Our humanness commodified in our obsession with ‘vintage’
The ‘old,’ ‘worn,’ and ‘analog’ capture our cultural attention. Thrifted clothing and furniture, film photography, and vinyl records are sought after as part of the concept and aesthetic of ‘vintage.’ These objects are loaded with feelings of authenticity and meaningfulness. They are subject to imperfections that make them unique, and are often imbued with the human history of their previous owners, which makes them feel more human. Our attraction to all of this makes sense, considering that all aspects of our lives are submerged in mass-produced things that feel too perfect and impersonal. Objects appear into our lives, shiny and new, and an exact replica of many, many others. No explanation for why that specific clone made it to you, no personal relationship that makes sense between it and your life. It’s repulsive, and this meaninglessness pervades the materiality of our lives. To this weariness, ‘vintage’ offers stories behind the object, of the hands that have touched it before—whether that’s how it was created, where it’s been, or who had loved it in the past. Its gleaming traits of being ‘authentic’ and ‘meaningful’ are rooted in the mode of production and the interaction and effort required by analog technologies, or mending old things, which build a relationship with the object.
However, in ‘vintage trends,’ these traits are commodified. They become feelings that the individual can attain by association with certain products—and by “association with,” I mean purchasing. By owning old, analog things, it seems like we become imbued with the feeling of authenticity and uniqueness. As a trend and a consumer pattern, a direct appreciation of the qualities of ‘vintage’ objects is distorted into a construction of our own identity through them. Our own value, and the value of our experiences, seem to be elevated through our association with them. Like how a closet full of thrifted clothes makes the wearer more authentic and unique, or how a photo taken on film makes the actual experience captured more meaningful.
This distortion is maybe clearest in mass-produced artificial replicas of the vintage aesthetic. Consider social media filters that replicate the aesthetic of film, promising that feeling of ‘realness’ for what we capture with our phones. Or fast fashion trends that make fabrics look worn to imitate a lived-in quality, offering a contentless semblance of an object with history. The authenticity and humanness that were appealing in ‘vintage’ things are thus stripped from its essence, commodified, and sold back to us. In his article, “Manufacturing Authenticity: How We Yearn for the Real and Fall for the Fake,” Martijn Visser elaborates on how the intrinsic value of personal, unique relationships to objects are commodified through mass production. Visser states “there is a blatant paradox at work […] Our desire for the real appears to be satisfied with manufactured authenticity.” He then goes on to suggest that the consumer isn’t oblivious to this artificiality—a disappointment that falls into irony towards authenticity in general.
Returning to our problem of vintage, however, even with genuinely old and worn things, we suffer from a reliance on external objects for our identity construction. When the actual human history of these objects is de-personalised and aggregated into the mere concept of authenticity, we enter into a strange relationship with objects. Having charged such objects with the feeling of being more ‘human,’ we then draw on them to feel unique and authentic ourselves. Somehow, we affirm our own humanness with material products. It’s a weird outsourcing, like our own bodily nature and individuality doesn’t cut it. Any object we interact with carries our human history, but that doesn’t seem to be enough—we want visual affirmation of it as a publicly recognisable aesthetic. Maybe it’s the intensified craving for authenticity coming from our unease with being constantly surrounded by products that are perfect copies of each other. Or it’s a distorted yearning for intentional relationships with the objects in our lives, in a time of constant consumption and disposal. Appreciating slow technologies and second-hand things makes sense as a response. Nevertheless, somewhere down the line, we fall into the trap of projecting our own humanness onto external objects. Maybe we need to recognize that our problem stems from an excess of products, and that we need to stop looking to more products for a solution.
