Are you Cursed or Charmed?
On the art of iPhone Wabi-Sabi
If you’ve ever made Content for Brands, you’ve encountered this ineluctable paradox: No matter how “cool” a Brand tells you they are up front, what the client actually wants are visuals that are elevated and storytelling that is Brand DNA-friendly. But that’s not even the rub yet: These things that almost every client intuitively wants are also diametrically opposed to what works best on the Feed. Our online culture engages most readily with visuals that are user-generated-looking and storytelling that is loose and irreverent. When we see something polished on the Timeline, 9 times out of 10 our reptile brain immediately says “This is an ad” and scrolls past it.
In the face of this paradox, Content guns-for-hire have two options:
Shoot the moon and deliver the rare thing that is both polished AND engaging.
Coax your client out of their comfort zone toward Content that is platform-native
By virtue of the many smart Contentsmiths doing lots and lots of coaxing over the course of the past five years, Brands have slowly come around to what I call iPhone Wabi-Sabi (iW-S) and now understand the magnetism contained within the slapdash visuals made on our phones. Take Loewe, which during the latter years of Jonathan Anderson’s tenure came to have arguably the best luxury brand TikTok in the industry. If you look at these videos — which lean toward absurdity and a user-generated aesthetic — it would be impossible to imagine them passing the sniff-test as “Luxury Imagery” just five years ago. And even today, they wouldn’t see the light of day at conservative brands. One unique advantage Loewe had was that their creative director himself was a doomscroller, and so one can imagine they were given license to delve into brain rot in ways that are harder to do at other brands (Demna also deserves credit for this too during his Balenciaga years).
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But wait, wait, wait. Go back to this iPhone Wabi-Sabi thing…WTF does that mean?
Over the past decade or so, our minds have been trained on visuals made by amateur social media creators, mostly using iPhones to capture and edit their work. This cannon of imagery is something that doesn’t ever quite look “professional” and that’s exactly the point. Like a wonky ceramic tea vessel, the attractiveness and charisma of iW-S comes from its imperfection. Heap onto this the proliferation of AI generators and tools, and the appeal of an image that is “polished” or “professional” becomes even less special and appealing. After all, the power of iW-S comes from the humanity of the person who made it. That is both its imperfection and its charm.
Although the entire zeitgeist of social media can take credit for its arrival, iPhone Wabi Sabi was forced into Fashion most profoundly by TikTok. Just as Brands were getting used to making campaigns for Instagram (that was its own nearly decade-long learning curve), the short and headless image-making style of TikTok combined with its rise during the pandemic threw marketers for a loop. Many major players hesitated a year too long to even have an account. And those who started early helplessly watched their multimillion dollar campaign videos get ratioed by Bama Rush girls and baristas doing viral dances in the breakroom of Starbucks. Those who were smart adapted fast from these fumbles out the gate and started hiring designated teams just to make TikToks. This was a major turning point in the Content trade, one which catapulted the humble figure of the Social Media Manager from being a Distributor (Hey, slice up this campaign and post it) to being a nose-to-tail Originator (Hey, what should our TikTok campaign for this launch be?).
But how does one attain iW-S? In the same way people say a four-year-old could make a Jackson Pollock, it’s tempting to say that all contemporary marketing could be done by a Content Farm of Zoomers plucked right out of college. So what makes something wabi-sabi and not just common or shittily-made? More or less, the answer is about two things: Skill and Charm.
Anyone who has studied 20th Century Art should be familiar with the concept of De-Skilling. Whereas almost the entire history of art was dominated by virtuosos, Post-War artists actively sought to remove technical skill from art-making. Take for example Andy Warhol, whose canonical paintings could be made just as easily by him or any random person who knows how to operate a screenprinter. Warhol would relish this fact, joking at his openings, “This painting looks great, it’s the first time I’ve seen it.” But De-Skilled art isn’t simply a joke or parody at the expense of virtuosity. By De-Skilling artwork, you place one of two things at the center:
1) The Concept: Yes, you could’ve made it, but you didn’t think of it.
2) The Person: Yes, you could’ve made it, but you aren’t me.
It’s important to stress here that something De-Skilled is different from something unskilled or naive. What Andy Warhol was doing with Electric Chair, or what Tracey Emin was doing with My Bed, is very different from what Outsider artists like Jean Debuffet were doing. Something unskilled does not have the access to make something skilled, whereas something De-Skilled is actively removing skill from the process of artmaking. This is a crucial distinction in the context of iW-S, because while a lot of Content made in this mode may seem like it was achieved by accident or lack of skill/effort, it is the result of something calculated. Is Courreges’s recent campaign composed entirely of mirror selfies Recession-Coded? Sure. But its simplicity also belies many clearly defined decisions about everything from styling to location.
What makes an iW-S image “good” rests in its Charm. This can come from the way in which its execution feels funny or authentic. But it often arrives via the charisma of the person making it. iW-S is inherently an autobiographical genre, because even when the image isn’t about the person making it, the off-kilter way it is made is still a reflection of its author. A great pre-internet example of this is the 90s photography of Juergen Teller. At a time when fashion photography was maxing out on glitz and slick execution — ie. Craft — Teller proposed a De-Skilled approach to glamor, one that documents the moment in its rawest form. Can anyone with a 35mm camera and a flash technically make one of his photos? Sure, many have tried. But are you him? And are you in a hotel room with Kate Moss?
While it's tempting to say that iW-S will supplant the Big Beautiful Fashion Image as our culture pushes deeper and deeper into brain rot territory, it's better to think of Craft and Wabi-Sabi as two contrasting forces that are getting stronger and more extreme. It’s similar in the field of entertainment at large, where even as the attention economy gets more and more DIY and YouTube-ified, the relevance of highly produced and incredibly written HBO-style shows is also deepening. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with fashion photography virtuosos par excellence Inez and Vinoodh (ironically, at an event for the new iPhone). When I asked them about how the image culture today has affected their work, Inez said, “I feel like our world is kind of divided between seeing things on the screen over the phone and seeing things as billboards on the street. Everything in between is sort of–”
I finished her sentence: “Dead.”
I feel like I can write 10x more about this topic than I just did. If you want to hear more, LMK below…
I want to hear 10x more about this plz! Great read.
inhaled the whole thing— a tonic!