ThinkingShift

This post will probably only interest the girls. So guys: sorry you might not be so interested, unless of course you are pondering why we are all looking and smelling alike these days. Regular ThinkingShift readers will be aware that I gave up THE BRANDS just before my trip to Hong Kong back in late March. So getting towards two months now and I have bought no “brand names”. Hasn’t been all that hard really.

I said I would buy my winter coat at a vintage clothing shop. Well, I ended up with a snappy looking moss green coat from the late 1970s. It’s so well made I was rather stunned (ie we are inured these days to dodgy stuff that falls apart or doesn’t last long). This coat has a wonderful lining and it’s reversible, so two coats for the price of one. And much cheaper than one I saw in a major department store (brand new and made in China).

And so with perfumes. I’ve always loved the “old time” perfumes - Coriandre by Jean Couturier (definitely not for the shrinking violets amongst us ladies!). Or perfumes by Caron such as Coup de Fouet created in 1957. It used to be that a woman was known by her “signature perfume”. My mother loved Crepe de Chine by Millot (I think this was created in the mid-1920s). She also loved Bond Street No 9, which was popular during WWII. My grandmother wore something called Rosa Centifolia - I think this was a German perfume.

Anyway, these specialist perfumes are almost as rare as the Kohinoor diamond! These days, women are stuck with the designer brand perfumes or the watery-like perfumes of “celebrities”. I mean really: do you want to wear a perfume by Britney Spears?? Is she a “nose”? So it’s very easy (for me anyway due to my love-affair with perfume) to sniff out what a woman is wearing pretty quickly. It’s rare these days for me to sniff a unique smell from an old-time perfume house.

And so to the really sad news. My favourite perfumery in Sydney was Julia’s Perfumery. It was run by a woman with outstanding knowledge of perfumes, especially the old time classics. After years of going there for Coriandre, we were talking one day about where we grew up and in one of those very spooky moments, it turned out we’d been dance partners in ballet school when we were 5 years old or so. Way too spooky for me!

Anyway, I went last week to get another bottle of Coriandre. Quell horror! Julia’s Perfumery is shut. She’s apparently gone online but I can’t find her (Julia if you stumble onto this blog through some sort of miracle, tell me how to find you!!). So now I am left wondering if I will be forced to totter off to a department store and pick up a bottle of perfume by some celebrity or designer. Some of them aren’t that bad. But for me, it’s about individuality and not having a perfume that’s totally synthetic. The jewellery girls (and guys these days) wear is about wearing art and expressing your identity. Same with perfume. Whatever fragrance family you prefer - Greens, Florals, Aldehydics, Chypre, Oriental, Fougère & Tobacco/Leather - it says a lot about who you are as an individual. Have the old time perfumes been engulfed by the brand names? I know many women who simply haven’t heard of some of the classics of the perfume world.

If you’re like me, you prefer a strong mossy wood. Coriandre fits that with notes of (obviously) coriander but also orange blossom, angelica, jasmine and lily. (I’m doing this by memory so I might have some of that wrong). But it’s not the hideous overpowering gardenia that seems to be the main ingredient of perfumes of the 1990s onward. I well remember the perfumes of the “greed is good” 1980s. These perfumes were shoulder-padded to death, Opium being a stand-out. Can’t stand that perfume personally but it was symptomatic of the excess of the 1980s.

And so, dear reader, I need help. Am I to wade my way through DIY books on how to make perfumes? Will I have to swallow my pride and go off to buy a BRAND name perfume? Coriandre is available, for example, on some online perfume sites, but is it the real deal? How do you know it is truly Coriandre?

Whilst our choice of luxury brands continues to expand, those of us who don’t wish to smell like every other woman are facing a real problem. Where to find the unusual perfume? Where to find that old-time perfume that is still available? Where to find your individuality?

I decided to take a different route late last year. In Dubai, I checked out some of the very strong perfume oils they have there. I went into a perfume oil shop where some guy was a bit perplexed with a Western woman wanting something with sandalwood in it that would last all day. To his credit and after three hours of sniffing and exiting the shop with a headache, he found for me two perfume oils that I love.

