Miss World

16 May

In an article published on the Guardian website today, Sarfraz Manoor drew attention to the recent controversy in India surrounding the body shape of one of its most famous female celebrities – Aishwarya Rai. Since being pictured in Cannes, she’s drawn an onslaught of criticism from Indian celebrity press, backed up by offensive videos, blogs and comments. The source of this fury is that she appears not to have shed the weight gained during her recent pregnancy; she gave birth six months ago.

Aishwarya Rai (India Today)

Manoor quoted Show business columnist Shobhaa Dé as saying “Aishwarya is like a goddess […] She is held up as the ideal of beauty and so there is an expectation on her to look perfect at all times.” What makes this expectation so imperative that her failing to fulfil it would create such a furore? What does it mean when the popular opinion of a nation offers its critique of a woman’s figure?

In 1994 she was crowned Miss World. That India was in the midst of the economic liberalisation, begun in 1991, that aimed to bring the country fully into global economic markets, makes it easier to understand why she has become a more powerful symbol than your average movie star. She is even supposed to have been proclaimed “The most beautiful woman in the world” by Julia Roberts (herself).

We might consider that Rai’s body and beauty do not belong to her alone. Her beauty and her body shape are not just her own, but they ‘belong’ to the nation insofar as they represent it on the global stage. Her physical appearance has become irrevocably entangled with national pride. It is not a coincidence that she has been called the Indian equivalent of Kate Middleton.

Mother India – Mehboob Khan dir. 1957

In India this link between the nation and woman is particularly enduring in part due to the deification of the Nation as Mother India. Sumathi Ramaswamy has documented this in The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India, a visual history of Mother India, or Bharat Mata. The female body has been used again and again to configure and refigure popular conceptions of the shape of the Indian nation. For instance Ramaswamy’s early research focussed on the way images of Mother Tamil have been used in the conflicts between Sinhalese and Tamil communities in South India and Sri Lanka.

What makes Aishwarya Rai’s case doubly interesting is that it is framed by her pregnancy. Bharat Mata and other feminine images of the nation have always been steeped in the symbolism of fertility, not least because of the ‘Mother’ epithet. In the poster for the 1957 Bharat Mata, the body of superstar of her time Nargis is clearly not the figure of the modern Miss World.

Whilst Aishwarya Rai is expected to fulfil an image appropriate for the representative of a nation, she is no longer expected to appear outwardly ‘fertile’. This points towards a broader question to do with modern femininity. The contemporary woman is no longer reduced to child bearer, and rightly so. However if Aishwarya Rai is not allowed to appear to have had children, and is compared in the Indian press to Angelina Jolie and Victoria Beckham, what is the ideal that has filled this vacuum?

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Street Style

14 May

When someone mentions TK Maxx we immediately think of big red labels, bargain bins and rifling through rails of odds and ends as if at a jumble sale. None of these things are particularly appealing, but their new advert makes you reassess the experience with a fresh pair of eyes.

 

The advert references street photography and style blogs that turn the streets of London, Berlin and New York into catwalks for the stylish people passing by. Blogs such as The Sartorialist and photographers such as Manou are helping bring street photography to the forefront of fashion. We’ve blogged before about how adverts have utilised this more real, less Photoshopped aesthetic, and TK Maxx has managed to do this in a much more tasteful way than we expected.

The advert pulls on casual street and fashion photography in a haphazard way. It may be fussy, but this only serves to add to the eclectic nature of what the brand actually offers. The advert tells us that TK Maxx is “for the treasure seekers” and cleverly turns their hectic in-store experience into something much more exciting. Trawling through those rails is no longer a chore – it appeals to those who love vintage fairs and Brick Lane thrift shops, those who revel in finding that hidden gem. Rummaging is made to look entirely aspirational.

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Ryan Gosling is a Man

9 May

Ryan Gosling is a man, but what kind of man is he?  Ryan Gosling is a Man, but what kind of Men are we? Ryan Gosling has become some kind of ultimate signifier of masculinity in recent times. Particularly for the Tumbling classes – see here and here  and here,  oh and here.

But what is it about the man that makes him so damn compelling, and more pressingly, what does this say about modern masculinity? There is probablya book about this waiting to be written. In fact, somewhere in South East London, a Goldsmiths student is probably writing it.

We suspect the answer is to do with the way that he spans the contradictions inherent within modern masculinity. There have been Lads, and Metrosexuals and now there is Ryan Gosling. He is a chauvinist and a feminist at exactly the same time. Or at least this is the image the world has of him.

