Vol. 1, No. 5: Fashionably Humiliated
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Performance Improvement Plan
Performance Improvement Plan seeks to solve problems by answering questions about working in the creative industries. What’s vexing you? Talk to us: pip@softlabor.biz. All communications and sources will remain confidential and anonymous.
Dear Soft Labor,
I work as an entry-level gallerist in New York City. As one might imagine, there is a major disparity in pay between my position and those of, say, the gallery’s directors and partners. Everyone I work with seems to be independently wealthy, as expressed through stunning wardrobes. I myself love fashion and know the sticker price of the quiet luxury that surrounds me. I secretly work a second job on some nights and weekends to support myself—no nepo baby, over here!—which none of my coworkers know about. I scour sample sales and Century 21 to try to keep up with the general look but at the bottom line, I truly cannot. A tale as old as time. (Why do I work in this thimble of a world, you ask? I feel that I am entitled to the opportunity as much as anyone else is.)
Here’s a twist: My gallery is big enough to have its own Human Resources operation whose head frequently makes passive-aggressive comments about my wardrobe, which is stereotypically black for a reason: at a quick glance, it’s tougher to discern brands. I’m quite sick of having my confidence undermined by offhand asides about mall goths.
From the dressing room,
Fashionably Humiliated
Dear Humiliated,
While it would be more fun to talk about clothes here, we feel compelled to focus on what we see as the heart of the matter in your situation: power. We presume that you have some facility with art history, and so we quote from Jenny Holzer’s infamous Truisims series: “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise.” Don’t be fooled by this person, Humiliated.
It is unfortunate that people who seem to hold power at work—and that sort of murky, mysterious level of HR-level power, in particular—sometimes lord that aura over others and especially, presumably-vulnerable people. However, “seem” is the key concept here, Humiliated. This individual likely feels powerless themselves, hence their cruel and even compulsive need to throw shade across the white cube. We presume that you are doing your job diligently and well, so what else does your HR director have to work with but your appearance? They know—and you know—that clothing is, in part, a form of social currency in the world writ large, but especially in a field where value is predicated on aesthetic judgement.
What should you do with this particular form of microaggressive behavior? Throw your shoulders back and laugh at it, Humiliated. We suspect that your colleague might feel threatened by your understated excellence on some level (you don’t even need that handbag!). We also suspect that they feel intensely self-conscious about their own physical appearance—about their own ability to keep up. You could quit your job; you could call a labor lawyer; or you could work at the gallery for a while longer—most jobs don’t last forever—and be the best mall goth the city has ever seen.
Yours,
Soft Labor
PS: We see a future spent trawling Dover Street Market lying ahead for you, Humiliated. Hang in there.
Search Results
“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests.
🔗 Follow Soft Labor’s research channel on are.na. We update it regularly.
🔗 For Humiliated: “Belittled Women” is an opinion piece written by critic Isobel Harbison and published in Frieze in 2013. She ably takes on the dreaded—and highly gendered—”gallerina” gallery title, if you will, and the way it denigrates women while implying a whole slew of assumptions about gallery work itself.
🔗 Those who know us know our devotion to Chris Kraus—one that vastly preceded I Love Dick's aughts resurgence, beginning, for us, with Torpor and Where Art Belongs, a tiny semiotext(e) intervention series book from 2011 that examines, amongst other things, her own and others' relationships to collectivity in the art world. We want you to read Kraus, Humiliated (and everyone) because Kraus is comfortable living—and working—on the outskirts of the "insider" art world in a way that is relevant when considering how to position oneself in life. A few more short on-ramps to Kraus: Lost Properties, an impossible-to-find semiotext(e) pamphlet from the 2014 Whitney Biennial (PDF) and a well-researched interview with Keegin Brady in November magazine. Go.
🔗 We're just started reading critic Sophie Gilbert's recently published Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, which explores the darker side of late 90s/aughts feminism. Chapter 9 is entitled "Girl Boss." We can't wait for it.
🔗 We're looking forward to Lauren O'Neill-Butler's chronicle of the relationship between artists and protest, The War of Art, which will be published by Verso in mid-June. Here's a recent conversation about the book between O'Neill-Butler and Cassie Packard for Frieze.
Other People's Projects
"OPP" follows the work of people we know and people we do not know.
👁️ Dear comrade Emily Keegin just published a stunning Op-Ed in the New York Times aptly titled “Trump’s Oval Office is a Gilded Rococo Nightmare. Help.” One might think the decor of the Oval Office was the least of our problems. Keegin suggests otherwise.
👁️ Dough! Magazine is the work of founding editor and designer (and comrade) Bella De Angeles and editors Emma Slack-Jorgensen and Chrisaleen Ciro. Dough is a monthly newsletter for the “culturally-informed and the economically-uninformed.” Dough! publishes on Substack and in print. (Try Casa Magazines for a copy.)
👁️ We’re watching ADULT (nice name), a "post-disruption creative company that cultivates collective intelligence in the hope of growing a better future" led by New Yorkers Cecilia Azcarate and Helene Hermes.
Progress Report
“Progress Report” updates readers on Soft Labor’s work. For summer 2025, we’ll be mining the Soft Labor writing archives for pieces that hold relevance to our ongoing work.
▶️ “Another C Word: On Content and the (Techno) Curatorial” is an essay that Soft Labor founder Sarah Hromack-Chan wrote for CCS Bard’s Red Hook Journal about a decade ago, when the word “content” was emerging in popular vernacular as a sort of casually lazy, catchall term; likewise, the hyper-specific “curator” was also being applied liberally in the digital sector. In this (epic) essay, we connected these real linguistic shifts to the changes we were observing within institutional culture—how the popularization of social media, for example, had blurred the private and public lives of curators. This essay is fairly heavily cited—Raymond Williams forever!—but it’s worth a read, as she spotted a set of bourgeoning trends that have clearly played out.
▶️ Sarah will be publishing a few new essays in the coming months, including a regular column in an as-yet-undisclosed publication. Stay tuned.
Dress Code
“Dress Code” spotlights workplace looks of all forms and kinds.
