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.
…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…
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…
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…