Virtual[ly] Real[ity]
Fake it till you make it
“From lies to forgeries the step is not so long, and I have written technical essays on the logic of forgeries and on the influence of forgeries on history” — Umberto Eco
The expression “Fake it till you make it” belongs to hallowed halls of clichés; it suggests that by imitating confidence, competence, and an optimistic mind-set, a person can realize those qualities in their real life and achieve the results they seek. The phrase has been bandied about since the seventies, a decade of relentless optimism in which anything seemed possible and the affluence generated by post-war reconstruction and subsequent economic growth offered new possibilities for social mobility. The spread of mass consumerism and education, and the role played by new media in popularizing cultural and political debate among previously uninvolved social groups, meant that both men and women no longer felt obliged to follow fixed steps, i.e. a family with marriage and children as the only possibility of social legitimisation. In the New Thought philosophy, the Law of Attraction is a pseudoscience based on the belief that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences into someone’s life. A central concept of the movement is to “act as if you already have it”. Of course, while you can feign confidence, there comes a point where faking it crosses over to the dark side and becomes an out and out lie. Partly as a result of social media, the lifestyles of the rich and famous are more visible than ever before — including anything and everything from fashion, to travel and interiors; with even the most refined designers, dealers and collectors posting carefully curated shots of their public and private lives. Similarly the media seems fixated on identifying new “trends”, spewing lists of “what’s hot and what’s not” so as to placate those big brands that are keeping them afloat with advertising revenue. In turn this has resulted in an incredibly warped idea of what constitutes normality, both in terms of fashion and the home and as a result people are increasingly turning to fakes and knock-offs so as to project a certain aspirational image. This is happening across the board, and in terms of interiors for e.g. Jean Royère (1902-1981) simply didn’t produce enough Ours Polaire (or “polar bear”) sofas to fill the number of LA McMansion’s in which they are frequently seen photographed.
“Ours Polaire” sofa, fabric, oak (c. 1950) by Jean Royère, a designer often perceived as outside of the modernist trajectory ascribed to twentieth-century design; Image c/o Phillips
The home of Jean Royère, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Paris (1947); Image from the book “Jean Royère” by Jacques Lacoste and Patrick Seguin
Fashion website Dress X describes itself as “reinventing multi-brand fashion consumption for an audience looking to fulfil a different type of need—constant fashion newness for their online personality”. Essentially it provides “digital versions” of physical fashion; shoppers can purchase garments in the form of an image of themselves wearing the item, and then upload the image on Instagram along with the other 360 million #OutfitOfTheDay posts. There’s an increasing demand for fashion “consumption” for the sole purpose of digital content creation, meaning that for these “consumers” purchasing and physical ownership is at least partially redundant; this is phenomena already resulting in the growing “purchase, Instagram, return” trend (a habit which, according to a Barclaycard survey, nearly ten percent of Britain’s are guilty). The concept of spending real cash on digital-only clothing is familiar to online gamers. Epic Games’ Fortnight for e.g. which has more than 350 million users, reportedly rakes in £215 million a month selling “skins” — something which big brands including Gucci, Marc Jacobs and Valentino are now trying to capitalize on. (Of course the same rules of tact and diplomacy apply to the virtual realm as they do in the real world; in March this year Riccardo Tisci, Burberry’s chief creative officer, designed two exclusive “skins” for tech giant Tencent — a partnership that was subsequently suspended following the British fashion brand’s comments on cotton sourced in the Xinjiang region, which did not sit at all well with its Chinese target audience.) “In my dream world people will only wear clothes because of their functionality,” says Gala Marija Vrbanic, co-founder of Croatian digital fashion house Tribute Brand. “You will have a couple of uniforms in your wardrobe and wear AR glasses to see someone’s style.” Whilst, arguably, virtual clothes (when one considers not only the final project, but the design and sampling process) offer a more sustainable solution to “fast-fashion” behemoths Boohoo and others, it does, at the same time, sound somewhat bleak, and cannot in any way make up for the physical, visceral experience of choosing and wearing clothes, their tactility, smell and the feeling they impart on the wearer.
