Op-Ed: Phoebe Philo Does Not Exist

In his seminal 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard posited that in our postmodern world we no longer live in reality – meaning, we do not process our world directly and immediately, but in hyperreality – a world created by and mediated through a system of signs and symbols. In other words, we live in a simulation – via screens, through social media, soaked in a semiotic system created by the vast leisure industry – entertainment, news, advertising, and so on. The simulacrum of reality makes the direct experience of reality impossible because our brains are so full of received messages that we are only able to process and reference reality through them – like a twenty-four-hour Disneyland (or the Matrix), or like a 1:1 scale map overlaid onto the real world.

To drive his point further, in 1991 Baudrillard wrote three articles about the first Gulf War: The Gulf War Will Not Take Place, The Gulf War Is Not Really Taking Place, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Of course he did not mean that there was no military action happening in Kuwait; what he argued was that our only experience of the war was through a narrow channel of highly mediated messages that have only tenuous relationship to the reality on the ground. For all we know the war could’ve been staged, like in the 1997 movie Wag the Dog. In the film, the government decides to create a fake war for television, filmed in a Hollywood studio, in order to divert public attention from a sex scandal involving a sitting president.  

Luxury fashion, which carpet bombs our lives through omnipresent systems of signs and symbols created by its vast marketing apparatus and influencer industrial complex, actively participates in creating a hyperreality, and, as you will see below, the Phoebe Philo brand is its latest incarnation.

In reality most people no longer experience luxury fashion, because they have no frame of reference of what luxury is, since, with very few exceptions, the standards of quality and craftsmanship have deteriorated so much for so long. We only experience luxury fashion by being told what it is by the luxury companies, which substitute symbols of luxury, of which the logo is the main one, for luxury itself. In her book Deluxe, the fashion journalist Dana Thomas argues that the luxury fashion brands “have shifted the focus from what the product is to what it represents.” And their customers have followed. “Consumers don’t buy luxury branded items for what they are, but for what they represent,” she writes. In other words, most so-called luxury fashion is a simulacrum. Materials – fake (“cashmere” is low-grade stuff that wouldn’t pass muster twenty years ago). Craftsmanship – fake (“Made in Italy” mostly means made in China and finished in Italy). Messaging – totally fake, as in, paid for. And now we have a fake Phoebe Philo brand, bankrolled by – who else – the emperor of fake luxury, Bernard Arnault.

To be sure, somewhere (presumably) in London a person named Phoebe Philo lives, and she probably designs clothes, too. But at this point all that exists for us is an empty website that asks that you sign up for updates, an empty Instagram account with 240,000 followers, and a slew of hysterical Instagram stories and fashion media articles that fan the flames of hyperreality, like the one that came out recently in the Wall Street Journal, that depicts adult women sending themselves into the kind of raptured frenzy about expensive cashmere sweaters normally reserved for their daughters anticipating a new Taylor Swift album.

When the Phoebe Philo collection comes out this fall, it will be revealed not in real life but through images – simulacra – and will be sold online, a hyperreal way of shopping. No one will have any direct contact with the clothes – arguably the only piece of reality here – until they will get a box at their home. Until then, no one will know how the materials feel, how the garments fit, or their true colors. We will not get an insight into Phoebe Philo’s work process, because she does not give interviews. We will never really know who designed the collection, how it was designed, and what it really looks like. The entire thing is a simulation. The Gulf War did not take place. Phoebe Philo does not exist.