But I can’t whip off to Dubai every few months to update my perfume wardrobe, so the dilemma still stands. I’d be really intrigued to know whether you share the same dilemma and what your favourite perfume is. And Julia: are you there?

I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with “brands”. Everywhere you go these days, you see people sporting the latest designer shirts or sunglasses; ladies toting around huge designer bags and “the look” of the season or teetering down the street wearing ridiculous sky-high designer heels. I’ve been a brand slave, no doubt about it. But frankly, there’s an insidious thing happening to us all: we’re beginning to look alike.

It’s true that when I was working for a global company as their Australian CKO, I fell into the brand trap. I did a lot of travel for global KM meetings - Paris, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, London, the US and so on. So I bought (gasp) a Louis Vuitton handbag. That was about 7 years ago. I still have it and use it, so I guess it was a reasonable investment. I was caught up in the “I’m travelling, so I must make some duty free purchases”; or “I’m in Paris, so I must have the latest French designer costume jewellery”; or “I’m in New York: quick, where’s Tiffanys?”.

But I’m sure we’ve all read about how children in developing countries toil in designer brand “sweat shops” to make the goods you and I covet so we can be thought of as hip, cool, funky - whatever the word is these days. I admit that in the past, I’ve rarely given a thought to where my clothes or accessories might be made or the context in which they were manufactured.

I’m now hearing the term “ethical luxury” - goods which badge their owners as people who are environmentally or socially aware. Organic supermarkets, organic brands and fair trade goods are popping up all over the retail landscape. Buy organic and it does make you feel a tad better I suppose.

As I was growing up, you didn’t hear of brand names. Clothes were made in Australia as far as I recall. You went to the local cake shop and bought a hefty apple turnover with real cream (not that mock shock stuff). You heard more about a Holden Monaro than you did about a BMW or Audi. But now we seem to covet what everyone else covets or what Hollywood celebs wear. There are so many brands now that I get confused!

So I am making a vow to myself (and to you dear reader!) that from now on I will buy no more brands. This winter, I am off to the vintage clothing shop to buy my new (recycled) winter coat. I recently bought a handbag from the early 1950s. No designer name, no idea where it’s made. Next summer, I am buying silk georgette blouses from the 1940s and 50s from another vintage shop I know of. I have a passion for anything from the 1940s and 1950s, so it makes sense for me to buy from that period.

New shoes? off to the vintage shop. A new bracelet or necklace? Make my own. I designed a necklace for a great friend of mine and we were at dinner recently when she wore it. The other person joining us asked my friend “wow, great necklace, where did you get it?”. We joked and said it was a Versace original. I have a jeweller friend who I have commissioned pieces from - so if it’s beyond me, then she’ll make my stuff. Hand make it. When was the last time, in our throw away society, that we lovingly touched something handcrafted and wore it with pride?

So instead of being a brand slave, I will now be an anti-brand slave. This week’s trip to Hong Kong will be my first big test. Normally, I would go on the prowl for that fake handbag (ethical issues in the making of the fake I know) or comb the shops for brand designs. This time, I’m taking my camera and I’m going to try to capture the street scenes and night life of Hong Kong. This should be a good ploy to keep me out of the shops. I’ll try to really look at people and context rather than looking for the nearest shopping mall. I’ll stop and look at how other cultures live instead of rushing off to the modern glistening skyscraper that houses a huge shopping mall.

Why don’t you do the same? Give up the brands and go anti-brand. Or have you already? Tell me more if you have.

In a few days, I should finish Naomi Klein’s very well researched and argued book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. If you haven’t heard of it or read it, do yourself a favour and get a copy. I’ve always thought that Milton Friedman would have a lot to answer for when he argued that businesses’ sole purpose is to generate profit for shareholders. Reading Klein’s book is really an eye-opener and shows how Friedman’s Chicago School economics that push free-market policies now dominate the world. As each country, like South Korea for example, is forced to open up its borders and economies to global (mainly US) corporations, once mighty local businesses and employees are ravaged. The Korean titan, Samsung, for instance, was broken up and sold for a fraction of its worth, with Volvo getting its heavy industry division, SC Johnson & Son its pharmaceutical arm, and General Electric its lighting division. What is often not known is how many once loyal local employees got the shaft as the new owners sought to downsize. Poverty and unemployment are more often the result of rampant capitalism.

