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Dressing History: Nostalgia and Class in the Worlds of Ralph Lauren

2003· article· en· W4396222552 on OpenAlexaff
Mark Moss

Bibliographic record

VenuePopular Culture Review · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicFashion and Cultural Textiles
Canadian institutionsSeneca Polytechnic
Fundersnot available
KeywordsClass (philosophy)Art historyArtSociologyHistoryPhilosophyEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Dressing History: Nostalgia and Class in the Worlds of Ralph LaurenOver the last number of years, it has been recognized that advertising is not simply a state of affairs whereby the consumer is manipulated "as a victim" into purchasing a particular item.As a matter of fact the relationship between consumer and advertiser has become much more sophisticated, to the point in fact that a "polysemous" process is at work.What is integral to comprehend for the purposes of this paper is the concept that advertisers make use of "established codes of status, desire, fear, and need."(Pavitt, "In Goods" 38) It is also important to recognize that the consumer is intimately involved in defining or refining his or her identity by purchasing a particular product or embracing a manufactured look.The question "Is that me?" comes into play here in a very significant way.As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has observed, the purchasing of products such as clothing to define one's identity occupies the sarne important role as choosing a profession.(Cited in Pavitt, "Branding," 156).When looking at the advertisements for the products of designer Ralph Lauren, -whether Polo, Polo Sport, or Purple Label-the words that come to mind are nostalgia, taste, refinement, class and old money.What the people behind the ads do (no doubt with Ralph Lauren's full consent) is attempt to harness the patina of age, with all that that entails, in order to create a series of "worlds" where time stands still.These ads and the related marketing programs are quite similar to Roland Marchand's description of the popular "social tableaux".Marchand comments that "reflections of society" advertisements were utilized in early magazine illustrations to link people to specific social settings.They relied on "scenes sufficiently stereotypical to bring immediate audience recognition."The social tableau advertisements of the 1920s and 1930s, had, as Marchand notes, a tendency to focus on an upper-class atmosphere with such prevalence that "a historian relying exclusively on their manifest evidence could only conclude that most Americans of that era enjoyed an exceedingly affluent and leisured mode of life" (Marchand 165, 166).A key trope in this recipe is the perception that what is stylistically "classic", in sartorial and material terms, is automatically equated with the casual yet sophisticated taste of the upper classes.The Veblien notion of the "veneration of the archaic", which as Paul Fussel has demonstrated, "shows itself everywhere", is a concept that many people hold in high esteem, if not revere.(Fussel, 71-73)' This

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.004
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.061
Threshold uncertainty score0.120

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.004
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0300.025
Scholarly communication0.0110.006
Open science0.0010.007
Research integrity0.0030.008
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0100.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.060
GPT teacher head0.258
Teacher spread0.199 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2003
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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