How the Media Helps us to Define our Lives
The picture above is of screenshots from one of KB Bank’s recent advertisements. Here is the video itself:
I write the post title that I did, because when I saw a similar “KB 카드” advertisement on the subway a few days ago, it instantly reminded of this quote:
In the end, design can even be the place where art and commerce both meet meet metaphysics. It is, after all, mostly by the sum of what designers produce that we understand ourselves to be living in a particular time. Nature is so slow to change that we can hardly grasp the flow of things. It is the world we manufacture that shows us how time passes. “Then” was when things looked that way. Now is when they look this way. Here are people making that way go this way.
That was from the end of the introduction to “The Look of the New“, a segment on designers from the July 17th 2000 edition of Time Magazine. It’s in that sense that I mean “how the media helps us to define our lives,” although that sentiment didn’t really resonate with me when I first read it, back when I was a youthful and innocent 24. In hindsight, maybe age has everything to do with it, because now that I’ve passed 30, I do.
Basically, when I saw the ad a few days ago, I thought “Finally, here is an ad with a distinctive 2000s style.” Sure, that sounds very cheesy, almost like something an advertising executive would come up with him or herself to sell virtually any product. But admit it: most of us can readily identify something as being “sooo nineties” or eighties or whatever, but 2000s…? I think it’s only just beginning to emerge. Personally, I’ve lived only in Korea in the 2000s, and to me that ad was one of the first I’ve seen which, looking back at years from now, I don’t think I’d ever confuse with something from the 1990s.
In hindsight, maybe the “signifiers” of a decade always do emerge in the latter half of it. Just watch season 1 of Friends sometime for instance - it’s hard to believe the hair, the clothes, hell, even the style of apartment are all from as late as 1994.
Anmway, here’s some more print ads in the campaign to show you what I mean. Click on any of them to get wallpaper-sized versions:
Despite what people may think, I don’t like the ads just because most of them have Lee Hyori in them, although I admit that she certainly helps. Hence, I like this that one with 비/Rain in it almost as much, and I detest pretty boys like him:
Finally, it wouldn’t be Korea in Winter 2007/2008 if an ad campaign with an attractive woman in it didn’t also feature some with her in a miniskirt too. But after writing about what will be the new, sophisticated standard for the blog in this post, kudos to me for sticking to it and saving the best for last not putting this ad up first, yes?
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Another interesting linkage in the article you linked to in Time is this:
“Change for its own sake also helped generate the annual couture collection, which led in turn to style crazes and recreational shopping, which led in turn to fashion victims, but that’s another story.”
Which led me to look what Wikipedia defines as a “fashion victim” and lo and behold:
Case in point: the Louis Vuitton Speedy Bag, which Lime and I have been calling the “Three Minute Bag” (I think it’s actually a netizen term) since you can’t fail to see one within at least three minutes of the last during any outing in Seoul. (At least, when in transit, this has proven to be absolutely true, and we more often count upwards of 6 or 8 in a single normal, not-jammed-full subway car.)
Ack,
My point being that the issues you mention probably have something to do with the relatively higher degree of fashion victimhood that is observable here.
Or maybe it’s because I’m from the prairie, and people are so much less fashionable here? (I saw a lot of fashion victimhood among my undergrads in Montréal as well, as I smirked at them going to class — even my class — in what looked like disco gear, and so on.)
There’s also something to do with “uniforming” that’s interesting here, to me. It’s even more pronounced in Japan, I think, but is widespread here in its way. A Chinese exchange student I know remarked that among young Chinese women, the baseball cap is seen as part of the female Korean student’s “uniform”, which got me to thinking about miniskirts in winter and so on.
Fashion-as-uniform does have roots here in militarization of culture (such as the old “rules” about sleeve-length by season) and the ubiquity of school uniforms isn’t all: foreign profs constantly remark on how odd it is to see Korean professors constantly in black suits of essentially the same cut day in and day out — as if they’re government bureaucrats or salespersons, or, for that matter, Rain in the image above. (And sometimes I wonder if all the using of microphones in tiny rooms where one is unnecessary isn’t a prop of authority too.) Even relatively well-dressed Western profs look like radicals on the days they wear sweaters and cords.
Ramble, ramble. I think this is more related to other posts, as well, but I’m gonna leave it here, since it was the Time link here that triggered all that.
