When Kanye West’s Auto-Tune malfunctions in the studio, he resorts to the next best thing: wearing Cher’s Uninhibited.

I was at that rat’s maze some of you know as Ikea. Normally I go there to play “gay couples vs. mail order brides,” tallying up which group has a higher head count before my visit is up. I actually like Ikea’s stuff. Snobs may poo-poo it as disposable furniture, but that is precisely the charm of it. Who wants to live with the same furniture forever unless is it’s an authentic Shaker dresser? Ikea gives you the living space of the season, and it’s affordable enough to toss if you wake up one morning on the wrong side of bed and hit your head on that armoire.

Modern high fashion, another concept that changes with every season, by contrast, is pure smoke and mirrors. That’s why I roll eyeballs and muffle a laugh when I hear some girls go ga-ga over brand labels and furiously name-drop designers as if being “associated” with those names is a validation ticket to the coveted lifestyle among the arrivistes. It’s no different than Asian women purchasing luxury items as simulacrum for a Western identity.

In 1999, Tommy Hilfiger was rumored to have “publicly admitted to Oprah that he wished African-Americans, Hispanics, Jewish people and Asians would not buy his clothes because ‘they are made for upper class white people.’” What breathtaking brilliance on a marketing level! He probably disseminated that rumor himself. I betcha minorities the next day were secretly ordering every Hilfiger item online, while publicly denouncing the designer as a racist. I have said this before: The most effective way to invoke the greatest passion in people to cross a threshold is to put a gate up. They could have walked by that unprotected opening every day for the thousandth time without thinking to enter, but the moment a gate goes up, entering becomes a sign of prestige.

I tried valiantly to remember a tv documentary I saw almost twenty years ago. It was an incisive and critical look at the fashion industry. This was just at the nascent stages of supermodel worship, so most of the program concentrated on the nuts-and-bolts of fashion marketing. My memory failing me, I dragged out my trusty old Sony Betamax, plugged it in, and who would have known! That very videocassette is still in the player. It is Gina and Jeremy Newson’s The Look (1992) produced by Janet Street-Porter for BBC-2. It’s a fantastic, eye-opening program. I was surprised you can’t even find it mentioned online. When I typed in “fashion industry”+”documentary”+critical, all that turned up were more supermodel infatuation films. I guess the fashion powers-that-be have done everything they could to erase this documentary from the face of the earth….or at the very least, among the Macy’s set.

Among some of the gems discussed in the program is the notion of seating at a fashion show. Celebrities and magazine editors jockey for the most prestigious front row seats, but they are also the worst seats in the house. All the photographers stand in front of you and you see nothing. But it’s important to be seen in those seats. What’s more, if you’re a magazine fashion writer and you say one bad word about a collection, you won’t be invited back the next show. So in order to give us fashion advice, these editors who crave the most prominent seats have to brown-nose the designers just so they’ll be invited back another season. But in order to get that invite, they can’t say a critical word about the collection.

And we’re taking fashion advice from these tastemakers? Isn’t that a conflict of interest?

The concept of diffusion is the most fascinating item for me. A collection showcases a dress for $30,000 on a runway. 6 people (mostly nouveau riche ladies of middle eastern oil tycoons alongside wives of junk bond dealers) can afford it. The label gets brought down a notch to a $3000-$5000 dress and now hundreds of people who want to purchase the simulacra of taste and breeding hand their credit cards over. The designer adds a consumer line to their collection (Emporio Armani, Armani Exchange, DKNY, Lauren, Brooks Brothers 346) and the washed masses rush in to drop $200 -$400 for a simple sweater. Most of the time, the designer themselves don’t even have ANYTHING to do with making the clothes at this level. They merely sell the licensing rights to their name, and some no name clothier from Thailand slaps the purchased logo onto their handiwork and mark it up by 500%. (This aren’t the knockoffs, it’s the *cough* real thing that then gets shipped to U.S. Stores as the genuine brand item.) You wait and you wait for that sale at Macy’s (which comes around approximately every 12 hours). And finally for those who simply need to feel rich and look like Linda Evangelista (oh alright, Gisele Bundchen for you Ugg Boots wearing embryonic fashionistas), they drop what’s left of their week’s pay on a bottle of Eau de Parfum. (Chanel No.5: Total cost of ingredients $3, packaging: $6, Administration $8. Advertising $8. Final price: $62..00 in 1992)

Where do I fit in in this absurdist pyramid? I’d have to say I’ll be at the Goodwill / Oxfam with my trusty measuring tape. And oh can I pick them! My togs are so fetch, when I sashay pass old biddies in Philly, they rise from their wheelchairs in pilled-cardigans grumbling “oh no she didn’t!”

