I've been thinking a lot about icons, because I happened to
interview Gloria Steinem the same week that Karl Lagerfeld died. Lagerfeld was "thought to be" 85. Steinem is an extremely sharp and witty 84.
Steinem is someone who, despite a lifetime of working in collaboration with a variety of other activists and never being appointed an official leader by her feminist peers, became the face of second-wave American feminism. I've always admired her as someone who understands the power of words, and has used them to push for justice. She took the feminist-icon status that was bestowed on her by the media (which
loved the idea of a pretty skinny white woman as the image of women's liberation), and has done her best to share and redirect the resulting power. For the most part, Steinem has remained interested in and rooted in the future, not the past. And this is, counterintuitively, why she has remained an icon rather than a 70s relic of white feminism.
Lagerfeld is someone who understood the power of persona, too. Unlike Steinem, he very deliberately styled himself as an icon. And true to the mold he used—
Coco Chanel—his brand has always been rooted in shoring up privilege and power for himself and
people like him, not an inclusive vision of art and beauty.
Their fame both dates to an era when popular culture was more... popular. There are still some personas that are extremely widely known—indeed, this has also been a week of
Kardashian drama! But most icons are personal now. We can all find and follow artists and activists that speak to our aesthetic and beliefs extremely specifically, and create our own pantheon. (My favorite piece of writing about this shift is
Lester Bangs on Elvis's death: "We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his corpse. I will say good-bye to you.")
I confess that I'm into the retro idea of widely known cultural figures with strong personal aesthetics. It's fun. But ultimately the question for the Lagerfelds and Steinems of the world is: What are you using your persona
for? If the answer stops at "getting rich and staying famous" then you're not much of an icon at all. You're just an empty brand.
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