Hmmm.
That is much more related to other posts, but I’m quite happy to get any comments at all for this post so I’ll keep yours here if I may! I must say, I’m quite surprised at how much attention my light-hearted, forgettable next post has received - written on a lazy Sunday - whereas personally I think this one is much more interesting and my points much more open to debate.
But back to your comments (sorry). I haven’t personally seen any Louis Vuitton bags in Busan for a while, but then I haven’t been looking, and few young(ish) people are commuting with me at 1:30 or 10pm. But your points about fashion victimhood and especialy “uniforming” are well taken, and in hindsight how else to regard the wearing of miniskirts by so many women in winter? By coincidence, the only similar case I can think of is under-16s boys and girls at my high-school in NZ (13-17/18 in NZ) being forced to wear shorts and skirts in what could be quite miserable and chilly winters sometimes, whereas older students of either sex could wear trousers. And in hindsight, I’m amazed that parents would tolerate it…I’m not going to have my children freezing in the winter like that.
I’m not sure what you mean by microphones in small rooms…do you mean loudspeakers for announcements? In which case I completely agree, and am confronted with it on a daily basis, as my bosses at my hagwon repeat the samed essentially useless demands and exhortations at the end of every single class, keeping tired, hungry, bored students from their breaks and/or escaping home. I still can’t see how saying the same things to them for 5 minutes every hour serves any useful purpose other than a reminder of the bosses’ authority.
[...] over-analysing it when I say that, to me, this recent ad of Kim Tae-Hee’s (김태희) is another example of a distinctive “2000s” style, but then that would hardly be new for [...]
I’m 21 and I can recall adoringly watching Star Trek re-runs in my teens. Back then I was absorbed by basically all the elements in it.
Last year or so I got hold of a season of Voyager and, with much excitement started watching it. However, it came accross as superficial and cheesy. The underlying philosophy/morality/stuff, if you will, reflected the preppy, (unrealistically?) philanthropic beliefs of the time period in which ST was produced.
While I am cynical, this fundamental factor, highlighted how OLD it is, and I could only watch it for sentimental value before thinking “this is soooo unrealistic, who thinks this way?”
So anyhow this unnecessarily long anecdote from probably the youngest reader here, is to ask to what extent mindsets, philosophies and popular beliefs about the world change over time? I often thought that my high school friends exhibited an intellectual inertia, while I thought “move on, buddy!” Their “hipness” was relative to their age and upbringing. Their anoesis was actually less dynamic than the kind of psychological evolutionary process I see in some middle-aged people.
Are the youth really that unaware and stupid? Is the modern media, predominantly marketed to young people (debatable), producing stagnating thinking patterns in their audience?
I won’t take it personally ;)
Rod
Rod, thanks for your comment. And sorry if this sounds patronizing, but I’m not so sure it’s a change in mindsets, philosophies and popular beliefs and so forth as you yourself that has changed.
I’m a big Star Trek fan and was quite happy to begin an in-depth discussion of the merits of particular series and so forth, but even though Voyager was notoriously cheesey it sounds like it’s just you that’s noticing it for youself now, rather than the world having moved on.
Having said that, the original series, for instance, was definitely a product of and was revolutionary for its time, presenting a future where all races and both sexes and so forth had learned to work together in harmony without blowing themselves up in a nuclear war, and that the world is a little closer to the former rather than the latter is in no small part precisely due to pioneering programs like that (the first black-white kiss on American TV was on Star-Trek by the way). Some of the blatant social commentaries in that program seem so cheesy to us now because, well, they worked!
The Metropolitician has a great post on these issues, and why Koreans don’t seem to like Star Trek, here.
As a teenager I couldn’t watch many Star Trek episodes, be they the original or Next Generation or whatever without cringing, and now even more so, but many remain very good and relevant today, and some, like this clip, remain classics.
But the vast majority of films and programs I loved as a kid…I simply can’t watch today, because invarialbly I’m disappointed and amazed that I ever liked them in the first place. James Bond movies especially, which for obvious reasons had a special meaning for me…all atrocious (until Casino Royale of course). I’ve decided I’d like to keep the nostalgic memories rather than rewatch many things.
I’m rambling a bit sorry, so I’d better stop!