The argument goes that globalisation and the opening up of markets will create business opportunities in areas of the world previously untouched. Waves of privatization have taken place and corporations greedily eye-off government services such as health care, telecommunications, energy, transportation and so on. Services for the people, built up by the people, using taxpayer’s money - now being transferred into the coffers of private organisations. And so we see private companies entering new areas - surveillance, the security industry, disaster response, health care. You find situations where a 103 year old woman was evicted from a care home because its owners declined to back down in a wrangle with a local authority over funding her care. The care home owners wanted an extra ₤100 a week because it said she required special care. Local authority assessments found that the elderly woman did not need additional nursing care but in the interests of not forcing a 103 year old woman to move, the local authority offered to meet the extra cost to avoid eviction. The nursing home is owned by a private company (according to what I’ve read) and clearly they prefer to extract the almighty dollar rather than allow an elderly woman the dignity and familiarity of living out her last years in the home she’d resided in since her early 90s. This poor lady died just weeks after being chucked out of the nursing home. You can read the sorry story here in the Guardian.

Privatization of nursing homes is all part of what Klein has outlined in her book and what I think we can all acknowledge if we just sit back and think about it. A nation-state, through state policy, provides for its citizens by educating them in the public school system, protecting borders, providing essential services such as hospitals and fire departments, administering prisons, providing adequate military forces and ensuring disease control. These are the core competencies if you like of the concept of governing. But these competencies are being outsourced and privatized. And so you have the privatization of the US Army - the army provides the soldiers and the weapons - Halliburton provides the infrastructure ie US bases overseas built with every modern comfort. Or you find Lockhead taking over the information technology divisions of the US Government.

With the War on Terror, the homeland security industry boomed, starting off with surveillance cameras: 4.2 million in the UK and 30 million in the US. And with the millions of hours of footage, you then needed analytic software such as facial recognition. And to further ensure homeland security, you needed wire-tapping, email and web surfing surveillance and of course data mining to prospect for all the gems of suspicious activity. Now we have mass state surveillance and the US is surely fast becoming a police state (and Australia is not that far behind frankly).

And if you don’t believe this then here’s a staggering story I’ve come across. The Halle Orchestra is one of Britain’s oldest symphony orchestras. It has not toured the US in more than a decade but they were looking forward to playing at Lincoln Center. But then the 85 musicians ran up against the very secure brick walls of US visa regulations. They were told they all had to travel from the orchestra’s Manchester headquarters to the US Embassy in London. And this was not just for a social chit chat over tea and cucumber sandwiches. Nope all 85 of them were required to be fingerprinted, have a facial recognition scan and suffer through a grilling of an interview. To schlep the whole orchestra to London with hotel costs, visa fees etc would have cost the Halle Orchestra $80,000 and this was before dishing out money for travel costs to New York.

Now the orchestra in my mind did a very sensible thing: they canned the trip to the US. So the US runs the very high risk of becoming increasingly isolated because foreign performers are simply not willing to run the gauntlet for obtaining a P-1 visa. And arts organisations in the US are reluctant to book foreign performers because they know the high risk of bureaucratic snags. But of course should a performing group wish to speed up the process, they can always cough up a $US 1,000 “premium processing” fee.

China’s Golden Dragon Acrobats have toured the US for the last 30 years but this year’s tour is under a cloud because the acrobats could not provide absolute proof that they would return home (hey, you know we don’t all want to live in the US). Even a visiting scholar from Montreal, Canada had a tough time. And some artists applying for visas have been asked to perform at consular interviews (I guess consular officials are pretty good judges of artists!).

And so the modern surveillance state kills off the arts and cultural exchange.

Source: Washington Post

Update: November 4 2007 - check out what happened to some hapless Finnish musicians at Minnesota airport. After 2 hours of what they considered humiliation, the musicians filed a formal complaint with the US Embassy back in Helsinki. Thank goodness they got home and didn’t get shunted off to somewhere like Gitmo!