The Simulacrum of Authenticity
There is a particular genre of brand communication that has become so pervasive it barely registers anymore. You know it when you see it: the founder standing in a field, sleeves rolled up, gazing into a middle distance that suggests both humility and vision. The copy reads something like, "We started this because we believed there had to be a better way." The lighting is warm. The font is a humanist sans-serif. Everything about it whispers: we are real.
The question, of course, is what "real" means when every brand in every category is performing the same gesture of realness. When authenticity becomes a strategy — when it is workshopped in conference rooms and A/B tested across segments — it ceases to be authenticity and becomes something else entirely. Baudrillard had a word for this. He called it the simulacrum: the copy without an original, the sign that refers to nothing but other signs.
Consider Glossier. When Emily Weiss launched the brand in 2014, its proposition was radical in its simplicity: beauty products for people who don't really wear beauty products. The aesthetic was deliberately un-produced. Models had visible pores. The Instagram feed looked like it was shot on someone's phone, because sometimes it was. The entire semiotic apparatus communicated a rejection of the beauty-industrial complex. And it worked, spectacularly, because at the time it read as genuine.
But what happened next is instructive. Every brand in the category — and then every brand in adjacent categories, and then every DTC brand in every category — adopted the same codes. The same dewy skin. The same millennial pink. The same "no-makeup makeup" positioning. The signifiers of authenticity became a genre, and like all genres, they hardened into convention. The effet de réel, as Barthes would say — the reality effect — detached from any actual reality and began to circulate on its own terms.
The Performance of Not Performing
This is the fundamental paradox of brand authenticity: the moment you try to be authentic, you are performing authenticity, which is by definition inauthentic. It is a logical trap with no exit. Sartre described something similar in Being and Nothingness with his famous example of the waiter who plays at being a waiter — whose very attentiveness to the role reveals that the role is a performance. The waiter who is too perfectly a waiter is, in that excess of perfection, not a waiter at all.
Brands face the same predicament. Patagonia's "Don't Buy This Jacket" campaign from 2011 is perhaps the most celebrated example of anti-marketing marketing in the modern canon. A full-page ad in The New York Times, on Black Friday no less, urging consumers not to purchase the company's products. The message was environmental: reduce consumption, repair what you have, think before you buy. And it was, by all accounts, sincere — Patagonia's environmental commitments are deep and well-documented.
Yet the campaign also increased sales by 30 percent in the following year. The performance of anti-consumerism became, inevitably, a consumable object itself. The sign "don't buy" was received as a sign of the kind of brand one should buy. The mise en abyme here is dizzying: authenticity used as a marketing tool to sell products to people who value authenticity, thereby negating the authenticity that was its own precondition.
One might argue this is simply how capitalism works — it recuperates everything, even its own critique. The Situationists understood this in the 1960s. Debord's Society of the Spectacle described a world in which every lived experience is mediated by representation, in which the spectacle absorbs all opposition by turning it into more spectacle. But what's new, perhaps, is the speed and thoroughness with which this recuperation now occurs.
The Authenticity Industrial Complex
In the brand strategy world where I work, authenticity has become a deliverable. It appears on creative briefs. It is the subject of workshops and decks and quarterly reviews. There are consultancies — and I know this because I used to work at one — whose entire business model is helping brands "find their authentic voice." The phrase itself should be a contradiction, but it passes unremarked because we have all agreed to participate in the fiction.
The machinery of authentic brand-building now includes: founder stories (preferably involving some kind of struggle or epiphany), transparent supply chains (communicated via infographics on the website), candid social media (which is to say, social media that has been art-directed to look candid), and purpose statements (which connect the brand to a cause larger than commerce). Each of these elements is, in isolation, perfectly fine. But taken together, they constitute a système — a codified language of realness that is as artificial as the glossy advertising it claims to reject.
The brand that most interests me in this context is Supreme. For two decades, Supreme maintained an authenticity that seemed genuinely resistant to commodification. The brand's strategy — if one can even call it that — was refusal: limited production, no advertising, a studied indifference to the mainstream. The stores were deliberately uninviting. The brand's relationship with its audience was, to borrow a term from Bourdieu, one of distinction: it functioned as a marker of cultural capital precisely because it was difficult to access.
Then, in 2020, VF Corporation acquired Supreme for $2.1 billion. And the interesting thing is not that the acquisition happened — capital acquires everything eventually — but what happened to the brand's semiotic apparatus afterward. The codes remained the same. The box logo. The drops. The queues. The scarcity. But the meaning had shifted. The signs that once communicated insider status now communicated corporate strategy. The signifiant was identical; the signifié had been hollowed out.
Barthes at the Brand Workshop
In Mythologies, Barthes analyzed the way French popular culture naturalized ideological messages — how a photograph of a Black soldier saluting the French flag on the cover of Paris-Match communicated, without saying so, that France was a great empire faithfully served by all its citizens. The photograph did not argue this. It simply presented it as obvious, as natural, as beyond question. This is how myth works: it transforms history into nature.
Brand authenticity operates by the same mechanism. When a brand presents itself as authentic, it is not making an argument. It is presenting a mythology — a set of signs arranged to produce the effect of naturalness. The hand-lettered logo says: we are artisanal. The kraft paper packaging says: we care about the earth. The founder's memoir says: this is personal. None of these things are lies, exactly. But they are not truths either. They are mythologies, in Barthes's precise sense: speech that has been depoliticized, drained of its historical contingency, presented as if it simply is.
What would it mean for a brand to be genuinely authentic? I suspect it would mean being genuinely boring. It would mean saying: we make this product because we think we can sell it at a margin that satisfies our shareholders. It would mean acknowledging that branding is a persuasive art, not a transparent window onto corporate soul. It would mean abandoning the entire apparatus of purpose and story and meaning that constitutes modern brand strategy.
No brand will do this, of course. The market punishes honesty of this kind. And so we remain in Baudrillard's desert of the real, surrounded by simulacra of authenticity that refer to nothing but each other, each one a copy of a copy of an original that never existed.
The question I keep returning to is whether this matters. Whether the simulation of authenticity is, for all practical purposes, the same as authenticity itself. Whether the distinction between the real and the performed is still meaningful in a culture where performance is the real. Baudrillard thought the distinction had collapsed entirely. I am not sure he was wrong. But I notice that even as I write this, I am performing the role of the person who sees through the performance — which is, of course, its own kind of authenticity claim.
So where does that leave us?