Ryan Gosling in Drive (guardian.co.uk)

In truth it is an image that is made up from his  roles rather than any true insight into the man’s personality.  Drive is a case in point, he loves kids, and he also loves idealising/ogling women in a slightly creepy way and smashing heads.  Half Nelson and Blue Valentine are further examples of the way that he has played roles that are both lovely and hateful at the same time. You could probably make this  point about Lars and The Real Girl too (lovely loser with a plastic woman as a lover – sure.) It probably helps that his second name is also the name of a baby animal. There is nothing Tumblr likes more than a baby animal.

Like Brad Pitt before him – with his  recurrent role as a dreamy lover and a man with a mental problem – we think we’re obsessed with the celebrity when in fact we’re obsessed with the characters he’s played. Film is the only arena  into which society can effectively project the ideals of men and women that cope with the oppositions that real life presents us with; whilst also allowing us to find them incredibly good looking.

In some ways this is a continuation of the Hipster Survivalism post on this  blog  a little while ago. Today, to be a man you need to be both progressive and regressive, you need to have an axe and a car, but they should probably be beautiful and vintage.

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A postcard from… Colombia

8 May

We recently visited Columbia. Here are some things we spotted…

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Golden Girls

2 May

Procter and Gamble have recently presented British Olympic hopefuls Victoria Pendleton (track cycling), Jessica Ennis (Heptathlon) and Keri-Anne Payne (open water swimming) as its new brand ambassadors. To trumpet this, the women have appeared in countless interviews, features and glossy inserts in women’s magazines. And they are presented like starlets – plucked and buffed and bronzed (by Braun, Pantene and Olay, of course) – groomed until they glow. And until they gush about how much they love waterproof mascara, how face wipes are a “must-have” and how “a touch of blusher works wonders.”

Procter & Gamble advert (Pg.com)

To us, there’s something a little sad about this. These women are incredible – they have fought hard to be at the very peak of their game. They are dedicated, tough professionals, about to take on an almighty challenge with the world watching. We’d rather hear about the sheer grit and slog it takes to get where they are, not how much they worry about their hair frizzing when it rains.

We’re used to actresses having to double as models, but we hoped that sportspeople might be allowed to appear on their own terms. We don’t need another raft of girls to look like Jennifer Aniston. As well as reducing them to beauty canvasses, it also makes them ordinary. In the P&G sponsored interviews we hear that Jessica Ennis likes nothing more than curling up on the sofa, watching Grey’s Anatomy with her Labrador.

We think we’d like these superhumans to stay super. We’re more than happy to think of them as fierce, strong and untouchable. We don’t need them to be glowing girls next door. We want them to be different to us, we think it’s marvellous that they are superior.

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Hand Made

30 Apr

We see lots of brands that boast about their artisanal and hand-made qualities. This Wallpaper* video is a fun take on it.

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When in Rome…

25 Apr

A clear occupation hazard of being part of the Cultural Insight team is turning your holidays into cultural immersions. From the moment we arrive at the airport, we begin a kneejerk process of cultural decoding – looking extra longingly at advertising on the walls, surveying spatial arrangements with a Jason Bourne-like intensity.

We have long stopped “turning off” our immersive prerogative when on vacation, and realised it’s useful practise to get the most out of a holiday experience. This time the location was Rome.  After the airport, the attention turned to how to effectively “blend in” so I could observe things more naturally.

Following the assumptions we use for our client work, we adopt some simple rules to help become more local -

• Buy a local language newspaper and display it prominently when you walk or place in on the table when you are sitting down (this creates a natural assumption by others that you are a local and is incredibly effective).
• Avoid cultural off-code colours in your appearance – in Rome there is a clear preference for earthy and classical hues (this will eliminate any visual cues that signal your foreignness).
• Adopt some default local mannerisms -  hand movements to support speech, open and confident stances, and respectful platitudes are all overt symbols of being Roman that can be easily be taken on.
• Order like a local – if you are eating and drinking what others around you are, you are unlikely to stand out.  Hint – tourists always seem to order long coffees rather than the local preference for short.

How can you tell you are getting local? A tell-tale sign of your “localness” is being asked by locals for directions – although this can sometimes lead to a sense of guilt. The worst victim on this trip was a Vespa-riding local who spotted us on the street and blurted out “How do I get to the place I want to get to”.  Unless he wanted to go to “macchiato”, “side of bread” or “that was delicious, thank you so much”, we thought it was best to fess up, however with a great sense of contentment that we’d pulled it off. 

