Obsolescence and Desire: Fashion and the Commodity Form. By Gail Faurschou

Much is consumed today to achieve a social status; a life style in which we believe will fulfill our desires. However, these desires embedded within us are not our personal desires at all, but the desires in which society has led us to believe are our own. For example, Ralph Lauren is marketing his line of “total environment”, a line of all home essentials as a system of objects, which in turn grants one with Ralph Lauren’s perfect life. Why do we associate objects with a lifestyle? When the consumer purchases a commodity, it is not the commodity as an object which temporarily gratifies the consumer. Instead it is the symbolic meaning of the commodity, its symbol in our media smothered society which gratifies us, and temporarily makes us happy. The symbolic meaning of the commodity “describes the void, the locus of the relation, in a development which is actually a way of not experiencing it, while always referring to the possibility of experience.” It makes no difference in our minds if the commodity is physically present to us at all. The mere awareness that we own the commodity, or are in the possession of the symbolic meaning of the commodity, is what triggers our gratification, and is what is used to strategically market the tangible product.