WHY EVERYONE WANTS TO BE A BRAND

We are obsessed with vivid personalities. We aspire to be like them. Creating our best selves, presenting ourselves for the admiration of others is an old, old endeavour in the West, says Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton.

Personal branding is about shaping others’ perception of you. It involves intense self-promotion, but the effect is one of utter authenticity. In Renaissance Italy, courtiers aspired to a quality called sprezzatura: concealing all effort, making difficult things look light. In Regency England, this became the ‘bon ton’, a mysterious aura of one’s own.

This nonchalance also meant shucking off the conventions of the feudal order. Clothing once signified social position. To dress outside your place in the hierarchy was to be ridiculed or fined. But by the late 18th century, London was swimming in new money from industry and trade, straining the old rules.

Personal branding, or what the book calls ‘self-making’, has always had twin impulses: An aristocratic element of signalling one’s superiority, and a democratic element of expressing one’s essence. In America, the idea of being a self-governing individual took deep root. People were to be judged by their own cultivation of themselves, not their father’s social station. You were supposed to imagine and shape your own fate; those who did not were deemed failures.

Later, Hollywood created a new kind of celebrity. Personalities and roles blended, as actors were seen as archetypes: the femme fatale or gamine waif or working class hunk. The personalities and lives of stars were managed by studios, their mysterious magnetism was, in fact, cultivated by committee.

The nature of celebrity is moulded by media, technology and politics. Jump to the 1960s, where American counterculture produced publicity-savvy figures like Andy Warhol (who coined ‘fifteen minutes of fame’). As television pervaded culture, reality and entertainment merged. The idea that you should create a persona, and this persona should be the most authentic thing about you, became a maxim of American culture.

It was enough to be famous, for the sake of fame alone, untethered to career or money goals. Nobody does this better than Kim Kardashian, who struggled on the fringes of fame until a private sex tape emerged, and she got her own show on reality TV. The Kardashians became a cultural juggernaut not because of any specific talents but an appetite for fame, cosmetic intervention and relentless self-promotion. She is a monument to plasticity.

The other canny self-creator of our times is of course, Donald Trump, who went from reality TV to Twitter personality cult to underdog candidate to president and challenger, insistent that reality is what we make of it.

Instagram lets anyone aspire to celebrity status, by making their seemingly real life into compelling art. There are ‘content collectives’ of TikTok influencers who live together, often managed by a label, and film their lives for social media.

And even if you’re not looking for fame and fortune, this internet-driven economic system requires pretty much everyone to sell themselves to survive – to get a job, to get a date, or get votes. We are what we create and commodify.

But what does it do to the soul, when we create these masks? What do you lose when you cut the strings of custom, or community, or deny your own internal complexity? That’s the question.