Thinking of best practices in “being local” it is interesting to consider how Londoners will deal with deluge of visitors descending on the city for the Olympics.  Our tips on immersion will become useful for Londoners how  want to assert their localness as an intuitive defence mechanism against being other-ed in their own city. So, it’s time to brush off your flat cap, remove those consonants from “isn’t it” and crack open a can of Tennent’s Super.

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Sporting Glory

16 Apr

Sure, we live in a secular world. But we still bow to demigods. No more so than in this Olympic year when London will become a kind of Acropolis for our shimmering-skinned heroes to stride around in. Every stadium will be a temple to Athena Nike.

Nike 'Make It Count' (Nike.com)

It is fair to say that here in Cultural Insight a few of us were latecomers to sport. However, for those of us that spent their school years scared of the sports ground, we are now joining our sportier colleagues in seeking opportunities to ape our heroes in this health-minded world. Between us we’ve got aspirations to run (more) marathons, cycle up and down mountains, swim the channel and more such mythmaking activities. We’ve become fascinated by the challenge and achievement of sport. We reckon this is due more than in part to the vision of athletes and sport that is presented to us in the media.

Athletes are not just hollow kinetic sculptures of strength, but more than ever they are heroes with fatal flaws. Twitter, and other sources of rolling news and gossip, have meant that we don’t just see our heroes when they achieve, or when they hold press conferences but we hear them complain, suffer and misspeak.

Nike 'Make It Count' (Nike.com)

The recent Nike campaign shown here invited athletes to scrawl their message over these unusually composed photographs. In each they are shown clearly to suffer for their ambition, and in each they look straight down the camera. They are as vulnerable as they are powerful.

Sport is not just for sport fans – speaking about the Olympics in the office recently we all admitted our enthusiasm for aspects of sport, but none of us spoke of national pride or competition per se. Our society has become enamoured with sport for more than fitness. Whether it is the running writer Murakami, or David Millar’s thoughtful and intellectual take on cycling.

We could go on about the melodrama of Boxing, the steely epic of Formula One, the sprawling soap of Football. We could even cite the hipsterisation of American Football amongst scrawny white boys in East London, not to mention the obsession with cycling. Suffice to say, sport is a source of heroes, and today as we get unprecedented access to the athletes we admire they become ever more fascinating, and not just for those of us who wore our school kits with pride – but for the grown up versions of the children that never skipped maths but always skived off gym.

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Future Books

11 Apr

If you’ve read much of our blog, you could probably guess that one of the things that the Cultural Insight team digs is books. So the ebook thing is incredibly interesting. And not just because it lets us feel less silly when we read Game of Thrones or Hunger Games on the tube. Though the ability of the ebook to ensure that a book never challenges one’s intellectual vanity is certainly a positive.

Epaper (www.engadget.com)

Recently LG announced that it was releasing a flexible e-ink panel, reported here by engadget. Does this mean that in the future we’ll all be scrunching up sheets of e-ink and stuffing them in our pockets while we run to catch our train? The question this raises is kind of a big deal for technology right now. When we make something digital, is the aim always to return it to something that serves as an analogue for the analogue equivalent?

We think it might be a bit sad if the future only ends up looking like the past. Isn’t it exciting that the Kindle and the iPad are genuinely different forms for us to experience culture through? Of course we are taking something of a leap from this faintly flexible material which, to be honest, does slightly smack of Tomorrow’s World. But having been converted to the digital reading experience, it would be a pity if books turned back into books before we really got a chance to learn what we could do with these things that look like they come from the future.

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Craft Videos

10 Apr

 

Two beautiful videos that show the processes involved in making John Neenman tools. Watching these craftsmen practice the traditional methods of ironmongery, woodwork and leatherwork to make axes and chisels from raw materials using  - against a sound track of Bon Iver – almost brings a tear to the eye. It’s another brilliant example of craftsmanship returning to forefront of our aesthetic ideals. 

 

Along with the mini documentaries they shared on Vimeo, they posted this quote -

“It is a tragedy of the first magnitude that millions of people have ceased to use their hands as hands. Nature has bestowed upon us this great gift which is our hands. If the craze for machinery methods continues, it is highly likely that a time will come when we shall be so incapacitated and weak that we shall begin to curse ourselves for having forgotten the use of the living machines given to us by God.” Mahatma Ghandi

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