Last month the streetwear brand Aimé Leon Dore released a collaboration with the storied Italian coffee equipment manufacturer La Marzocco. Besides the usual merch, the star of the tie-up was a limited edition espresso machine. Here is how the collab unfolded. First, the drop was touted by the streetwear media, which duly noted that its centerpiece, the co-branded Linea Micra espresso machine, costs a whopping $11,660. The egregious markup of the device that retails for $4,200 became a talking point. Then the drop happened, with the machine quickly “selling out,” the fact that spurred further coverage and online conversation.
Welcome to the world of fashion pseudo-events. In his 1961 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, which influenced the much more famous Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, the author Daniel Boorstin defines a pseudo-event as anything that has no bearing on the everyday reality and which has no root causes in it. The book is about “the world of our own making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life,” he writes in the preface.
Boorstin posited that as Americans morphed into the bored rich leisure class, we have gone from experiencing life to seeking constant stimulation from it. Thus arises a need from pseudo-events, and every aspect of society from the private sector to the government has gotten in on the action. Pseudo-events is the reason we created a round-the-clock media industry that has gone from reporting to manufacturing news. We have created an entire class of famous people who are not famous for anything other than being famous. We have turned travel into tourism. We have turned things into images of things. And so on.
So, what’s a pseudo-event, as opposed to a real event? Presidential elections are an event. But televised presidential debates are pseudo-events, created as spectacles for our consumption. So are the hours of pre-broadcast punditry that predict how the debates will go, and the hours of after-broadcast analysis and countless articles the day after. They mean nothing and they are autonomous spectacles made solely to fill the round the clock media cycle and alleviate our boredom. An actor may be rightly celebrated for his or her acting skills, but as celebrities whose every move we follow, they are human pseudo-events. That trip you took to Paris to do all the things Tik-Tok said you must, is a pseudo-event.
Contemporary marketing is a collection of pseudo-events – it tells you nothing about how the product functions and everything about how it will make you a better, more complete person. Fashion is an Olympic champion here, because what it sells surely will make you prettier, more confident, richer-looking, successful, and will get you laid. And as fashion gets blander and the competition for our attention spans heats up, the more it must rely on marketing. Staging pseudo-events has become ever more important because the purpose of advertising has shifted. The conventional aim of fashion advertising used to be to sell you a specific product. That is no longer the case – today, as most fashion has become mass market, the main aim of advertising is to lodge brand awareness into a corner of your brain. Hence, the constant need to remind consumers that the brand exists by creating a treadmill of collaborations, activations, events, drops, and “limited edition” everything.
What are some of fashion’s pseudo-events? Runway shows from which only a few styles will actually be produced are pseudo-events. Sponsored celebrity outfits are pseudo-events. Tik-Tok fashion “micro trends” are pseudo-events. Pricing can be a pseudo event. Take a recent example of Prada’s infamous $1,000 cotton tank top. No one at Prada seriously thought that they would actually sell (m)any – most likely they gave some to influencers and off-duty models. But its absurd price became a talking point – causing outrage, eyerolls, lols, an a million social media shares, all reactions that kept Prada at the forefront of conversation around fashion. Most meme products – from Balenciaga’s coffee cup bag to a Valentino one shaped like a kitten – are pseudo-events, made for the media. Another good example are Balenciaga’s super destroyed sneakers from 2022 that were so damaged that they could not be worn and that came with a $1,850 price tag. According to the brand 100 pairs were made, but the more likely scenario was that only a couple were made so that they could be photographed and disseminated to the media, which in the rush to sustain its frenetic cycle of posting twenty pieces of content a day was more than happy to write about them.
Which brings us back to the Aimé Leon Dore coffee machine. The one question that was not raised was how many of the “sold out” machines were made. The answer, according to an inside source, is eleven. And most likely half of those went to influencers or stayed in house. Maybe a few were sold, or maybe none. Selling was not the point, pricing them egregiously and then marking them as sold out, thus generating conversation and brand awareness, was. When something is sold out it immediately creates hype and endows a brand with an aura of prestige. When Phoebe Philo released its first collection, the brand did not even hide the fact that the numbers per style were made purposefully low. Within hours most of the first drop was sold out, and an image of desirability was quickly created. This may have mattered more to the brand than the actual sales. If brands wanted to be honest about every sold out limited edition drop, they would publish the number of units produced.
Pseudo-events may not result in moving product, but they work (sometimes) in intangible ways. “If you can’t measure it, it becomes religion,” Matt Powell, a respected industry sneaker analyst who has made a habit of skewering collabs for the lack of impact on brands’ bottom line, once told GQ. That espresso machine has gathered more comments on Aimé Leon Dore’s Instagram account than any other, edging out its custom-designed Porsche 993, another pseudo-event. “Today the master of truth is not the master of facts but the practitioner of self-fulfilling prophecy,” wrote Boorstin. Words both wise and true.
