'Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness," wrote Tom
Stoppard. "After that, you know too much."
Pandora jewellery is further down the ravine. That explains its
success and why it is so repugnant. We spend so much time trying to
know less, are so enamored by youth, that we would rather be dumb
than old. We would rather spend $1000 on a lumpy children's
bracelet than age into real jewellery.
I was talking to Karin Adcock, Pandora's Australian managing
director, when this registered. I realised, standing in the middle
of my youth, that what I have now will be repackaged and sold back
to me for the rest of my life. I will have the same wants and
insecurities; I will just pay more for them. This is a good as it
gets.
We have been tricked by Pandora charm bracelets - thousands of
us, queued up, buying beads for girls, wives, friends who claim the
need to record relationships on their wrists. We have been tricked
over and over, as many as 20 times to fill a bracelet with
beads.
It is ugly, bulbous stuff, Pandora. Glorified tat on the wrists
of Mosman matrons. Children's jewellery passed up as teething rings
for the middle aged.
The number of bracelets in Australia is incalculable. They
arrived here in 2004 and inside three years had made this country
its third-largest market. Sales doubled in the past two quarters
and hundreds of thousands of bracelets now cling to the aged arms
of the middle class.
Pandora plays a clever game. Women need to see the jewellery on
girls to convince them of their youth. But young girls cannot
afford jewellery like older women. Pandora brought out grades of
bracelets to correct the problem: gold for $2000; silver for $80; a
few combinations between; a class system, instantly read, like the
slave manillas of West Africa.
In his book, The Conquest Of Cool, Thomas Frank traces
this selling of youth to an era of ad men with sideburns and wide
ties; to 1966, to a nude woman in body paint advertising the 46th
Annual New York Art Directors Show. "Creativity," wrote Frank, "had
merged with counterculture."
In that moment, advertising turned youth from a demographic to a
product. It would no longer sell to youth; it would sell youth
itself.
We have always idealised youth. But at some point in the last
century we started using youth to dumb down consumers, to make
people want what they couldn't have, to have them spend until they
felt close.
In making us crave youth, advertising made us think like youth:
bright colours and simple shapes; the broken pathways of the baby
brain, the cells all there but the synapses not developed.
Frank, again: "Madison Avenue was more interested in speaking
like the rebel young than in speaking to them."
And, so, Pandora. The brand claims its target market is the
late-20s. That is where the advertising is directed. That is the
age to which women are aspiring. In truth, many are much older.
"It is a product that appeals to all ages," Adcock says. "We
often see three generations standing in front of a Pandora window,
looking at the product."
There, lined up at the window, are three generations all being
told to think the same way - 60 years between them but no
development to separate them, all wanting the same thing.
And it doesn't stop with jewellery. Take the Iowa primaries,
where pundits seized on the young voters behind Barack Obama.
Time used the word "youthquake" - without shame or irony.
"Only the students," it said last February, "have kept Obama in
contention."
Iowa youth votes were up 135 per cent. But even with 17,000 new
voters in Camp Obama, the net gain was shy of what the then
Democrat contender needed to win. That "youthquake" had to shake
older voters into action before it could have any effect.
And shake them it did. People were used to watching youth for
direction, to privileging youth over wisdom, to being dumb instead
of being old. People were so used to buying youth, they figured
they might as well elect it.
But youthfulness does not make good policy. Youth is not
sensible. The whole youth frenzy is as reductive in the White House
as it is in the jewellery store.
There is resistance, as youth undermines sense. For all his
campaign foolishness, John McCain was at least old. And jewellers
were initially hostile to the idea of stocking Pandora. The company
struggled for outlets. People would not spend half an hour selling
a $30 bead.
Then the market took over: McCain lost; so did the jewellers; so
did age; so did good taste.
Erik Jensen