I BRING TOGETHER BRAND-BUILDING EXPERTISE
AND MODERN MARKETING LEADERSHIP.
I help fashion and luxury brands find
creative relevance and drive growth.
Defining their long-term market position and how they tell
their stories. Defining their point of view on culture.
This starts with leadership. Change of any sort is hard.
Defining a vision and plan demands inspiration and passion.
My unique background in fashion and luxury HAS enabled me
to build some of the most successful brands of the last decade.
WHY ARE YOU CALLED
THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE?
The writings of the Situationist Movement greatly inform my approach to brands and modern culture.
In 1967, Guy Debord published 'The Society of The Spectacle.'
A profoundly prescient book on how 'the spectacle' distorts a consumerist society.
In the Situationist's world, 'The spectacle' reduces reality to endless commodifiable fragments. Encouraging us to focus on appearances over reality. Situationists concerned themselves with reversing this "unacceptable degradation of our lives".
Detourment, their chosen means of subversion, was the result. “The integration of present or past artistic productions into a superior construction of a milieu.”
I believe we live in a golden age of detourment. Where in fact, the means of this production are in fact more powerful and meaningful than ever.
What was once a means of critiquing 'the spectacle', the spectacle is now used to critique itself.
Brands and marketing eat their tails to tell even more mad stories about themselves. Therefore, we are on the cusp of a golden age of brand marketing where the spectacle has been subverted.
Because 'truthful' stories that brands tell are all manipulations anyhow. The spectacle isn't something to destroy - it's become a space to revel in.
Therefore, great marketers unlock detourment to their advantage. Because the great brands understand they are part of that spectacle. Leveraging it, reacting to it, shaping it into their form of truth. Is in fact, the way to make the spectacle work for them.
Ultimately, detourment makes the spectacle more enjoyable for brands and consumers. Because 'the reality' doesn't exist anymore. Everything has become a spectacle. And we've come to use the spectacle to change our reality.
Take one example from a famous Situationist quote: “Sous les paves, la plage!” (Under the paving stones, the beach).
The beach is not a shared reality - but a subjective one. The beach is another dream. That dream is where modern brands
can thrive and flower.
Consumers want to dream. They want to escape. They want
their brands and products to shape those realities.
The spectacle as a tool for societal revolution is dead. The method of detourment to subvert and shape what we know and see around us is as alive and as vital as ever.