media you consume to reinforce your economic, social, and cultural categories. This agrees with the mechanisms of culture industry in which there is a severe lack of real choice when it comes to media consumption, for we can’t enjoy art and media for its own sake but rather for the sake of corporations that have economic stake in what is produced. Wilson focuses on the kinds, types, and varieties of media that we actively chose to ingest, but pushes that those choices do not exist without the context in which they were produced saying “the argument is that the kinds of music and sports we choose, and how we talk about them are socially shaped- that the cultural filters and concepts that guide my interests in and reactions to music, clothes, films or home decoration come out of my class and field (Wilson 93). But, this method of socially informed consumption is not solely due to the choices of consumers, for “[c]orporations and culture makers pursue it as much as individuals do. It changes attributes in different milieus” (Wilson 93). Corporations and consumers work together in this system to reinforce what has the culture industry has offered. How we interact with these offerings is a reflection of what is considered to be taste. This systematic nature is further enforced by the fact that one cannot escape this system. Adorno & Horkheimer echo this saying “Something is provided for all so that none may escape; the distinctions are emphasized and extended. The public is catered for with a hierarchical range of mass-produced products of varying quality, thus advancing the rule of complete quantification. Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type (Adorno & Horkheimer 2). Here we see that while Adorno & Horkheimer talk about how mass production disproves the idea of choice, Wilson argues that the choices of we make to consume that been mass produced media is socially constructed and in turn, informs our taste.

An example of the way Wilson’s critique provides a contemporary example of the choices we make when consuming mass-produced media is the way that today, high taste is classified as one who can have both common and exclusive tastes, and in doing so they are considered globalized and well-cultured. He describes this as being omnivorous in how “the coolest thing for a well-off and well-educated person to do is consume some high culture along with heaps of popular culture… But nobody is a true omnivore. To have taste at all means to exclude” ( Wilson 98). This distinction in how taste can be nuanced by the choices you make, but these choices are still working within a system that limits the offerings to which media you can consume. This echoes the way that Makeover Tv as described by Ouelette, uses individual choices to create a better fitting neoliberal employee. In all, the emphasis of choice in both makeover tv and the development of personal taste are negotiated within a system that the culture industry has provided. Mass produced media that holds the interests of corporations and business strategies rather than artistic expression creates an industry of culture in which our choices work to form our place within society as a consumer and employee and further solidify this place through the formation of high and low taste.