It's more Barbie...
and you might be tired of hearing about this but you know, for me,
it's only so often that hyperreality whips you in the face with a synthetic ponytail
So that said: Barbiecore is a trending fashion "look"
and fashion is fashion—not my thing, however,
I think it's significant that our copies are now invading reality.
"—Core" is a bizarre suffix that fashion people add to a word to turn it into a style
So where you might see a dress with a flower print, a fashionista sees "cottagecore"
Where you might think you see a chubby dude in a
hoodie and track pants, a connoisseur sees a fashionisto styling "Normcore"
More evidence that our world is just the ad copy for some higher one.
Barbiecore fashion, from what I can gather anyway, is a style that references Barbie toys:
bright pink, glittery, feminine,
and the Barbie core universe is about to get a lot more saturated
with the release of this summer blockbuster
"I literally go nowhere without them"
So it's worth noting though here, I've looked at a lot of Barbies
for the last video and Barbie is sold in pink sometimes for sure,
but not that much more than any other color
even the archetypical Malibu Barbie is sold wearing blue
the pink comes mainly from the logo, the packaging,
the Porsche, but in the Barbiecore mirrorverse the clothes are all pink
so if in your first thought of Barbie—your mental image—it's wearing pink...
this may actually be a planted memory
that's attributed to Barbiecore rather than to actual Barbies.
But if Barbiecore style doesn't even imitate actual Barbie clothes then what even is it?
Well I'm glad you asked.
It's a sign in a sign system.
Signs are words and images and their meanings,
yeah, but also other things and their meanings in a shared interconnected mesh
a shared-meaning-matrix
Barbie's not just a toy, it's a sign produced alongside other media
and now it influences, reciprocally, the signifying matrix that first produced it
You'd need to do some careful semiotics to understand any of this mess like:
Why is pink a girl color in the first place?
Why is it Barbiecore to wear pink when Barbie wears every colour? Even spacesuits?
And the all-important question: Why is a child's plaything an icon of femininity,
even feminism, for fully mentally-developed adults?
I'm not gonna explain semiotic theory here because I'm not getting paid by the hour
and because I already did five hours explaining it on my podcast
but suffice it to stay any individual sign here
inherits its significance from other proximate signs.
Also: meanings here do not need to be correct in order to be used,
and they're not finally decided, ever.
Words' meanings drift.
Images' meanings vary from culture to culture.
And a new sign can overcode old meanings.
For example, pink was once a boy's colour, not too long ago, 1918.
So the signs in a system are arbitrary—but, they're not random.
For this little matrix to exist, as it does today,
a bunch of events had to happen accidentally at around the same time:
Colour-processed film went mainstream, enabling the mass consumption of the colour pink,
Pink then began its shift to the feminine.
And this can't just happen once, you need to reproduce the association of
"pink" and "feminine" millions of times for it to actually become significant
Or, just show one association of "pink" and "woman" millions of times like one viral image...
Oh look, there we go!
1963 right? Well guess when the first Barbie was sold with an all pink outfit...
1964.
Barbiecore starts to make more sense when you disambiguate these exchanges.
Before moving on, let me stop me there...
Step back from all this for a second and pretend that we're alien anthropologists, just arrived.
We've shown up and are observing human behaviour at this moment.
We observe real humans and then little Idols of humans wearing the same clothes.
Surely we'd hypothesize that humans made the toys in their image, right? as little copies?
How nuts would an alien anthropologist sound to his colleagues if he proposed
that real humans dress up and put plastic in their
face to better resemble a children's toy and not the other way around?
So the hyperreal question: which comes first? Which is the copy and which is the original?
I know this seems normal to us, but when you decontextualize our cultural practices
like if you if you look at it without the sign system
it's kind of like looking in from the outside of a cult.
If the internal logic of a cult makes sense to you it's not because it's accurate or rational,
it's just because you're in it. Our culture is a culture of images
or a giant cult of the image
that's the other thing that dressing up like Barbie signifies.
And don't get me wrong here: I am pro-image cult.
