(Re)verberations #2: Popeliaga
On AI, Catholicism, and the relationship between fashion and power
In the opening scene of the 2022 Palm d’Or Winner, Triangle of Sadness, our melancholic model of a protagonist, Carl, is quizzed by a Scandinavian twink on walking—specifically, how to adjust one’s walk per brand. The flamboyant journalist asks Carl, who’s preparing for an audition: “is this a grumpy brand or a smiley brand?” The English himbo is confused. The journalist explains: when you walk a runway with thousand-dollar clothing, you frown; distraught with the burden of luxury. But when you model a shirt an average person on the street can actually afford to buy, you smile, letting them now you are in on the joke that is their poverty. The twink then commands Carl, and the gaggle of models assembled around him, to switch from their “smiley” looks to their “grumpy” ones. The queues are inspired:
H&M!
:)
Balenciaga!
:(
This week, the internet has been rocked by photos of Pope Francis I, dressed in an exquisitely priced $3550 Balenciaga puffer jacket. The internet was rocked further by the shocking revelation that the photo was doctored, and that the Holy Father had not, in fact, strolled around Vatican City with decadent drip. Establishment bourgeoisie media has been quick to make the story about AI and its alleged dangers, but they are missing the real meat of the matter here. “Popeliaga” is about more than technological deception. What it lays bare is not a present relationship between our collective subjectivity and our mediated simulations, but the very collapse of any distance between these experiences. All that is solid melts into memes.[1]
It is easy to think of Popeliaga as the Baudrillardian nightmare it obviously is, but look closer. If the French sociologist once notoriously remarked that “the Gulf War did not take place,” then we have now crossed beyond the pale, where the materiality of reality has become plainly irrelevant. The mediation of the Gulf War undid the fact of it having taken place, but it was naïve to think we’d stop there. The oversaturation of the simulacrum has made it so that what does not happen does happen. The Gulf War did not take place, yes, but Popeliaga did. It is, in fact, realer than any “real” event of the last 30 or so years. When the reactionary Wachowski sisters had Morpheus utter the line “welcome to the desert of the real” in the first installment of the overrated Matrix franchise back in 1999, they could not have fathomed how accurate this sentence would be as a descriptor of life in the 21st century. We are all parched for reality, desperately (doom) scrolling through our little simulation consoles for a glimpse of the world beyond. That world has been obliterated. We are already in the post-apocalypse.
Which brings us, of course, to the brand at the center of the scandal: Balenciaga. Last fall, the Spanish house made headlines for its bold and transgressive takeover of Paris Fashion Week, in which they essentially built a swamp of a runway. It was disgusting, sloppy, and one of the most transcendent fashion statements I have ever witnessed in my life. Bourgeoisie critics, of course, viciously attacked the show, heartbroken that they couldn’t get their fix of neat, unpolluted luxury. As one fool wrote: “when you think of Paris Fashion Week, you think of elegance, beauty and sophistication, but Balenciaga turned it into a s**t tip, with models tramping along through the muck like unimpressed dog walkers.” As usual, the problem is one of historicity, or the lack thereof. The images of decay and despair elicited by the mud pit were, in actuality, a public reckoning with the company’s own sordid past; a brave and profound act of self-reflexivity. The grimy, almost bodily, aesthetic of the set plainly acknowledged the ties of the founder, Cristobal Balenciaga, with the fascist Francoist regime. This is emphasized even further by their choice to have Kanye West, who has since gone even further down the far-right rabbit hole, walk the mud dressed like he is ready for the culture war he is currently waging. These evocations of militarized rot represent an exciting new frontier for the fashion world, one I hope other houses will quickly learn from.
The connection between Franco and Balenciaga brings us right back to the Pope and that complicated institution he leads; the Roman Catholic Church. Ties between the Church and the fascist regime in Spain were tight and mutually beneficial, no matter what supporters of the Second Vatican Council’s propaganda would have you believe. That bond returns in the AI generated image of the Pope donning the puffer jacket (or did it ever really dissipate?), reminding us of the circuitous relationship between power, faith, and style. As a lapsed Catholic myself, I cannot help but struggle with the image’s delicate balance between reverence and blasphemy. The only text that comes remotely close to this feat is Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ.
More than anything, however, Popeliaga reminds us that, despite all our illusions of secularism, we remain very much in the hold of the Church and its monopoly on god. All things holy remain comprehendible only through the patriarchal image of the patriarch. Why the Pope? Because how else can you sanctify the ostensible unholiness of an abomination such as Artificial Intelligence? How else do you give it the veneer of respectability, the blessing of the heavens it seems to spit at? In The Matrix, Neo can only ascend to heroism by effectively becoming Jesus. His worth, too, is incomprehensible without the Church. In this sense, Popeliaga is not merely the abolition of a post-Enlightenment hermeneutic, but the burial of any fantasy we might have hoped to yet maintain of a meaningful separation between Church and State—“state” both in the sense of nation and of affairs. The Church, personified in the supreme father, cannot be separated from our very epistemology of affect. Like the 2022 Paris Balenciaga show, or the opening scene of Triangle of Sadness from the same year, Popeliaga is revolutionary in its reckoning with that harsh fact. And yet, at the same time, it is also an insignificant marker of the so-called “secular” age’s passing; a meek wooden cross on an otherwise unmarked grave in the desert of the real.
Cinis in cinerem pulvis ad pulvis.
Horatio Fatoushccine is wust el-balad’s critic-at-large. A PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, he studies the temporalities of resistant ruptures to (post)colonial epistemic violence.
[1] See Fatoushccine, Horatio. “Theorizing Pizza Time.”