The totem is the symbol of a natural or supernatural entity, to which can be ascribed two different meanings in heathen religion.

On the one hand, it can indicate the spirit of the forefather, materialised in a phallic monument – generally in stone – holding together a tribe through a founding myth and through rituals, which are reinforced as long as they are remembered.In this case, the totem performs the function of keeping the group together, protecting it of its own explosive or implosive tendencies. This is what we would call “a State” today. On the other hand, it can be a way to incarnate the other by letting the self become spiritually possessed by the other – usually an animal – with the aim of acquiring its power to face difficult situations. For example a wolf or a bear.

Today more than ever, the theme of the totem is relevant as contemporary society, splintered by unhinging phenomena such as globalisation, the fall of ideologies, the no-logo culture, web 2.0 and the financial crash – of which I will have the opportunity to talk plenty in a soon to be published book – has returned to a tribal, nomadic form of organisation. According to the philosopher Michel Maffesoli, new tribes differentiate themselves from primitive tribes by being constrained virtually instead of physically and by not submitting themselves to a central authority with punitive power. It is even different form the young subcultures that characterized the second half of the nineties, which managed to create a universe of closed meanings, practices and values, coherent with and adding to the way of those of native cultures. These subcultures positioned themselves as antagonising the dominant culture: to order they oppose the desire for a new order, that’s why the counter-culture was the counterpart of the mainstream culture. The new tribes, on the contrary, uphold chaos without trying to bring order into it, they live inside the crashing values without reassembling the pieces. The result is that the individual becomes a dividual and a multividual. Memberships are concentric and identities are multiple. This is highly visible in the coexistence of affiliations through social networks in real life, in the decreasing power of brands due to the disintermediation operated by the new media and in the decline of loyalty to places and institutions, also commercial ones, in favour of nomadism that sees the human pursuing different and discontinuous emotions according to each occasion.

Before the fall of the Berlin wall, when people were divided in two visions of the world, they were united internally. When the fall of the wall reunited two nations and geographical territories, people, no longer constrained by coherence of existential positions rather than ideological positions, became divided in their own identity. From this emanated the recent phenomenon of “cosplay”: the disguise of identities by wearing costumes that used to define roles such as the sailor, the soldier, the Lolita and so on. But also more simply, we see this in the association of opposite categories in the same look (undressed and overdressed, under and over, night and day, etc.), working against the total look proposed by the ideological brands. The neo-tribal society explodes the divergences, reducing them to convergence. Meanings become transversal and syncretic, even those regarded previously as unchangeable in as far as they seem to belong to the domain of biology. Sensuality and sexuality are making way for trans-sexuality or asexuality.

“Familiation” is no longer an affiliation: the traditional family is in crisis. Age differences have faded, the elderly – e.g. the seventy-year-old DJ Ruth Flowers – aspire to be young, the young feel like adults earlier and earlier on; and all, young and old, are all together always children. The middle class, seen as the category of segmentation, is threatened with extinction: consumption is polarized and the same person, beyond his membership to a specific social class, can buy something in hard discount and luxury boutiques in the same day. With H&M the pyramidal differences in dressing are reduced and Zara has become for many young people a third habitat, after home and school.

A recent editorial in the Italian Vogue opens stating that we are in the new “No Rules Era”. Fashion has become ever faster because desire, in a nomadic logic, is consumed in a way which is ever more unlimited and closer. The semestral update has become an upgrade thanks to the availability of alternative (or surrogate) offers. The creative action is left deconsecrated, the brand humiliated. But the extreme speed, suggested as a circular vortex of proposals, has always in the middle – just as the black hole in space – an element of singularity, attracting everything approaching it and temporarily repelling everything tending to approach it. Tribes, deconsecrating elements of the sacred as we experienced it in the past century, contain also an element of re-sacralisation around which men of different race, culture, wealth, age and social class tend to gather. Once a cult object, later a system of projection in the other through his incorporation (from fur, through tattoos and finally vintage), today the Totem is a pure concept.

The totem thus brings back an undivided sacrality, a more profound reunion of the self, pre-existent to the speed and to this repelling, well described by the ancient Greeks who preferred to the kairos (a time of opportunity) the cronos (the circular cosmic time). For so many years the word totem has been referring to a billboard, a pillar posed on a base, analogical with the form of the primitive. These proposals by Linda Loppa, close the gap created by decennia of publicity for star brands and liegemen, targets, clients. The phase of division and multi-division is here exceeded. The individual returns, subject and no longer cult-object. The contradictions of being, becoming, playing and being and belonging, through seduction and sedition, through listing and indicating, are overcome in a way that is at the same time postmodern and primitive. Totems are not publicity, storybooks of segmented products for numbered people, nor are they subliminal metaphors for those who are purchased while purchasing. Totems are archetypes and holograms. In the No Rule Era, we are the Totem without taboo.

Author: Danilo Venturi – Fashion Brand Management Master Teacher
Translation: Charlotte De Bruyn – Fashion Brand Management Student 2010/11