Being in the business of Identity.

Am I altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams…? ~ Audre Lorde

Throughout this COVID-induced period of stillness and self-reflection, I, like everyone else, have been evaluating my purpose, my role, my work, and the relation of these things to my ‘identity’. As someone who’s been in PR and Marketing for close to a decade, in and around the fashion/beauty/entertainment industries, I’ve fallen in and out of love with what I do for various reasons including industry changes, code-switch exhaustion, boredom, and burnout.

Through the journey, at the core, I’ve always held tight a grounding opinion of who and what marketers and PR people are; Identity salesmen.

On a day to day, marketers help companies connect with audiences that they want to reach by showing, sharing, promoting and selling like-minded values. We determine what is important to you (the audience) and we sell it back to you in the form of a product, in a way that resonates with your own perception of yourself.

To me, this reads as both morally problematic as it relates to the sociology of business and entirely necessary as it relates to representation.

Eugene Rabkin wrote about how streetwear is the machine that turns insecurity into money for High Snobiety; “Hype culture is uniquely positioned to tap into the…