To that I say, “if you think I look antiquated now, wait till you see what I have in store for next season! Grandmama, Please!”

Talking about the making of Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog once explained his decision to haul an actual full-sized boat over a mountaintop.

“I wanted the audience in a position they could trust their eyes. I want to take cinema audiences back to the earliest days, like when the Lumiere brothers screened their film of a train pulling into a station. Reports say that the audience fled in panic because they believed the train would run them over…. This is the issue of truthfulness in today’s cinema. It is not about realism or naturalism….Nowadays, even six-year-olds know when something is a special effect.”

Herzog on Herzog, p 177

I think about that quote often.

In this day and age of CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery) and Photoshop disasters, the line between reality and imagination is one clone stamp away. When a fake can be as real as the authentic item, what does authenticity now mean? It certainly doesn’t help that a counterfeit nation is quickly overtaking the West, dictating the rules of conduct by shattering any considerations towards intellectual property.

The trend is that we, the audience, have become increasingly skeptical. I know when I see a spectacular YouTube clip online, the first thing I do is to scan the comments for the keyword “FAKE.” If that produces nothing, the next stop is Snopes.com. It’s not that I don’t want to be swept off my feet and dazzled, I just don’t want to get prematurely enthusiastic, soar to the heights of inspiration, only to have the wind die in mid-flight. I proceed with caution, like most people in the digital age.

For me, the MegaWoosh Video was the turning point where I went from doubtful to permanent skepticism. It turned out to be a viral marketing campaign for Microsoft Germany.

By the time Girl Dies Exhibit B-5 rolled around, I was pretty jaded. A few Facebook click reveals the “dead” girl to be actor Cindy Vela.

So it should come as no surprise, that when the photo of dead Osama Bin Laden / Usama Bin Laden was circulated on the internet, most of us who were well-versed in the viral culture of digital hoaxes shrugged with a “Meh, whatever.” It’s debatable at this point whether there is any true value in releasing the actual picture, especially when the “digitally-jaded” amongst us have been conditioned to question everything we see. I do think the fear of inciting violence, as an excuse for withholding the publishing of the photograph, is proof that terrorism is effective. I’d rather we’ve said “because we are a civilized nation, and we don’t do that sort of thing.” As much as I want to believe it, I know it’s not true. There’s already pictures of the three dead men shot in Bin Laden’s compound making its rounds around the mainstream media outlets.

How to retouch a photo of a dead terrorist: Bin Laden fake dead photo. General Public: 0 Photoshop CS5: 1 (click on picture for Guardian story)

It’s funny that Herzog said he wanted to restore our trust in our eyes, because later on in Fitzcarraldo, there is a scene where speculations abound as to whether the “ship” was a model or the real thing. (Look at the size of the water droplets). Herzog was there, he was on the real boat. There is no doubt about that, but this was also 1978-1982: the pre-digital age. Given Herzog’s insistence on photographing at “the golden hour,” (near sunset) combined with the reckless rapids and the director’s shoot-from-the-hip filmmaking style, it’s not improbable that the camera was set at the wrong exposure during the frantic moment a 360 ton ship was barreling down the white waters of the Amazon. The actual boat did come down the river, as documented in Burden of Dreams. I just believe the footage wasn’t useable, and a replica had to be made for the three second shot.

It’s different today. We are constantly Googling and Factchecking what we see and hear. Oftentimes, regarding items that were manipulated, retouched, computer generated, auto-tuned, cut-and-paste, and digitally spliced. We expend an inordinate amount of time to double-check our reality. And that says only one thing: the machines are winning.