Emotions, Consumption, and Feeling Good in Cute Dresses

This week’s reading, “Emotions, Imagination, and Consumption,” by Eva Illouz is an interesting argument to apply to our screening of Project Runway.

            Illouz premises her article on the idea that “commodities themselves are not so much material objects as they are cultural meanings that in turn provide access to emotional categories and experiences,” and she goes on to outline the specific ways in which emotion can be used to explain the cognitive and cultural practice of consumption.  Among these is “a positive or negative attitude towards a specific object” – in essence, consumers purchase objects because they like them, and they like the feelings and experiences they render. 

            A common argument I notice across several episodes of Project Runway and its various knock-offs is that the designs created for the show are not meant for the “average buyer” and that contestants should not be creating outfits appropriate for the patron of the local Nordstrom Rack.  This is where Illouz’s invocation of Bordieu seems most appropriate – high fashion caters to the tastes of the ultra-wealthy elite, with no connection to the product available to the middle class.  And yet, in this particular episode of the series, the contestants are asked to design high fashion through their reliving of childhood emotions – their deepest secrets and motivations played out on a runway that probably has no bearing on the circumstances in which they were raised.  There is a deep-seeded contradiction in that these designs must also be appropriate to specific circumstances, i.e. the twentysomething socialite meeting up with friends at the trendy urban nightclub, and the designers are asked to imagine these scenarios.

            This is where the limitations of Illouz’s argument seem to be the most visible.  Postmodern consumption, which Illouz links to others’ discussion of conspicuous consumption in the 16^th century, “entails a painstaking process of self-fashioning through commodities” and is less about the usefulness of commodities than the way consumers feel when they own them.  These emotions seem arbitrary and superficial to some extent – it doesn’t matter how the designer intended the dress to be worn, but how the person wearing the dress feels in it.  These emotions, according to Illouz, propel consumption as it exists in capitalist systems today – but how does this argument relate to other circumstances?

            The example that comes to mind most easily with Illouz’s argument is the Depression Era and the Dust Bowl that deeply affected the economy of the Heartland in the 1930s – specifically, the rise of the “feed-sack dresses” as fashion of circumstances.  The purchase of food for livestock became not only a means to propel the rural economy through production, but also a means to clothe the body, which, as Illouz points out, is a crucial element of personal comportment and self-identity.  The provenance of these dresses evokes emotions of poverty as well as resilience, and while they are not commodities in themselves, they are reiterations of a commodity with various uses.  For me, this example would suggest that emotion goes beyond the actual purchase of the commodity and is, in certain economic circumstances, entirely linked to usefulness as well as personal attachment.