The host suggests people now choose bland clothes and homes so that nobody judges them. Millman doubts that's possible and argues that refusing to send a signal is still a deliberate choice that signals something. The story about her father is her example.
Right.
And there is this dimension where are you willing to have people have views about you, right? What your house looks like, what you're dressed like, how things are decorated, or recognizing that some people might love it and other people might hate it, right? That fashion can be polarizing and design can be polarizing versus do you have a society that in some cultural way has become less comfortable with that, right? People in it do not want to expose themselves to judgment. They want to be looked at, judged as acceptable and have the gaze fall off of them.
I don't know if that's possible, Ezra. And even when someone takes a stance against being obvious or loud, that choice is still a choice. It's still a deliberate decision. Years ago, my father decided that he was no longer going to wear Ralph Lauren polo shirts because he didn't want to be a walking billboard for the brand. Okay. What did he do? I can't even say this with a straight face. He put a flag pin over the logo. I'm like, dad, you just exchanged one logo for another. Now you are representing the United States on your shirt, on your polo shirt. He didn't want to buy new ones. So he replaced the logo, he put the covered up the logo, the polo logo with a flag. As soon as you see that flag, it signifies something. I have always, in the last 20 or so years, been kind of afraid of wearing color. I only always wear black. Always, always. Anything else feels too fluorescent. I feel like I'm being looked at. I sort of, this, everything goes with everything. It blends. My nephew first, first realizing it many, many years ago, he said, hey, why do you always wear black? I'm like, oh, it's just easier. I don't have to decide about too much. Everything goes with everything. He goes, that's weird. Yeah, it is a little bit weird, but it's easy for me. And I also feel like you in the podcast world to have to then suddenly go into video is terrifying. But I do think that every decision we make is deliberate. We're revealing ourselves in ways that allow us to be perceived in a certain way. And clothing and objects and cars and houses and sneakers and handbags all express that.
In a way, I'm not sure people mean that much by the Ralph Lauren brand, so it may not be a great example. But when people put a flagpin on now, like particularly in like the post-9-11 world and in that period. It was a very, very, very specific kind of statement about yourself that maybe it wouldn't have been at other times when it was just a, you know, people had American flags or they had an FDR picture hanging in their house. Or separately, what it meant to have a Mao picture or a Stalin picture in those societies meant something different than in societies where it's much more of a choice whether or not you hung those.
You're talking about the sort of emotional resonance being different between Ralph Lauren and a flagpen.
No, what I'm talking about here, what I think I'm talking about here, is that the logic of branding, we have become so used to thinking of it as branding, as corp, like the thing corporations are trying to do with it, that even when the symbol is coming out of a non-commercialized sphere, a sphere that would understood to be representing very different things about somebody, we almost now sort of see them all on all in the same plane. You know, when I was a kid, I wore a gold chai, which is a Jewish symbol. Yes. And I wore that at a time when I was quite religious as a kid. I went through a period where I wanted to be a rabbi. And what that meant to me wasn't what it meant to me some years later when I got my first Nike shoes or when I was trying to dress to fit in with other kids. Like I was expressing something that was more private. I mean, it was existing publicly too, but it wasn't. And I think these are different. And so it's funny because it's not where I thought our conversation would go, but I think it's a very interesting place for it to go, which is places where maybe logics or ways of accessing the world that should remain separate actually begin to converge. And I want to get into the public and private spheres here. And maybe a good way to do it is this. We sent you an email asking you for an example of something ugly that you thought was good design. And you talked about these ads that used to be on the subway from Dr. Zimmer. Dr. Zismore. Dr. Zimore. So can you describe them for listeners and audio here?