Not Another Teen Marketing Study

An old review I penned in 2005, originally published by the in-house magazine of a large Filipino bookstore chain. There are plenty of Filipino-centric references, but hopefully the context should be obvious enough for international readers to understand.

For many twentysomethings, the idea of being a kid started with "Pepsi... 7-Up!" on the roadside, and ended with our first (measly) paycheck, via Game & Watches, inuman sessions, and cramming for mid-terms. For better or worse, things seem decidedly more complex for those born after the '86 EDSA uprising. Like so much else in life, the concept of youth has been redefined dramatically, in the last few decades or so. If you believe philosopher Francis Fukuyama, mankind has reached the so-called "end of history", with the spread of liberal democracy, and the rise of a global market economy. One side effect of these hyper-mobile capital flows has been the increasing focus on kids as consumers.

In various ways, "tweens", high schoolers, and college undergrads have each become discrete target markets for a surprising range of goods and services, from cellphone plans to racy underwear. There are now marketing gimmicks devised to separate teens from their spending money. But how do these media-savvy young adults buy into -- or resist -- the lure of the consumer world? That's what Alissa Quart hoped to answer when she penned Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers (2004).

More like pop journalism than scholarly work, Quart's book reads like a collection of well-researched, critical magazine articles. She avoids using too many dull statistics and complex, ivory-tower economic theories. Instead, she relies mostly on interviews and first-hand anecdotes to illustrate how the values of branding and corporate identity have made their way into various facets of adolescent life, from teen designer clothing lines, to movies that encourage reckless shopping as therapy.

Her work gives readers an insider's view of the youth culture industry. Quart interviews brand managers and their trend-setting "teen advisors". She meets with guiltlessly self-promotional young authors. She even reports on a marketing conference held just days after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US, when the somber mood threatened to dampen the 'celebration' of youth spending power. In the process, she exposes all the inner workings of youth branding, from promotional strategies to crass attitudes about kids' buying habits.



A lot of the examples cited are decidedly 'Western'; Quart is an Englishwoman, but her research was conducted mostly in America. Still, it's not difficult to make parallels with Filipino culture. The fuss over expensive Latina quinceanera celebrations is not so far removed from the hassles of organizing a sosyal debut party. And the stress of getting into a 'big name' university is certainly not limited to would-be applicants for Ivy League schools.

Quart is fiercely critical of corporate influence on youth culture, no doubt. But if you're hoping to read a Communist Manifesto for the Bratz set, think again. She clearly understands the appeal of cheap pop thrills for young people, steering clear of moralistic hand-wringing, as well as the dreary 'pop culture is bad' attitude of hardcore Marxian writers.

If Branded has one flaw, it's the lack of suggestions about ways to negotiate the encroachment of branding into everyday life. There are chapters titled "Unbranded" and "DIY Kids", featuring anarchist punk rockers and student radicals, who rage against the corporate machine in basement shows and campus auditoriums. But there are few other concrete proposals, if your tastes do not lean towards subculture and going organic. This is just a minor quibble, really; Quart has built a solid foundation on which other researchers can document more thorough alternatives to all this relentless consumption. (And when they do, I'll be ready to buy it.)

'Sisterhood' is Disappointing

Part I of the Traveling Pants Critique Series

In anticipation of the Traveling Pants movie sequel, I give you this series of relevant posts, culled from the archives of our previous blog.

Over the weekend, Claire and I belatedly got around to watching a pirated DVD of the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, the 2005 movie version of Ann Brasheares' eponymous young adult novel. I found it so jam packed with opportunities for pop critique that I've decided to write not one, not two, but a whole series of posts related to the movie! Most likely, I'll be addressing each main character (and the persona they represent) in detail, later on. But for now, I'd like to dissect the core themes of the film.

At this point, I think a brief summary is necessary. Basically, the protagonists are a tight-knit barkada of four teeange gal pals, living together in urban Maryland. Each one represents a different aspect of contemporary American girlhood, with identifiable personality types, demographic markers, and aesthetic sensibilities, neatly divided among each character, in a show of "food court diversity" (a one-for-each-market-segment kind of logic). Near the beginning of the film, they make a routine stop at a neighborhood thrift store and find a pair of jeans that somehow manages to fit them all perfectly -- an oddity, given their differing body types. Since each of them have seperate plans for the upcoming summer holidays, they decide to form a Sisterhood -- complete with its own rules and by-laws -- based on the Pants. Each girl will use the Pants for a one-week period, documenting what happens as she wears them, through hand-written letters sent along with the Pants. As summer ends, they will record their experiences on the Pants themsevles.


1) MAGIC, FATE, AND PREDESTINATION

Right away, the premise alone raises some interesting themes, not least of which is the near-magical quality of the capital-P Pants. In fact, the movie opens with loving close-ups of the Pants in detail -- the seams, the pant legs, the stitching -- as they're assembled via an old-school sewing machine. No human operator is shown, as if the Pants are threaded by the cosmic hands of Ariadne or the Fates (appropriate, considering the prominent Greek lineage of Lena, one of the main characters). It's a very mythical image, one that's comfortably removed from the squalid working conditions of laborers in the contemporary garment manufacturing industry. (You know, teenage girls just like main characters, but in "developing" parts of the world, toiling in sweatshops or Export Processing Zones; people who are restricted from crossing national borders as freely as the pants they make.) Indeed, the Pants have no visible label, nor is any brand name ever mentioned, so it's left as a deliberate mystery for the audience to make their own guesses about where the Pants travelled from.

