the tech perspective

I read Viscose Journal for the first time and it somehow landed me here.

Genius is beguiling. Its delusory metaphysical nature appears as magic — innovation is spontaneous; industries changed overnight by an individual’s inimitable talents. A predestined moment in time where their nature-given abilities finally manifest. I spent most of my childhood aspiring to unexplainable individuals — scientists, musicians, tv characters; their alluring predisposition for potential is still marked in parts of my mind today. Though I’m aware of the vanity in this way of thinking, I can’t help but to chase a bit of genius in everything that I do. I get lost in daydreams predicated on vague and indefinite possibilities: one day creating something that would change the world even if it was just for one person. Would it fulfil whatever numinous purpose has been waiting for me or is it just a mild case of grandiose narcissism?

I don’t think it’s wrong to want recognition or believe you are capable of more, but after years of succumbing to my ‘overachieving’ tendencies to tear even a strand of genius from the people I admire, I realise that this belief that genius falls from beyond the spiritual boundaries of space is naive. What leads someone to genius cannot be forcefully enacted or predicted, yet it takes a great amount of effort and intentionality to execute it and an even greater will to maintain it invariably. Genius is not magic or ‘ease’ but the complexity that allows it to come to fruition creates the illusion that it is — it’s mythicised. And despite the fact that I’m aware of this, I still worship it and see others do the same.

In May of 2024, my friend invited me to a screening of ‘High & Low – John Galliano (2023)’ hosted by MUBI at Central Saint Martins. Like many with an admiration for Galliano’s work, I had already formed a thesis on his infamous fall from the fashion pantheon. It’s clear that Galliano’s descent following his appointment as creative director of Dior was the result of issues deeply embedded in the skin of the fashion industry and the sentiment was reiterated by students during the director Q&A: results are favoured over the well-being of its contributors. I suspected as such; there is plenty of media that depicts a career in fashion where Anna Wintourian caricatures perpetuate the sacrifice of time and mental sanctity in service of art. But as the questions slowed, followed by a mass exit of the building as the overheated equipment causes the fire alarm to go off, I thought over the documentary and felt a key element was overlooked in its assessment.

Even when genius is championed, the connotations of such a persona can still have adverse effects on the individual who embodies them. John Galliano’s talents preceded him as a person and made people complicit in his offences and suffering. Even the people nearest to him seemed enamoured and armed with excuses to frame his behaviour as simply symptomatic of his innate, immense talent on the basis that it’s “not the Galliano [they] know”. He is postured as an alchemical crucible and whether this was admired or exploited, ignoring his vulnerabilities was an erosion of his humanity. Where “friend” and “designer” become an enigmatic entity, eclipsing the person beneath.

My mind was spooling trying to understand how this form of idolisation occurs. What about this specific kind of genius turns the person beneath into such an iconoclastic figure? My initial thought was simply, media — a strong narrative can be driven through media hegemony — but I wanted the origins of the ‘genius’ archetype itself. So I fell down a philosophy rabbit hole that led me to an interesting realisation. (Please bear with me).

Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida present two schools of philosophical ideology, cradled by a distinctive change in world perspective across the 70s and 80s — modernism to postmodernism. Kant believed that genius was an innate ability to produce something which cannot be explained. In other words, it’s a natural predisposition to do what has not be done before. Derrida’s definition of genius is a dialectical opposition to Kant’s idealism: “Genius is what happens”. It’s an event that we observe and identify, not an ability. It stems from his concept of ‘Différance’ which is the belief that ‘meaning’ is never absolute — this is the implicit juxtaposition of modernist and postmodernist thought. Objectivity versus Subjectivity. Yes, these are ways of thinking and, even if one ideology believed so, not proven facts of our reality, but they’re shaped by social and political observations of the time that can affirm its legitimacy as an analytical tool of certain phenomena.

There is a paradox that arises between Derrida and Kant’s interpretations when you consider the propelling force of business and capital. Derrida’s genius in a state of flux opposes the Kantian genius’ definitive nature — it’s nuanced and free. If it truly exists nowhere then it can be constructed anywhere and if this true, then Kantian genius is simply another interpretation just lacking its signature permanence. But when we place this kind of figure at the helm of a business, organisations built on structure and stability, does this not reinstate the genius’ non-volatility? To hold the favour of the mercurial court of investors, media and consumers, the Kantian genius reemerges in the form of marketable corporate titles like ‘creative director’ and ‘founder’ to lend their talent and eccentric proclivities. Manufacturing the already precariously elitist slant of innate genius is contradictorily, God-like status, packaged. 

I think this form of constructed idolisation permeates beyond the fashion industry. How else does the belief of a mystical innovator behind the curtain reach my impressionable mind? So much of this construction of genius through title and marketing, self-affirmed in the media, reminds me of the tech industry. It’s fitting, 2 branches art and science, that I’ve noticed experience leaps in shifts in innovation and subsequently, culture, at similar moments in history. At first I thought it was just my bias but really, I think there is credence to contending but paradoxical philosophical ideologies in both industries that allowed genius to become an aspirational export.

