How do we deify without dehumanizing? I don’t know. Here we have to consider if dehumanizing a person is always wrong (or maybe unwanted); and the gut reaction should probably be yes. That said, there are a lot of people who work very hard to be taken as not human, particularly in celebrity and particularly in digital celebrity. Presenting the best imagine of yourself online is, by nature, itself dehumanizing; yet we all make sure our profile pictures are the better pictures of us.

So we can embellish ourselves and it’s mostly culturally okay, but what about other people. The whole idea behind Manic Pixie Dream Girls is that they are not people, but fetishized objects. In literature, it demonstrates lackluster writing ability and arguably sexist tendencies, but I’m going to make the argument, just because I can, that despite Daisy Buchanan role as the green light in The Great Gatsby (and, on top of that, Fitzgerald’s generally well-rounded sexism), she was not a flat character, but rather a misguided, thought fully formed, person who was part of a narrative that often took the perspective of Gatsby. That said, Gatsby may have not been looking at her at all.

The modern reading of The Great Gatsby describes Gatsby as a character who is more or less defined by his relentlessness. He made his fortune and it wasn’t enough. He built up his reputation, and it wasn’t enough. He lived in his castle and drove his golden car and it wasn’t enough. And yet he thinks that if he had Daisy, that would finally be enough. It wouldn’t be and the tragedy is much stronger thematically because of it. There are themes that we, maybe as a culture, maybe as a species, seem to never stray from and relentless pursuit, specifically of love, is one of them. Lana Del Rey built her career on it and specializes in being both Gatsby and Daisy.

If there is a single person (well, character) who exemplifies they ways in which relentless pursuit is romanticized in popular culture, it is Lana Del Rey and she does incredibly well. Because of the expanse of the theme across the entirety of her work, examples might be trivial, but we can see it blatantly in “Without You,” “Off to the Races,” and “Video Games,” and the way it takes sort of reversal of perspective in the revelry of the pursued-to-pursuer dialog in “Nation Anthem.” It fits very well with grand strings and drug oriented metaphors (see Justin Timberlake’s “Pusher Love Girl” for another example with mostly identical properties in a very different style).

Wildfox is… well, flawed. The brand does some things so poorly it makes me uncomfortable, and we really should talk about them, but that needs to be its own topic. That said, Wildfox’s first of two strong points (the second it the price range is attractively high) is that it sells it’s clothes throughout context and about half the time produces effective work. The idea is that you could only be doing the things that are done in these clothes by buying these clothes. Sweatshirt for when you get annoyed with your boyfriend on your hundred thousand dollar resort trick and need to blow off steam by playing tennis by yourself and listening to Lana. That sort of thing. But the interesting part is that they’re sold on fictions. No matter who you are, you are probably not going to be serving tennis balls across the court, half drunk, as the sun sets behind the palm trees so that all you can here is the salt in the wind hitting the dunes when your boyfriend, sort of worried about you but well aware you can take care of yourself, shows up with a tennis racket and a bottle of Champaign to ask if you want to be his doubles partner to play against the shadows the two of you cast across the court in the rising dust. That’s not going to happen, but honestly what else could you possibly wear that sky blue, laurel crested, loose cut hoodie for? The clothes are designed so that they insist on an emergent fiction to be sold upon. It’s branding on a seasonal, line-to-line level.

But of course, once you have it, the fiction vanishes and you find yourself looking at the fall line, inspired by Cambridge students having bonfires in grounds of their English country homes. Lit swimming pools and casual lacrosse. That sort of thing. And damn, it sells all over again. Neither you or I are stupid though, we both realize how this works and yet the fact is that it works. Brands like Wildfox weave, surface-level, beautifully shot fictions and no matter how many they produce, we always want more. We know that in the moment a Cambridge University Crew Team t-shirt is exactly what we want, but we also know that in three months, it will be something else, and later something else, and that’s fine because, hey, that’s what Gatsby did and he turned out alright in the end.