Why did Slavoj Žižek write copy for Abercrombie & Fitch?

December 2024

Media Analysis

In 2003, Slavoj Žižek — a vocal Marxist critic of consumer capitalism — wrote philosophical copy for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. He was paid. He did it voluntarily. And he didn't seem particularly troubled by the contradiction.

This is either: an embarrassing hypocrisy, a cynical cash grab, or one of the most honest things a philosopher has done in decades. I'd argue it's the third.

To understand why, you need to start with McLuhan. The Medium is the Message means that the form of communication shapes its impact more than the content. What you say matters less than how it arrives. A philosophical argument in a glossy A&F catalogue isn't philosophy — it's an aesthetic move. The words are decoration. The product being sold is the idea that the brand is intellectually serious, that buying the clothes makes you the kind of person who reads Žižek. Whether the customer understands a word of it is irrelevant.

Žižek understood this better than anyone. He knew his actual ideas wouldn't survive the medium. He was selling his persona — the wild-haired Eastern European contrarian — as a brand asset. The content was always going to be irrelevant. Only the form mattered.

This is the world we live in now. The map has replaced the territory so completely that the territory is often irrelevant. What matters is how things look, feel, and fit into existing identity frameworks. The substantive content of a Substack post matters less than whether it reads like the kind of thing your tribe shares. A political argument matters less than whether it feels like the right team scored.

Consider the Barbie film. It was commercially successful and critically praised for being a feminist statement, a takedown of patriarchy, a celebration of women. It was also an enormously effective two-hour advertisement for Barbie. Both things were true simultaneously. The film felt like social commentary, and that feeling was sufficient. Nobody needed it to actually change anything. The aesthetic of critique had replaced critique itself.

Žižek in the A&F catalogue is just the Barbie film with smaller production values. The appearance of intellectual seriousness performing the exact function that intellectual seriousness was supposed to undermine.

So here is the actual lesson, stated plainly:

In any medium, master the formal conventions first. The words, the structure, the aesthetic register — these do the heavy lifting. Substance is secondary. People will experience your form and construct the substance themselves. If the form is right, they'll tell you it's the best thing they've read. If it's wrong, even a genuinely important idea will slide off them.

This is not cynicism. It's just how communication works. Žižek knew it. McLuhan knew it. Every effective propagandist in history has known it.

The question is what you do once you know it. You can use it to sell things people don't need. You can use it to make bad ideas seem good. Or you can use it to make genuinely good ideas actually land, which is a much rarer and more difficult art.

Žižek chose the first option in 2003. Make of that what you will.