Jo Fuertes Knight on ethnic homogeneity and virtual beauty standards
While apparently ethnic diversity in the beauty industry has become more commonplace, the standards of beauty are just as homogenous as ever before. This article outlines several examples of current hegemonically defined beauty trends,including the K-beauty trend, which is facing a low-key backlash in Korea. But she then explores the recent and utterly baffling concept of 'virtual influencers'. Lil Miquela seems to be the virtual influencer de jour, an ethnically ambiguous yet completely fabricated model constructed by an LA tech company. She is an excellent example of Jean Baudrillard's concept of hyperreality, of "substituting the signs of the real for the real", and creating a hyperreal simulacrum whose very 'fakeness' is presented as a desirable and elusive fetish.
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| Welcome to the desert of the real... |
Lil Miquela has 1.5 million followers at the time of writing this post, which is not bad for a self-professed 'robot'. However, it raises an interesting point about social media and the construction and cultivation of our own identities online. By choosing what information to share, and digitally manipulating the images of ourselves that we do share, we are creating hyperreal cyborg identities at once totally fake and yet more real than anything else...
Anyway, definitely check out this article by Jo Fuertes Knight. And you should probably follow her on Twitter because she's awesome.