Emily and Kanye Go Shopping

Messy Fictions, Modern Product Placement, and the Making of Culture

What do a 40-something hiphop multi-hyphenate in his post-Presidency /divorce era and a fictional Midwestern twenty-something have in common?

Kanye and Emily are neighbors on a blurry intersection. Whether it’s a black unbranded hoodie or a gaudy pink bucket hat, both are shifting the line of what’s for entertainment and what’s for sale, what’s reality and what’s marketing.

Kanye Goes on a Date

Kanye West, aka hip hop genius, aka founder of ugly footwear and more line Yeezy, aka bipolar MAGA hat wearer, aka KK’s ex, aka former Presidential candidate, aka quasi-religious figure running Sunday Service, recently went on a date.

He turned a second date with his new belle, Julia Fox, into a high-profile photoshoot with Interview magazine (exclusive!), starring not just Ms. Fox, but also a $100,000 closet full of clothing, provided by Diesel.

He also dropped a music video/advertisement in which faceless people run around in a dark grey universe in black hoodie.

The video served not just as a launch for a new song, but also as a launch for his collaboration with the Gap and Balenciaga, which includes this Yeezified revision of the classic Gap logo.

Balenciaga has of late made it their business to revive doddering old brands like the Gap and Vibrams with an injection of hype couture--the amalgamation of haute couture and the hypebeast world, both of which have cracked the code of making the brand more important than the product. That hype couture is also a specialty of Kanye, who’s still recouping his reputation after flirting with fascism last year, and seems to have refound his foothold as a brand.

The writer of State of the Art, a new fashion critique blog, purchased this hoodie, fully aware of the why:

Now, the hoodie was purchased because a) I’m easy to market to, and b) because of a carefully orchestrated sequence of events that predated the final reveal of the product (something to do with Balenciaga, Julia Fox, and Ye’s upcoming Netflix doc) made me believe that I needed to own this physical timestamp of pop culture that signifies, “I was there, and understand that this plain overpriced hoodie isn’t just a plain overpriced hoodie because I’ve built a cheesy personality around being more in-the-know than my peers.” 

As Kanye’s Heaven and Hell song says, “Everyone’s gotta make a living.”

Emily Does a Marketing Campaign

Emily in Paris takes a page from the same playbook. At face value the show is a simple, silly distraction we loved to hate for its stereotyping of France, its eye-scorching fashion, and its facile plot lines--a too-sweet pink macaron bought at a suburban coffeeshop.

But the show is also a prime example of blurring lines between marketing and life. Ostensibly about a young marketer making her way in a Parisian agency (advertising? PR? experiential? social? It’s never clear), the very premise allows the show to work with brands that span reality and fiction. There are plot points about marketing fictional brands like Champére, a champagne so bad you spray it instead of drinking it, to real brands like Chopard, a luxury Swiss watch-maker, and Dior, for a collab with Vespa I thought might be fictional but is not. 

Brand on brand on brand: Emily on a real Dior-branded Vespa, which her fictional agency Savoir is marketing .

And it’s about Paris and an agency with fashion clients, so Emily’s looks are available to you, dear shopper. Netflix is developing its own brand of merchandise, including Emily sunglasses, over at Netflix.shop, and Saks among other retailers are official partners carrying collections of Emily style.

Haley Nahman points out in her newsletter another layer of marketing. Among Emily’s daffy ensembles are seven in which she wears fingerless leather gloves, which happen to be available for $298. They are designed by the show’s costume consultant Patricia Fields, who is also known for Sex and the City, which launched America’s obsession with Manolos and Jimmy Choos. Fields mentioned in a Page Six interview that the gloves are part of one of her favorite Emily outfits , a casual drop in an article that later pushes readers to the site where they’re for sale.

Product placement has always been about blurring the lines of fiction and reality. Putting a real product in a fictional universe is one way that the brand snags on a thread in our memory and lodges itself there. It’s nothing new; Reese’s, for example, paid a million dollars to be ET’s candy of choice in Spielberg’s 1982 classic, tying the candy to the warm and fuzzy feelings a young boy might have for a secret alien. James Bond has been a core part of the marketing efforts for luxury brands like Aston Martin and Omega, driving up the story value of these aspirational brands while building the rarified air of Bond. 

What Kanye and Emily in Paris are doing is light-years beyond Daniel Craig driving the latest Jaguar in a scenic car chase. It’s doing product placement in a space that’s somewhere between fiction and reality, with no clear lines in the road. Is it a marketing ploy? Is it a TV show? Is it a date? Does it matter? Everything is an opportunity to sell. As Haley puts it, 

It’s impossible to disentangle Emily in Paris from its marketing, or even from marketing as a general concept. ..Of course, you don’t have to “believe” in marketing to recognize its permeation into nearly every aspect of modern life. But Emily in Paris does more than dip that notion in sugar; it imagines an alternative universe in which marketing is not a nefarious, overreaching presence in our lives, but a conduit for infinite possibility—even a force for good.

In Emily’s world, advertising campaigns are never cynical or tricky or market-tested; they’re aha! moments, a twinkle in the eye of a skinny 24-year-old in an unconvincing wig.

Or of a recently divorced fashion-music mogul.

Real Brands, Fictional Worlds.

Fictional Brands, Real Worlds.

In this layer cake of fiction and reality there are many more examples, besides the classic product placement mentioned above, or the more straightforward ad campaigns we know and love/hate. Another real brand in a fictional world, Balenciaga wowed Paris Fashion Week with a short episode of The Simpsons, where Marge goes to Fashion Week and gets decked out in the brand’s ensembles. Fictional brands also function in the real world; consider every bro in a Dunder Mifflin shirt, or (one of my favorites) the launch of a fictional app Not Hot Dog to market Silicon Valley.

I tried my damnedest to make a 2-by-2 of brands in reality and fiction. But as our online and IRL worlds converge, and as collabs twist the foundations of brands together, it was impossible.

So I have for you a gradient-by-two, with classic advertising and classic product placement in the corners, and Kanye and Emily hanging out in the muddy middle.

Is Kanye’s date just a date, or a branding exercise for Diesel? Or for Julia Fox? Most certainly it’s a branding exercise for Kanye. Is his music video/advertisement building a fictional world for this black hoodie? Is Yeezy x Gap x Balenciaga a real brand, or a temporary fiction to sell out basic hoodies? Are the gloves that Emily wears and that get so casually mentioned in an interview a real brand? How about the products specially made for Saks? It doesn’t really matter, does it? As long as we’re entertained and the product sells.

EDIT: I can’t talk about Emily, Kanye, and fashion without giving a nod to the iconic fashion guru André Leon Talley, who passed yesterday at 73.

Emily in Paris pays tribute to the scale of his personality with a character played by Jeremy O. Harris.

RIP ALT. Too many legends passing this year already.