As part of my tireless commitment to self-fulfilment, corporate conformity and brown-nosing senior management, yesterday I attended a 'personal branding' 'workshop' at the behest of my employers, presented by a perfectly harmless but strangely uninspiring woman. Topics were the usual pseudo-psychological guff about finding your 'inner' 'authentic' 'core', and learning how to make an impression - as a way of differentiating yourself from everyone else.
Now, since last year's series of The apprentice, it is of course laughably, contemptibly easy to be disparaging about anyone peddling a way to 'market' yourself as 'a brand', so I tried not to be too dismissive. 'You get out what you put in,' after all - though it is surely no coincidence that you will most often hear this from the lips of people who are peddling the bleeding obvious in a slightly mystical way.
Stuart Baggs the brand. He is no Liz Locke.
Still, apart from reinforcing my impression that 95% of the world neither knows nor cares how to dress - even those who set themselves up as authorities on the matter - I discovered that I would look good in a fuschia pink tie. I have no intention of testing that hypothesis, of course; but, as our American friends might ask, Who knew?
The handouts included an actually rather good basic guide to business dressing, albeit with some unintentionally hilarious recommendations for shirt makers, and the apparent belief that any item of clothing more than five years old will be 'dated'. As Professor Yaffle would no doubt remark, fiddlesticks and flapdoodle.
But ultimately these sort of things collapse under their own contradiction: if everyone did what the 'workshop' recommended - polished their shoes, brushed their hair, wore the right colour for their skin tone etc - then everyone would be 'memorable', and then none of them would be.
That reinforced also a feeling of unease I have entertained since starting this venture. Thank goodness it will never happen, of course; but if everyone began dressing well, where would that leave me?
ps Posting has been light this past month, and I have as a result been haemorrhaging reader. I have just changed jobs and the IT policy in my new office is considerably stricter than at my previous workplace, which means I am forced to post when at home, and, with a two-year old and eleven-week old under the same roof, circumstances rarely permit.
As I've grown up, my ideas about what it means to be 'rich' have evolved substantially. I don't mean that I've migrated from a materialist definition - big house, smart car etc - to a more spiritual 'Love of the common people'-type definition. Financial assets and possessions remain important, if not central, and only a knave, a fool or a through-going combination of the two -John Lennon, perhaps - would tell you otherwise. Indeed, the 'materially rich/spiritually poor' archetype is not only demonstrably false in plenty of cases, it's a lazy and dishonest construct - a bit like the 'tragic clown' cliche that probably applies to, say, ten per cent of professional comedians.
And the flip of the cliche, perpetuated by, among others, Paul Young, is exceptionally dangerous: it is manifestly obvious that millions of poor people don't have a daddy to buy them a dream to cling to; and, while their momma might love them as much as she can, that might well not be as much as she ought, or as much as they need. The idea that family love somehow compensates for the hole in your shoe that lets the snow come through will only hamper that family's exodus from state-peddled welfare dependency, particularly in those many circumstances where the state accrues to itself the role of father and provider. And let us not pretend that the presence of both daddy and momma gives a child a statistically greater chance of achieving 'positive outcomes.' Etc etc.
Paul Young: a musical cosh for the sans-culottes