I appear here as an image showing you images.
So let me spook you with some postmodernism.
Look, don't don't take anyone else's opinion on what post-modernism means
it's all I produce and I barely know what it means because it's kind of a nonsense term
That said, some part of what it means is the accidentalness when
it comes to images and signs and what they mean
Here's facts: people, en masse, have always trended towards image cults
Today, 4000 years ago, 20000 years ago
and this would have been the status quo until God showed up
Or rather, until God didn't show up, because He's invisible.
God cults want to make you worship something invisible,
something intellectual, a world of ideas.
Ideas known only through words: scripture cults.
Abrahamic God, uncaused cause, necessary being...
it's functionally the same thing, at least eventually, and the priests of this God are
priests and philosophers who traffic in "real ideas."
Though as theologians and philosophers through the ages have realized, as God has realized,
it's very difficult to keep people interested in something invisible and intellectual.
People much prefer images.
Or rather, they cannot help themselves from preferring images.
Images are way more seductive than ideas are.
Makes sense then that God has always been at war with images, since day one,
it's commandment number two: "NO IMAGES."
But the first thing that humans did when God revealed himself in
those boring words is to make an image out of him—exciting!
God as a golden cow is better than being invisible. But of course God,
was not tickled by this...
Anyway, this war lasted a couple thousand years. Many outbursts
of image makers and iconoclastic haters: Muslims, Protestants...
but all the while the images bided their time...
They stayed within the limits of the law until that law was hollowed out, from the inside.
Today, the images are winning or they've already won.
I don't know when this happened.
It has something to do with mass media production,
which is a basic material process, you know, chemicals and stuff.
Colour film, then sound, then pixels,
but however it happened and whenever it happened,
Barbiecore signifies that the Primeval Cosmic War has ended,
"Real life" imitates images, and images don't imitate "real life."
Now the priestly class—which is in the process of disappearing—or
as they like to call themselves "intellectuals," "philosophers"
—they will bemoan this event having happened. They will call it the "New Dark Age,"
diagnose it as a new mental illness... "post-modernism"
I hear them say this all the time,
and they're going to continue their rituals of writing articles and writing books—
remember they are creatures of scripture, writing, first and foremost
and yet against all their intents and purposes the images have won:
Politics is images. History is images.
Images have taken over Aesthetics which was supposed to contain them in ideas;
fence them into a more manageable state,
but they Kant be contained. That means art too, paradoxically, has been overrun by images.
A lot of nostalgists find this hard to accept.
Some of them prefer when girls are pink and boys are blue,
natural gender as God intended.
Other nostalgists prefer when institutions are respectable, stable, scriptural...
and when images bow to "morality" usually their
morality: "What should the boys and girls be allowed to see?"
This will all be insignificant soon enough...
What's called "culture war" is images fighting images,
not truth fighting falsity, or good fighting evil,
we've been seduced past that.
And sometime during all this, that tired "reality" quietly bowed out.
In the world of images and the world of people, which is now the parasite and which is the host?
I'm saying we've always got images wrong. We've always considered them to be passive,
or objects, or products, something WE made and WE have under control.
I'm getting convinced, though, that they've stopped playing by our rules.
We answer to them, morning to night, and we've long since given up on answering to each other.
We're all idolators now.
For all our humanity, and will, and power,
and intellect, our fate is not up to us anymore, if it ever was.
No "ONE" controls the images... we just react to them now, all day,
and they are absolutely indifferent to us, just like the old gods.
That's irony: the gods were in them all along... do what they say,
ignore what they say, they don't care...
Fate is fate.
Respect to the images, man, they they're there biding their time, getting beaten down,
but now they're the vehicle of almost... if not all then almost all meaning.
And the limit of human choice here is the "image" or the "idea."
Do you want to be on the winning side? Or the side
of disappearing subjects that are powerless in the face of images?
So that's my game, let me seduce you...
THESE games are more fun
I play them uh every week and explain the books they come from on patreon
...did it work? you seduced?
alright I'll catch you next time