Janie B. Cheaney: Trading legacy for labels

MYNRA BROWN, HOST: Today is Wednesday, May 14th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. WORLD commentator Janie B. Cheaney asks: What’s in a name?

JANIE B. CHEANEY: I have a confession—after the annual Met Gala on the first Monday night in May, I click over to the Vogue website to peruse the haute couture.

The Met Gala originated in 1948 as a fundraiser for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. The event is now organized by fashion maven Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue Magazine, and is largely considered the world’s glitziest fashion parade. Some of the biggest names of New York high society are there. Attendance is by invitation only and attendees have the option of dressing to a theme. Arrivals parade past a bank of cameras and pose on the floral carpet before climbing the grand staircase into the museum. Tickets this year cost $75,000. Don’t ask me where all that money goes, and I’m not sure where it all came from, either.

For the last several years, the Met Gala has become a rich target for conservative commentators, who have a lot to say about the pretentiousness, the puffed-up glamor, and the clothes—oh, the clothes! From the pictures, it appears that tasteful evening dress is almost déclassé. The celebrities outdo each other with outfits outlandish, scandalous, cross-gendered, or wildly exaggerated. What struck me this time, however, was not the outré fashion sense, but the number of celebrities that now go by one name only. It’s been a trend, from Adele to Zendaya. There’s even a term for it: mononymous. Still, mononymity has generally been reserved for durable superstars, or world conquerors like Napoleon or consequential creatives like Leonardo.

I had never heard of most of those one-namers on the Met Gala runway, though presumably they’ve made their mark somewhere. But the self-naming suggests to me that these aren’t personalities so much as brands. Branding is how we sell products; the brand is what sets one thing apart from similar things, whether it’s ultra-whitening toothpaste or specialty dog food. Brands fight it out in the market to determine what gets shelf space and what finds its own little online niche. Social media allows anyone with media savvy to become their own brand; “influencers” market themselves more than any product.

But people aren’t products, and the pouty faces and ridiculous getups at the Met Gala this year seemed more lamentable than laughable. Celebrities have never been known for their just-plain-folksiness—showing off comes with the territory. But unlike celebrities of the past, many of today’s rich and famous don’t sell their exceptional talent or “star quality” to an appreciative public. They sell a brand, and single names like Lisa, or made-up names like Bad Bunny, are a dead giveaway.

For most of us, names are bestowed at birth by someone else, and we don’t change them; we grow into them. Think of Abraham, “Father of a Multitude,” whose name echoed through generations. Even today, names make a statement: they say who we are, but also where we’re from. They put us in the context of a family and a generational line, individual yet connected. There are real persons with real names under the Lisas and Lizzos, but self-creation can only go so far before becoming self-parody.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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