Marketed ‘hipness’ is dull

Just look at the kind of advertising that is beaming out of our television sets and glossy magazines these days and you will see what I mean. There is that slightly rusty (in advertising time) commercial about the boy sitting on his college steps blithely drinking Sprite and watching the world go by.

When a friend tries to push him to get the girls and be popular he just raises an eyebrow and soon it becomes clear that he has everything he needs just sitting on the steps. Then there is the more recent one about the executive type who appears to have retired in the prime of his life to spend time shopping with his family, trekking or just sitting by the window in a contemplative mood.

These are ads that — surprise surprise — tell you not to achieve or to get ahead (Be the best! Get the biggest! Kill your neighbour with envy!) but instead exalt the whole idea of leaving the rat race and focusing on the ordinary pleasures of life.

If this is true for men it is even more true for women. If the new line of advertising is any indication then unpretentiousness is the hallmark of the modern woman. There is a campaign revolving around a moderately attractive woman who claims to not understand art but loves the splash of rain water on her skin.

Or the campaign featuring an actress-model who laughs at the idea of being the ‘most beautiful’ or the ‘most successful’ but wears a diamond to express her ‘inner fire’.

True the majority of ads still harp on quality, taste, size and virility but the share of commercials preaching an ‘alternative’ message is increasing rapidly. Freelook clothing, for instance, has a young man claiming he is ‘free among other things to talk in my mother tongue’. The Wills Classic Collection shows a man and woman positioned so as to indicate they are successful and equally so. But their style of dressing is relaxed. Jackets are conspicuously absent and the strapline says : ‘Harmony, Not Hierarchy’. An expression of new age leadership!. No talk of dominating the boardroom or of vanquishing the competition. The copy in fact conveys exactly the opposite message with phrases such as ‘nurturing teamwork’ and ‘breaking down the shackles of domination’.

What is going on? Is the new age here? Have we really evolved so rapidly as a society through layers of noisy flamboyance, acquisitiveness, middle class insecurity, male chauvinism, the pressures of community, family, etc., to reach this state of nirvana?

Has the Value For Money demanding Surf matron really metamorphosed into the new, self-assured, balanced, individual? And has the ambitious executive turned into a prosperous hippie? Have we Indians really reached that level of ease with ourselves?

There is certainly little evidence of this in our politics or indeed in anything else. One could imagine perhaps that the neo-sixties cultural trends sweeping the West have just infected us faster than they might have earlier in this age of globalisation. Or is it just a clever salespitch?

There is little doubt of course that behind all these images of self assertion is still the imperative to sell. The evolved man and woman is known to be so by his or her material objects — soft drinks, clothes and jewellery, which is a contradiction of sorts. But far more dangerous than this is the potential for subversion.

In 1994, Time magazine carried a cover story entitled ‘Everyone is hip…. is anyone hip’. The 1994 Woodstock had just taken place and, comparing it with the original, the magazine claimed while the latter was history’s largest convergence of the privileged few, the hip minority, the former was the largest convergence of the mass market. Hipness, it claimed has become an American paradox, a special condition almost everyone seems to aspire to. And one that, thanks to a lot of shrewd marketing, almost everyone can fancy having achieved.

In its infinite pliancy, capitalism proved itself well suited to absorb whatever it was in hip that might fascinate consumers, while discarding the uncomfortable parts. But when hipness is embraced by the mainstream, the article went on to warn, much of the life gets squeezed from it. It may be a warning for us.