pricing beauty --ar 3:2 --sref 3982351386 --sv 4 --v 7
By: Ashley Mears
Rating: ⭐️
The case for beauty (or physical form) as social or cultural capital is obvious. At a minimum, it has value in the genetic marketplace, and at a maximum can confer status in community in more complicated ways. Mears’ other work, Very Important People (an ethnography of the party/nightclub scene), covers the usage of financial capital to acquire social/cultural capital, including in the form of acquiring or hiring beauty. This work covers the inverse exchange - the conversion of beauty into financial capital as told through the fashion and modeling industry.
It’s a question I have had broader interest in, from when I first read Very Important People. It was never particularly clear to me exactly how someone’s beauty could be priced (especially when divorced from some mechanical labor like acting or being present somewhere). Furthermore, why does the fashion world exhibit such power-law like outcomes? Kim Kardashian is incredibly wealthy and powerful, despite not doing.making anything specific (as far as I can tell). I don’t mean that as a slight against Kim Kardashian or others like her - far from it. It’s incredibly impressive to command the economic weight she does despite so many others also being generally pretty. So what exactly is Kim K getting paid for?
Mears provides us with a vocabulary for this kind of work, which she calls “aesthetic labor”. This is work done by workers “whose bodies and personalities are up for purchase on the market.” This is an important framework through which to view not just models’ work, but many forms of labor; however, I think this is a partially complete definition. Based on Mears’ structure, I largely think of labor comprising of the following categories.
Pure Labor: On the extreme end, you have people who are being compensated for some mechanical labor, without any particular function to their form. I think of this as Gary Oldman (no offense) - he is the consummate actor, but I don’t think of him as having conventional sex appeal.
Composite Aesthetic Labor: When we go to see Oceans 11, it is a composite of the acting, score, set, story, and more. Arguably the sex appeal of George Clooney or Brad Pitt helps the overall product and is critical, but it is not the only component - their aesthetic labor is but an ingredient of the overall concoction.
Sublimated Aesthetic Labor*: This is the role the model fills when their main and only function is aesthetic labor. Unlike beauty in the club scene that Mears’ covers in Very Important People, there is no physicality or locality necessary for this kind of labor. This is the subsegment that Mears writes about in this work.
Mears segments the types of aesthetic labor in the fashion world largely by their purchasers intent.
Editorial work: High symbolic value, low financial value. For a model, this is being in high-end magazines or runway shows. If you’re lucky, very successful models can become supermodels and begin to command large payment for their work. Mears doesn’t really propose a threshold or framework to measure when a model becomes a supermodel. The fashion industry at this point has selected talent that has an ‘edgy’ or unconventional look to fuel this segment.
Commercial work: This is higher frequency work that pays well, but generally considered lower status. This would be akin to being in an H&M commercial. The talent here might have more traditional definitions of beauty.
I was most curious about why we see extreme outcomes in the editorial segment. Mears makes the argument that at the extreme end, the rationale for editorial work to pay such outsized sums beyond the pure cost of labor is really for optionality. The idea is that if some major fashion brand is going to plaster someone’s face around the world, they want to ensure that new fame is used exclusively to associate with their brand.