Screenwriter Delia Ephron -- who has a reputation for penning "chick flicks" like Hanging Up, as well as magic-is-real fare like the 2005 remake of Bewitched -- just reinforces these mythical connotations. In fact, skeptical would-be rebel Tibby declares that it's "scientifically impossible" for the Pants to fit each of them so well.

Furthermore, the girls celebrate their new find by breaking into the dance studio where their pregnant mothers first met (during a "Pre-natal Aerobics" class in the late 80s, natch) thus sealing the bond that would make them friends since pre-birth. Now, this aspect of fate and predestination might seem a little creepy, especially for those of us who prefer our relationships more flexible and not quite so unconditional. But the characters never let it show. In fact, they solemnly light a bunch of candles, as if taking part in some Druidic rite, drafting up rules that will seal their bond to each other. The Pants become the vessel of their union -- a physical symbol (or fetish?) of their Sisterhood.





2) "CREATIVE CONSUMPTION"

Okay, so if the film won't address the production of the Pants, it fares slightly better at dealing with how they are consumed. That is, depicting the shared ways that the girls make use of the jeans.

The Pants transcend their immediate use value. Of course, they're worn as clothing. (Duh.) But they also function as a "talisman" of sorts for improving the girls' self-image. They show off late-bloomer Lena's body, or flatter Carmen's curvy, half-Puerto Rican frame.

Furthermore, like the agimats worn by folk Catholics and provincial bad-asses, the arrival of the pants seems to bestow the wearer with the possibility of reversing their personal fortunes. I won't cite examples without issuing a prior spoiler warning, so I'm not going to detail any specific events, at the moment. For now, let's just say that the screenplay regards the Pants as a good luck charm, a probability-skewing fuck-you to the "good sense" of rational/empirical thought.

However, the most interesting use of the Pants is to jumpstart the girls' self-awareness of their own personal narratives. Since they are required, per the verbal laws of their own Sisterhood, to document their lives while in possession of the Pants, the garment serves as a kind of catalyst to the protagonists' efforts to become more self-reflexive. Perennially driven go-getter Bee realizes that she can't always get what she wants. Withdrawn, artistic Lena begins to take control over her life. Carmen starts to vocalize her bottled-up resentment at her deadbeat father (in paricular) and blithe attempts to disregard her racial identity (in general). Sarcastic, mistrustful Tibby learns how to open up to people outside her immediate social circle. The rules of the Sisterhood force them to articulate -- and then act upon -- their individual social positions. (I suspect that Tibby and Carmen, at least, have the potential to be moderately interesting zinesters.)

By the end of the movie, the Pants have been customized and altered (through embroideries, scrawled notes, and other embellishments) to reflect the events that lead to the breakthroughs experienced by the protagonists. Their shared coming-of-age narratives have been literally written onto the fabric that holds the Sisterhood together, "transcending" the Pants' initial purpose as a mere vintage retail item.

I seriously doubt that feminist writer Hélène Cixous had something quite so, um, cheesy, in mind when she conceptualized the idea of "Écriture féminine". But admittedly, this does support the basic mission Cixous laid forth in her essay, "Laugh of the Medusa":

"Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies."

By inscribing their life experinces onto a shared piece of clothing, the Sisterhood are effectively reuniting their bodies with their personal histories.


3) COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY

As the Pants are shipped from girl to girl, the audience is shown the garment in transit via global courier service. Their journey is mediated by routing numbers, computerized order forms, and barcode scanners. Thus, the Sisterhood is facilitated by the presence of a transnational network of digital communications technology; without the mobility afforded by these innovations, the Sisterhood would not be as strong as it is.

And yet, these are not gizmos usually associated with young bougie/burgis technophiles (e.g. instant messagenger services, online journals, or texting). They're large-scale communications infrastructure projects being used to relay the most traditional kind of correspondence: letters hand-written on stationery, pages from journals, and so forth.

This is the happy face of what sociologist Manny Castells refers to as the "network society" -- one in which communications technology allows networks of people to maintain fundamental human relationships across the borders of geography and national citizenship. As Castells observes:

“Technological revolutions are all characterized by their pervasiveness, that is by their penetration of all domains of human activity, not as an exogenous source of impact, but as the fabric in which such activity is woven.”

Indeed, the connection between technology and human interaction is a theme explored further in Tibby's individual story arc. So i'll get back to that, once I deal with her sub-plot, in detail. For now, let's move on to...




4) GIRL BONDING

I decided to watch ...Traveling Pants, primarily in comparison with other films that deal with bonding among single-gender groups of friends. For the boys, it's stuff like Dead Poets Society, Stand By Me, or even recent fare like The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Among the young ladies, there's Strike!/All I Wanna Do, Coming Soon, Sugar & Spice, and Bring It On.

One thing that struck me about the Sisterhood is how formally they regard their bond. Granted, even guys like the "Charolastras" from Y Tu Mama Tambien had their verbalized codes of honor -- basically, permutations of "bros before hos". But I felt it was a little odd that the Pants girls willingly adapted a kind of "ten commandments" for the Sisters to follow. Of course, as a twentysomething straight dude, I may have been misreading how seriously they viewed these rules. Indeed, Carmen describes it as more like "a manifesto" or a charter than a set of operating procedures. But even that seemed a bit unneessary, given that the Sisterhood is an open group (as opposed to, say, the Daughters of the American Ravioli from Strike, who were essentially a covert rebel militia, in addition to being good friends).

Nevertheless... the candles, the pledging. It all seemed a bit too ritualistic, like a proto-sorority rather than a bunch of friends enjoying each others' company. In any case, I'm pretty sure i'll have more to say about this, once I begin writing about the individual characters' narratives.