Yesterday I passed by the Paul Smith store on Fifth Avenue and was stunned to see an entire window display based on Parisian May 1968 propaganda. This collapse between mercantilist nostalgia for revolutionary youth culture and global branding was not surprising and yet it still disgusted me. Though as I have written in the Collecting Schlock section of this blog, I am party to such decontextualized appropriation of revolutionary visual culture for its chicness -- as in my blog photo, so who am I to judge?
