In the middle of a discussion on authenticity in marketing, I think of the Target poster from Judith Levine’s ‘Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping’ and smile to myself –
The job of consumer culture… is to blur the line between need and want. A poster for Target Stores… plays explicitly along this line. The picture is an Exquisite Corpse-like photomontage of a woman’s head, the upper half of which is a lampshade of ivory satin… a bit of twenty-first century Victorian kitsch. “The lampshade you need,” the copy says. The lower half of the montage is the woman’s face from bridge of nose to sly smile to slender throat, around which is tied a small scarf in a Fiftyesque green and white circle pattern: “The scarf you want”… It is hard to say which is practical and which frivolous, the scarf or the lampshade. We cannot see the model’s eyes, but she is winking at us. For both Target and the consumer know that… almost nothing that is advertised is actually necessary.