We are made of references made by books, movies, songs, pictures, and moments. Each of those pieces is part of our identity and knowledge, encouraging us to want to know more to feed our natural human curiosity and creativity.
If you work in an industry related to entertainment, marketing, fashion, design, art, and culture, having poor reference sources can be a death sentence. Albeit today's society seems shallower and less articulated than in the past, the reality is that historically these fields constantly fed from cultural references. Recycling references produced some of the most iconic and memorable moments in pop culture.
Take the images illustrating this post, for example. On the left is one of the most iconic photos of the Twentieth-Century, the Mainbocher Corset, captured by Horst P Horst in Vogue's Paris studio in 1939. The other one on the right is a scene pulled from Madonna's 1991 Vogue music video directed by David Fincher.
Horst was a German-American fashion photographer best known for his photographs of women and fashion. The Mainbocher Corset, considered his masterpiece, has influenced photography, style, and pop culture for almost a hundred years.
A former visual effects producer, assistant cameraman, and photographer turned into a film director, Fincher debuted directing commercials and music videos. When he looked for references to create Madonna's Vogue music video, he found inspiration in films and photography from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the artwork by artist Tamara de Lempicka and Art Deco design. As a result, many scenes in the video recreate photographs taken by Horst, including the famous Mainbocher Corset.
Voilà! One of the most iconic images of the 20th century, 51 years later, inspired the third spot on the Rolling Stones 100 most famous videos in history.
This is an excellent example of the importance of references to recycle and create memorable moments in culture. Diana Vreeland, legendary editor-in-chief at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, famously said: the eyes have to travel. It speaks to the importance of making things visually interesting to satisfy our eye's natural curiosity. Articulating different visual references is a crucial element in making things more engaging and attractive. That's when having a lexicon of visual references makes all the difference.
But in a dynamic society fueled by the fast pace of social media trends and news cycles, are we losing our memory and creating a generation with an insufficient reference pool?
With the technological advances of the last 20 years, culture research has become more accessible and democratic at the tip of everyone's fingers. What would take hours or days of research, with the invention of Google Images in 2001, can be found in a matter of seconds. But if searching for subjects on Google is easy, finding aesthetic references isn't that simple.
For example, you just need to type "woman's back," and the search engine will offer up millions of options in a flash. However, if you are looking for a specific aesthetic style, you will need to know what you are searching for. And that's when things get tricky. How can you start looking for something that you haven't ever heard about it before? It's not impossible, but it will undoubtedly be more complex and possibly unsuccessful.
When you think of the role of aesthetics in advertising, you have to consider that besides the representational depiction of signs, it requires artistic creativity and originality. Form, composition, texture, chromatic palette, and cultural context are core elements of a style. But the ability to connect different references to create something new and unique seems to be intrinsically human. However, as much as inheriting this quality might be, to be fully refined, it still requires visual education.
But if people are fishing references from the same pool, they will likely come back with the same findings. Which makes us wonder how many times one can recycle the same idea to come up with something new? In the end, everything will end up sort of looking the same. So, to keep people engaged and feed their curiosity, we'll need to fire out faster and louder. But because it's all about the speed and the splash, there will be little recall might be left. It is like walking on Times Square. Everything is fighting for your attention, and although it might look dazzling at the moment, nothing stands out to become memorable. So, as necessary is letting our eyes travel; at some point, they need to land somewhere in our memory.
Today, it seems things don't last long enough to become genuinely iconic anymore. However, ironically, today, we have all the information we want available to anyone 24/7. It's there; you just have to Google it.