Despite its age relative to other forms of technology, the internet has become an intimately ubiquitous entity in the lives of anyone born after the year 2000. It’s presence can be greatly attributed to the epochal birth of the World Wide Web, on April 30 1993, taking the tech industry through a metamorphosis of which its current state is seemingly irreversible. Fearing they would be left on the outskirts of exponential financial prosperity, venture capital firms spurred a period of immense investment into internet start-ups (such as Google, Amazon and eBay) from 1995 to 2001, creating the ‘Dotcom Bubble’. And the decision was more than justified. Programmers across the globe had been presented with a nascent and lucrative environment to become digital magnates. Even when the bubble inevitably burst and investment slowed in 2002, they had already set the stage for what we would later refer to as ‘big tech’.

So the young tech programmers-turned-CEOs building an interconnected megalopolis created a new model for what a successful technology company should be: businesses supported by the work of hundreds but helmed by lone innovators. They were eccentric, supposedly a symptom of their newfound wealth and natural intellect, yet adept at showmanship and formulaic in their ‘disruption’ of industry. Just a few years earlier, this archetype was being perfected in the fashion industry.

Legacy fashion brands going into the 80s, due to a cacophony of social and political reverberations from the 70s, were no longer aligned with the rising ideologies of the time. Whilst the UK and US led conservatism as a domineering political force, the greater cultural sphere seemed invigorated by the punk movement of the 70s, advancements in technology which changed music, the print industry and personal devices and, an emphasis on individualism in both thought and consumer behaviour. The new fashion landscape had become bold, deconstructive and provocative in the hands of equally endowed designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Karl Lagerfeld, Gianni Versace and later in the decade, Christian Lacroix, John Galliano, Marc Jacobs and Martin Margiela. But in the overture to this precipice, French businessman, Bernard Arnault had traversed the fashion space with an arsenal of aggressive business tactics to create his own fashion conglomerate, LVMH.

Bernard Arnault’s corporatisation of high-fashion completely changed the industry. With Karl Lagerfeld’s revitalising appointment at Chanel as the unspoken mould, the ‘creative director’ becomes an established job title in a newly modularised fashion industry going into the 90s — an individual teeming with iconographic and revolutionary re-contextualisations of heritage house codes. Appointments of Marc Jacobs to Louis Vuitton and John Galliano to Givenchy and then Dior captured new audiences which proved the value of the creative director role in the new empire. They were selling a lifestyle. And Arnault leverages this new archetype audaciously. Trying to confine a designer’s supposed unruly edges of genius within a structure that inevitably benefits from it breaking free in scandalous and sometimes upsetting ways.

As we’ve settled into a postmodernist society, I thought we had rejected much of Kant’s elitist implications of a magical genius and yet, the fashion and tech industry continue to perpetuate this narrative — with great success, otherwise I wouldn’t be constantly wondering why I’m so determined to follow it in the first place. I didn’t intend for this to be a history lesson but the corporatisation of luxury fashion and the beginnings of big tech following the Dotcom boom feel critical to the understanding of what this kind of ‘genius’ is. They manifest as ordained revolutionaries during periods of successive innovation and are plucked by businesses to be the mystifying figures spearheading large-scale productions. It’s not about the work of many but the talents of a single individual who is suppressed by insurmountable success that only affirms their mythos in the eyes of the media and subsequently, the general public.

Maybe, we’re reaching a reckoning. The arbiters of big tech have chosen right-wing politics as their current flitting fixation and fashion is caught in a cycle of musical chairs as houses seem to shuffle through a deck of designers to boost interest and profits. But I don’t know if we will ever stop relishing in the inspiration that genius, uninterrupted and iconographic, can plant in culture. There is some hubris in admiring that allure when you know it might be all a lie. But I feel so conditioned to obsess over it….

-the tech perspective-

by Stephanie

Sources and Inspirations:

‘Genius Is What Happens: Derrida and Kant on Genius, Rule-Following and the Event’ by Michael Haworth, The British Journal of Aesthetics: https://academic.oup.com/bjaesthetics/article/54/3/323/137805

‘The metamorphosis of tech CEOs: from big to boring’ by Farhad Manjoo, The Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/the-metamorphosis-of-tech-ceos-from-big-to-boring/

Editor’s Letter by Jeppe Ugelvig, Viscose Journal Issue 1: https://viscosejournal.com/Shop/Issue_1/Blog

‘Facebook: The Ultimate Dot-Com’ by John Cassidy, The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/facebook-the-ultimate-dot-com

‘The 1980s’, History.com: https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/1980s

‘The Perfect Paradox of Star Brands: An Interview with Bernard Arnault of LVMH’ by Suzy Wetlaufer, Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2001/10/the-perfect-paradox-of-star-brands-an-interview-with-bernard-arnault-of-lvmh

‘Does It Really Take A Genius?’ by Mahoro Seward, 1Granary: https://1granary.com/opinion/does-it-really-take-a-genius/

‘Fashion Designers as Personalities’ – a discussion from The Fashion Spot forum, 2011: https://forums.thefashionspot.com/threads/fashion-designers-as-personalities.223007/

‘The 80s Fashion Designers Who Changed The Game’ by Eliana Brown, L’Officiel: https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/80s-fashion-designers-mugler-jean-paul-gaultier-alaia#

‘Cognitarian Subjectivation – Franco “Bifo” Berrado’, e-flux Journal Issue 20: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/20/67633/cognitarian-subjectivation/

‘Chanel’s Iconic Designers: Coco Chanel & Karl Lagerfeld’ by Aurélie Vassy, Sotheby’s: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/chanels-iconic-designers-coco-chanel-karl-lagerfeld#

‘Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster’ by Dana Thomas