Interior designers such as New York based Andre Mellone are leading the trend for mid-century furniture, used to great effect in the Park Avenue apartment of Alexandre Birman, image c/o Studio Mellone
The same Matrix-esque digital takeover can be seen in the art world, with improbable amounts of money being spent (or laundered) on purely digital Non-Fungible Token (“NFT”) artists. Most notably digital artist Mike Winkelmann’s (b. 1981) Everydays — The First 5,000 Days sold at Christie’s for a hallucinatory $69,346,250; placing Winkelmann — also known as “Beeple” — among the top three most valuable living artists (ranked behind only Jeff Koons (b. 1955) and David Hockney (b. 1937)). Though after a string of high-profile sales in February and March, the market for NFT’s is already showing signs of cooling, with prices plummeting nearly 70%, from a high of $19.3 million in the second week of March. NFTs represent unique digital objects sold on the blockchain, transforming widely disseminated GIFs or JPGs into valuable collectibles. Artists who have never even had a gallery show — let alone a Museum retrospective — are suddenly making hundreds of thousands of pounds for the sale of their art. You’re quite possibly one of the 881 million people who have seen the “Charlie bit my finger” video on YouTube — the most watched viral video of all time; now, the Davis-Carr family, who own the video, are auctioning the 14-year-old clip off as an NFT, before deleting the original from YouTube forever.
Whilst granted, more people are now talking about art than ever before, somewhat dispiritingly the conversation is becoming less about the art and more about the transaction. “The people bidding $15 million for Beeple’s work at Christie’s aren’t traditional art collectors. They are people who have made money through cryptocurrency,” Robert Norton, the chief executive and co-founder of NFT art company Verisart, told Artnet News. “Artists like Beeple and FEWOCiOUS are very well known to their community, because they have had a significant dialogue.” Of course, arguably, the Beeple’s of today might be the Warhol’s of tomorrow. There were, after all, those critics and detractors who saw Pop Art as decadent, immoral, anti-humanistic, even nihilistic; an affront to all those who had supported the technical and aesthetic values of Abstract Expressionism. Clearly NFT’s are in a league of their own, and whilst personally I can think of numerous non-digital-works on which I would rather spend $70m, it is, essentially, a problem for the 0.001% (Francis Bacon’s portrait of George Dyer (1977) has been on my Christmas list for some years now, still with no takers). At least in part due to the pandemic, virtual fashion is fast moving from the fringes to the mainstream — and whilst clearly more affordable than it’s art world equivalents, prices are not at all insignificant; Tribute Brand for e.g. sells basic items for £30, but scarcer, limited runs, sell for anything up to £700.
Study designed by Alyssa Kapito in a two-story house in Rockleigh, New Jersey, the sort of elegant, refined interior spurring the trend for Jeanneret furniture, photograph by Stephen Kent Johnson/OTTO
There have always been fakes and forgeries in the fashion and art worlds respectively; Alessandro Michele at fashion brand Gucci has even gone as far as to embrace bootleg culture, showing “Fake Gucci” t-shirts, with a logo based on 1980’s counterfeits. So as to combat the problem of “replica” furniture, the UK government extended the period of protection for designs deemed “artistic” until 70 years after the death of the creator. In essence, that means the entire oeuvre of canonical twentieth century design. Yet, despite this, every other “lifestyle influencer” seems to have an apartment full of Pierre Jeanneret (1896-1967) “office chairs” and Serge Mouille (1922-1988) light fittings; in the case of the former, it’s highly doubtful someone renting a Victorian maisonette in Zone 3 has splashed upwards of £6000 on an original. Those buying such pieces are unlikely to care about authenticity, provenance, or patina, they’re merely “doin’ it for the Gram” — as by portraying a vague approximation of the sort interiors seen published in glossy magazines they’re able to lure followers, and PR agencies, with the aim of being paid to promote candles, fast-fashion and home accessories. So how long will it be before people pay to have one of Royère’s whimsically rotund Ours Polaire sofas digitally imposed into their sitting room? One would think the iconic French designer had been rolling them off a production line; yet Paris dealer Patrick Seguin (who, with Jacques Lacoste, has published two volumes on Royère), estimates that between 1947 and 1967 there were only around 150 polar-bear pieces ever made (Unlike other iconic mid-century styles, there has never been an authorized re-edition). Advertisers have always know that “image is everything”, and for a growing number of people, from social-media-influencers, to interior designers, seemingly it’s all that matters. With advances in graphics and technology, one has to wonder, at least in the digital realm, the point at which we will no longer able to distinguish reality and artifice; virtual models such as Lil Miquela and Shudu, for several years now, have been making serious money staring in luxury fashion campaigns — so it’s quite possible that in the pages of Elle Decor, Wallpaper and World of Interiors we might start to see entirely virtual interiors.