I got up at the crack of dawn this morning and had the bulk of my daily work done by around 8 a.m. I'm pretty sure that's a new record for me. With a suddenly unfettered morning, I turned my short attention span to the Hulu. My queue: barren. No favorite shows to waste a little time on, so I clicked through the new shows. Found Dating Rules From My Future Self which billed itself as a strange combination of light sci-fi and romantic comedy. Okay, interesting. Martin Starr is in it, so maybe it won't be utterly terrible?


Premise: Lucy (played by a rather blank-faced, dull Shiri Appleby) is recently engaged, sort of. Her douchey boss/boyfriend proposed to her upon their return from a vacation in Paris and she doesn't say "Yes" right away. Her hesitation should be evidence enough that she doesn't want to marry this guy, but instead of reading the signs clearly, Lucy is full of doubt.

In a pitch-meeting at the "App Creation" tech firm she works at, where douchey pseudo-fiance is also her boss, Lucy proposes an App idea where a user can complete a personality profile for their ideal self and an algorithm can answer the user's questions about big decisions they have to make - hoping that a concrete answer from a make-believer "future self" may help them eventually realize their ideal self.

Of course, things quickly turn strange when Lucy starts getting texts from an "Unknown" party that urge her to break off her engagement to the boyfriendboss. Unknown claims, eventually, to be Lucy's future self, and supports these claims by giving her eerily prescient advice that matches up to her present experiences. She begins to believe that this is her real future self communicating to her, and she follows Unknown's advice and dumps the boyfriend.

Okay, that's a strange premise, but hey, I've seen stranger. This is not my problem with the show. My problem with it is the overt and tacky way the show incorporates product placement.

Schick Quattro, Biore Strips and some kind of car (chevy?) are heavily and awkwardly promoted through the course of this short show (each episode is only about 7 minutes long). For instance, when Lucy breaks up with her boyfriend, her roommates urge her to go get laid. There's a scene where she's trying on the typically slutty** roommate's typically slutty clothes. The practical roommate informs Lucy that the next dress she's about to try on is so short that Lucy should consider "mowing the lawn" (i.e., shave her pubes), before trying it on. Cut To: Lingering, extreme close-up of Lucy eyefucking a Schick Quattro as she mulls over the temptation to shave her ladyparts. WTF? It's such a forced moment that it makes me cringe.



Oh yeah, and when she's trying to get over the boyfriend, slutty roommate and practical roommate urge her to do a "Cleanse" with them, which apparently entails lounging around with stupid looking Biore strips on, drinking green smoothies, and generally whining about men. Oh, but the linchpin in this ridiculous display comes at the end of the episode, when slutty roommate declares, "There's only one thing left to cleanse." Cut To: A slow-motion shot of the three girls washing that goddamn Chevy car (or whatever car that is they're trying to promote).

Stupidest.
Product.
Placement.
Ever.

This show is an insult to me because it's not a fucking show, it's a vehicle (literally, at times) for product promotion. They're not even subtle about it. They might as well be doing this:



You might ask why I continued watching the debacle that is Dating Rules from My Future Self, but my reason is simple: I had gawker syndrome. This was a complete train wreck of a show that not only failed to convince me to buy anything, it actually turned me off from these brands. I couldn't look away. I had to count how many times they showed her iPhone, the car, the razor, and the Biore strips. I had to drink in these images so that I could better understand how out- of-fucking-touch Hollywood and marketing firms really are.

Shows are getting worse and worse about blatant product placement. As if it wasn't bad enough that loud volume commercials have cut the average 30 min Television show down to a mere 21 minutes, they're also obnoxious and promote heavy use of logical fallacies (stereotypes, argument ad populum, appeals to authority, etc), trickery and reliance on ignorance to sell products.

If you're like me (i.e., righteously indignant), then you might do well to avoid this show. Or better yet: watch it with your friends and develop a drinking game where everyone takes a shot when they show a product. Or don't. You'll all get alcohol poisoning.





[**For the record, I'm not calling this roommate "slutty" from a moral judgement point-of-view. I'm all for doing your own thing. I'm just saying that unimaginative writers have a lot to do with creating these archetypally loose women. Example: In the show, Slutty McSlutterbuttons makes out with a guy she has not even met, while she's sober, in broad daylight. They're making this character's only dimension one of sluttitude, and they're not being subtle about it. Surprise, surprise.]

Though I wear many hats, fashion writing is my main career. As such, it's often presumed by people who meet me that I am not very bright. Fashion has certain negative associations with shallow, vain vapidity and these associations can hurt my reputation. This typically causes me to set the bar higher when I engage in conversation with someone.

It is important to me to exercise my brain on a daily basis. My mornings start with a startling blast of Robert Siegel's voice on NPR. My alarm is set to the station, so I often awake in the middle of very confusing sentences ["...and lacking any available source of nutrition, the intrepid explorer chose to eat his own parachute..."]. From there, I check several online sources for information: the World News subreddit, the best science website ever, and Al Jazeera. I am never more thrilled than when I am learning something new, and being aware of the world around me is one of my highest priorities. I have a physical reaction to my own delight at learning, which is something akin to a flush that creeps from neck onto my face (I've dubbed this reaction "nerd fever"). The reason for my insatiable news/information hunger is two-fold: 1) Elevating the level of dialogue I have within my community, and 2) I am, at heart, a philosopher (a lover of wisdom/knowledge).

My educational background is in philosophy, and if I hadn't started this blog and then started writing about fashion professionally, I'd probably be a philosophy professor right now at some Midwestern university. When I embarked on this blog experiment nearly five years ago, I was finishing my final semester at OCU. When I told my philosophy advisor about my fashion blog, he was rightly confused, as fashion - taken only at its most popular defining parameters - is an endeavor that seems to fly in the face of higher learning.

However, I quickly realized how many philosophers, writers, intellectuals and thinkers have explored the arena of fashion. To name a few: Immanuel Kant, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soren Kierkegaard. Each saw significance in the way we choose to dress, in the symbology of garments themselves, in the ritual of adornment and in the aesthetic debate to be had concerning the nature of fashion (is it art?). For that reason, I can and will argue for the rest of my fashion writing career that fashion can be an intellectual pursuit when dissected in metaphysical terms.

As such, I have made a career by writing about fashion philosophically. Though the bulk of my writing each season centers around runway reviews, I take pride in looking at each collection through an intellectual lens. Because fashion is a form of non-verbal communication, my starting point is often "What is the latent message of this collection?"

There are few role models to turn to when employing a philosopical approach to fashion writing. While there are many great writers - Cathryn Horyn, Holly Brubach, Guy Trebay, Joyce Carter (RIP), Rachel Strugatz, Suzy Menkes, Derek Blasberg, Ruth Laferla and Nicole Phelps - there aren't many that speak on the subject with intellectual authority. Enter: Tim Blanks.