Image is Everything

But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” I Samuel 16:7

Back in 1990, tennis star Andre Agassi, with his trademark flowing dirty-blond, lion-mane mullet, cut a commercial for the Canon EOS Rebel camera with the iconic tagline, "Image is everything." The spot featured Andre riding in a Jeep, smoothing back his hair and generally looking like the essence of California cool.

Problem was that Agassi's trademark hair was actually, well, largely not his. In his 2009 autobiography, Open, Agassi admits that he started losing his hair when he was 17, and was actually wearing a wig during the commercial and on the court -- and it cost him the 1990 French Open. Seems that Andre was worried about his hairpiece falling off in the middle of the match, so he played pretty stiff and got beat.

To his credit, Andre got real about his image after that and shaved off his hair, making his image all about what happened on the court. What he did not know, however, was that his signature line, "Image is everything," would become the mantra of the first two decades of the 21st century. After all, how else can you explain Paris Hilton, the Kardashians and the vapid cast of Jersey Shore and their reality TV ilk -- attractive people who are only famous for being famous? Whereas celebrity used to involve a measure of talent, now it is only about the bling.

Case in point: A number of cottage industries have arisen out of the culture's obsession with fame that will give you the celeb treatment even if you do not have any celeb cred whatsoever. You may not be a real celebrity, but you can play one in your own mind. Image is everything, but only if you are willing to pay for it.

You may not be able to own the runway at the Oscars, but you can borrow a designer dress from a company called Rent the Runway for about $75; just do not forget to order it in two sizes in case you, um, misjudge the fit. The owners of Rent the Runway say their business has tripled in a year.

Need some bling to go with that dress? Jewelry company Adorn will rent you a $24,000 diamond necklace for $260 and a pair of $8,250 earrings like Princess Kate wore at her wedding for just $160 (yes, there's a security deposit). And Avelle, another company, will rent you a Louis Vuitton handbag (retail price $1,680) for just $60 a week.

Of course, none of that will matter if no one's looking. Image, after all, is a visual medium. Why not head out on the town in style in a Bentley, Maserati or Rolls-Royce rented from Gotham Dream Cars? A Rolls Royce Phantom convertible will cost you $1,950 a day, which is chump change compared to its retail price of $427,000.

Since the whole "image is everything" mantra was started by a camera commercial, what does a fake celebrity need more than a pack of fake paparazzi? Turns out you can rent them, too. Celeb 4 A Day was founded in 2007 by photographer Tania Roberts and operates in four celebrity-rich cities in the United States.: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin and New York. In L.A., $499 will buy you four personal paparazzi to follow your every move and shout questions at you for 30 minutes. You can upgrade to the "MegaStar" package, however, and get a two-hour experience that includes six personal paparazzi, one bodyguard, a publicist and a limousine.

Our society is growing ever more preoccupied by physical appearance: what it says about us and how to enhance it. Professor Joan Brumberg of Cornell University has documented this growing obsession, through a comparative study of diaries written by teenage girls.

She first consulted surviving diaries from the nineteenth century. She analyzed their entries, arranging them by topic. What Professor Brumberg found is that nineteenth-century teenagers spent a great deal of time writing about their aspirations to be good, useful, caring, positive contributors to society. They had a sense of personal mission, something that caused them to reach beyond themselves.

Then, the professor turned to diaries written by teenage girls of our own time. She found their aspirations to be focused mostly on becoming slim, pretty, well-dressed and popular.[1]

I am not usually much for poetry. However, this little poem struck me as a reflection on the problem with image.

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,

which knew it would inherit the earth

before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds

watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom

is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,

more famous than the dress shoe,

which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men

who smile while crossing streets,

sticky children in grocery lines,

famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.[2]

---

[1] --Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (Vintage, 1998).

[2] --"Famous" from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Used by permission of the author.