Dear Shaded Viewers,
In the age of uncontrolled satisfaction that borders on uncomfortable exposure, everything (and everyone) has to perform. Whether you join the play or not, you still get cast: you are either the one in the thick-framed Meta glasses or the one being filmed. Will you answer truthfully and risk disappointing your potential audience, or will you pander, so to speak, and give in?
Natasha Zinko’s SS27 show chose to play this game with one rule: she is in charge. If everything now passes through a Pay Per View logic, she will be the one rage-baiting the cameraman. The show placed the audience at the centre of a panopticon, gazing at a cast who know they might be watched at any moment. The wardrobe follows the same logic. The collection leans heavily on underwear, lacy slips and lingerie-inspired pieces, fusing private bedroom wear with public fashion. That is the OnlyFans dress code, minus the ring light. The subscription model runs on a simple hierarchy of layers. Subscribers pay in monthly instalments, one-time tips or pay-per-view, and what they are really paying for is the removal of a layer: the slip, the strap, the thing underneath. Zinko turns the hierarchy inside out. Underwear is exposed and worn as outerwear, so the item behind the paywall is now on the street, in the light, for free. The joke is that the paywall was never the fabric. It was the frame, the box, the little window you have to be admitted to. The pieces are not selling nakedness. They are selling the ticket to it.
Freud would have had a field day, and probably a subscription. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality he describes scopophilia and exhibitionism as a pair: the pleasure of looking and the pleasure of being looked at, two halves of one drive, ready to swap places at the first opportunity. The Meta glasses simply hand the voyeur a prosthetic eye. Freud called man a “prosthetic god” in Civilization and Its Discontents, and here is the god, now with a battery life and a “record” LED. Meanwhile the one being filmed learns what every hysteric learned in Vienna: the body speaks whatever the room is willing to pay to hear. Attention is the new libido, and the like is its currency.
So who wins? Not the glasses, and not entirely the girls in the boxes either. The winner is whoever admits that it is all theatre and writes the script before anyone else does. Zinko’s answer to “will you pander or tell the truth?” is a third option Freud would have appreciated: perform so deliberately that the performance becomes the truth. So, now the only remaining luxury is choosing which one, and knowing who is holding the camera.
Perhaps, the winner is Natasha Zinko, who flipped the utopian Zuckerberg-esque drama into her greatest comedy?
