You Already Understand The Consumer Society- Thanks to The Devil Wears Prada

Miranda Priestly could write The Consumer Society but Baudrillard wouldn't survive a week at Runway 🥱

Like every other aspiring (read: terminally online) pop culture devotee you've had the cerulean blue sweater monologue memorised for over a decade. The moment where Andy realises the claw of fashion is monopolised, capitalised and legitimised by the converging of forces far beyond her comprehension thus the illusion of autonomy in selecting that lumpy sweater that morning is shattered, is iconic.

I'd credit this largely to Streep, as that lass could read a cereal box and make it riveting however, but also because it names something most of us already intuit: that consumer “choice” is always curated, never neutral.

"That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room... from a pile of 'stuff.'“

The illusion isn’t just shattered— legitimate choice was never structurally available in the first place.

The deal of consumer society is simple: you are granted complete autonomy, under the precondition that your choice slots neatly within pre-determined limits you do not get to negotiate.

Legibility of Identity: Buy Now, Pay Later

You can have a brat summer, or summer of Sabrina, you can even dive into a Y2K revival, or become a clean girl gym bunny with a matcha addiction- flirt with every archetype you like, doesn't matter. You just keep that clearpay on, keep your desires satiated by late stage capitalism and remind yourself that you're a taste maker, the only one doing it right, you're not basic, you're 'elevated'.

The surface changes endlessly, but the machinery underneath does not. Identity becomes something assembled through consumption, then reaffirmed through visibility. Only through consumption are we told we become legible.

That's why you have a Pinterest board full of things you have to buy to create a sense of self, the board constantly changes, matching every fleeting whim. Not because you are indecisive, but because desire has become an algorithmic loop: imagine, curate, consume, repeat.

This is the lie that is sold universally: that identity is something you express outwardly, rather than something shaped in advance by what is made available to express.

Only through consumption can you truly be you. You are told this is self-expression. It is also a subscription model.

And the most effective part, arguably the most psychologically violent, is that it doesn’t feel imposed. It feels chosen. And the system rewards you for believing the versions are yours.

Exemption Is Not Exit

The real kicker is we cannot do anything but partake. There are ways to negotiate autonomy within the consumer society, a way to make more ethical choices, but nothing is ever neutral or wholly ethical. Only more or less extractive.

As Mark Fisher put it, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Which leaves the question the monologue quietly raises but never resolves: what happens when identity itself is split between identity as performative appeasement and identity as purchasable exemption? Between consuming knowingly, and consuming while believing you are outside it?

And if both ultimately feed the same beast—does intent matter at all?

Identity is not outside the system. It is how the system continues to be lived and embodied.

Intent doesn’t remove consequence. It only changes the story we tell ourselves about our participation.

Arguably, the most persistent (and dangerous) fiction of the consumer society is that you purchase anything that can exempt you from the system that produced it.

There is a version of identity that believes ethical consumption, aesthetic alignment, or ideological correctness can create distance from capitalism.

But exemption and participation are not opposites. They are variations of the same structure embodied.

For the Love of the Leash

“Florals in spring” not being groundbreaking was never the point.

The point is that even the awareness of repetition doesn’t remove you from it. You can recognise the pattern, name it, mock it—and still participate. The Consumer Society was designed to be accommodating. It accommodates irony. It accommodates critique. It even accommodates exhaustion.

Because participation does not require belief. Only continuation of you wearing the leash.

The leash actually loves criticism. It metabolises it.

And sometimes the most sophisticated argument offered in defence of the leash is that some people do, in fact, like it. That it feels like selfhood. That the tug of it, the direction of it, the mild correction of it—feels like clarity. The leash offers nostalgia for a time that was just as turbulent but easier to gloss over. The leash heals their inner-child. They love their leash so... mind your own business?

But naming that pleasure, and however you may justify it, does not dissolve the structure that produces it.

You can see the leash.

You are not a dog.

But you do have teeth.