Individually Wrapped

What we consume brands each of us as the ultimate product: a Boutique Individual.

By Timothy Taylor
Illustrations by Elvis Swift

1   |   2   |   3   |   Home

When I was six years old, I went with an older cousin to look at sailboats in Fisherman’s Cove in West Vancouver. At the gas station opposite the marina, he parked his 1969 Dodge Charger and offered to buy sodas. What about one of these? He indicated his favourite: Orange Crush. I declined, although I wanted the drink. But I’d been so well indoctrinated on the evils of fast food and soft drinks that I didn’t dare indulge.

A few decades later, I understand the whole incident in terms of the microeconomics of branding. That summer day – seagulls gliding in the salty air currents above a thicket of swaying sailboat masts – Orange Crush made me a “brand promise,” an offer of membership in a tribe of guys like my cousin: Dodge Charger enthusiasts with girlfriends, puka shell necklaces and brown corduroy boot-cut Levi’s. This was my incentive to buy.

And yet the more powerful incentive to me, just on the savvy side of kindergarten, was to keep ranks with my existing tribe: my immediate family, my homemade clothes-wearing, West Coast Trail-hiking, Schubert-loving, Anglican, hyper-individualist, Tiger’s Milk-drinking family. A tribe so… unique that even now I struggle to explain it beyond saying that we were somehow taught, implicitly, to reject what was mass in culture. To be suspicious, particularly, of any identity offered to us by an ad campaign.

I relate this old anecdote because, sniffing the cultural breeze lately, I’m tempted to think that mainstream mass culture is dying. We could summarize the legion articles like this:

Ordinary people are seizing control of their own cultural experience of life, in other words. And empowered by technology (particularly bandwidth – just think of that kid in Baghdad writing his wartime blog read by millions) individuals are breaking the grip that corporations like CNN have had on cultural experience in the past. As Reed Johnson wrote in the Los Angeles Times recently: “The culture’s being boutiqued or, as the expression goes, ‘unbundled.’ ”

This would seem to read like good news, if you came from my old tribe. If mass culture suppressed individual choice and creativity with its top-down, monolithic approach, then the new decentralized, bottom-up culture should foster a new, more robust individual: a Boutique Individual, let’s say, able to distribute content, build community, and unleash personal creativity in previously unimagined ways.

Or that’s the theory, anyway. But online manifestations of boutique culture, regrettably, suggest that the identity liberated with the erosion of mass culture seems to have been primarily a consumer identity. Sure, some online communities form around a common philosophy or moral outlook. But you’ll find a lot less communities of Hegel enthusiasts than people sworn to all things, say, Helly Hansen. And this is because when Boutique Individuals describe themselves they tend to sound like highly-personalized, self-edited assemblies of consumer components.

“You see this in popular services like Friendster and MySpace,” writes culture critic Hal Niedzviecki in our e-mail exchange on the topic. “People using shared consumer archetypes to define personality: ‘I like kung fu action movies, Italian food, NASCAR and Starbucks.’ ”

1   |   2   |   3   |   Home