Reproducibility and the Zara Jacket

FOTUS expresses herself through her outerwear. The messages, though, are ambiguous. She uses a fashion language the rest of us don't speak.

 This jacket seems to be one of her more explicit messages since she stepped off an airplane wearing Manolo stilletos while touring a flood.

Daily Mail reports that Melania Trump boarded her plane to Texas wearing a jacket that said on the back, "I really don't care, do u?"https://t.co/SeNGeux5jB pic.twitter.com/owHqTAyPdO

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) June 21, 2018

One consistent feature of Melania Trump's outwear style is that there's always something missing--human contact, generally. The Zara jacket is missing a pronoun. What doesn't she care about? Another consistent trope of her outwear is resistance--to contact with her husband, sometimes. Not to be too "Free Melania" about it, but we can't assume that she sees her mission to the border in the same way we do. It's possible her outwear has an audience of one. If that's the case, the rest of us are locked out, again.

Ambiguity of the image is fertile ground for reproducibility in the sense Benjamin outlined in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" as people try to reclaim meaning from the elites.

Got a new jacket this mornin' and whatnot. pic.twitter.com/A3ABo9S08r

— George Wallace (@MrGeorgeWallace) June 21, 2018