BigShinyThing

This June, Walt Disney Consumer Products will launch its first line of designer wedding gowns. The ‘Fairy Tale Collection’ by LA bridal designer Kirstie Kelly, will be priced between $1,100 and $3,000 and aimed squarely at the mass market. The gowns will draw inspiration from Disney’s mass of much-loved characters including Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. According to the typically gushing press release:

Beginning this spring, modern brides can have a real fairy tale wedding with a spectacular gown that captures and illuminates the style and spirit of their favorite Disney Princess.

The gowns are the latest attempt by Disney to hang on to consumers once they’ve hit puberty. And in many ways they are a logical progression from an existing business. In 1991, Disney World in Orlando, Florida, launched its Fairy Tale Weddings and Honeymoon service and it now hosts more than 2,000 weddings a year. Many of these weddings are already themed along Disney lines, such as the popular Cinderella’s Royal Court wedding, in which the bride and groom parade down Main Street USA in a pumpkin carriage and say their vows on the steps of the Cinderella castle.

Which brings us to Jean Baudrillard (R.I.P.) and his take on Why Disney Works:

The objective profile of the United States, then, may be traced throughout Disneyland, even down to the morphology of individuals and the crowd. All its values are exalted here, in miniature and comic-strip form. Embalmed and pactfied. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin does it well in Utopies, jeux d’espaces): digest of the American way of life, panegyric to American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. To be sure. But this conceals something else, and that “ideological” blanket exactly serves to cover over a third-order simulation: Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.

The Disneyland imaginary is neither true nor false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It is meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the “real” world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness.

Indeed.

Source: Businessweek.