“Like a pussy hat on steroids, and without the pinkness.”

June 3, 2017 1:35 PM

Facebook Wants Me to Dress Like ‘The Handmaid's Tale’ [Racked] ““What is this Serena Joy lewk?” I post incredulously, with a link to the ensemble from online retailer eShakti. The dress has an A-line silhouette and Virgin Mary hue that is close enough to the pious and domineering commander’s wife, Serena Joy, that I feel queasy. Within a week, Facebook pushes a garnet ruched-waist maxi dress that’s a dead ringer for the eye-catching, iconic Handmaid’s dress like that of the main character, Offred. The algorithms-that-be had decided that if I were in the company of headlines of compromised elections, missile tests, and thwarted government agencies, it was time I dressed for a dystopia.”
posted by Fizz (18 comments total)

There's more going on in the article than the pull quote, but can we seriously stop acting as if "algorithms" are these magical things stalking our every move. It's a remarketing pixel which requires the amazing algorithmic sophistication of being able to check set membership.
posted by hoyland at 1:48 PM on June 3, 2017 [21 favorites]

I mean, by all means, find re-targeting creepy and install Ghostery (I do), but there is no sophisticated algorithm behind going to eShakti one day and seeing an eShakti ad on Facebook a couple days later.
posted by hoyland at 1:50 PM on June 3, 2017 [10 favorites]

I have spent a *lot* of time on eShakti. Like, super a lot. I am very fat, and in quite weird ways, so getting clothes to fit me is hard. I own a couple of dozen eShakti dresses and I have put many, many dozens more in my shopping cart only to remind myself I can't afford them before pushing the big red button.

eShakti has had dresses in those same basic silhouettes and colours at many, many intervals over the years. The fact that they are showing up in ads may indicate that they are increasing in popularity due to the show, but they aren't something eShakti has just made up recently as a result of the show. They do a ton of maxi dresses -- which you can get cut in non-maxi lengths if you prefer, since that's one of the customization options. Bright colours are a big part of their aesthetic, as well. You can change the neckline on many of their dresses, as well, and that basic rounded neck is one of the usual options.

Also, I really like the Serena Joy dress, which is both a colour I love and a profile I can wear to work, and long enough that my legs won't get cold waiting for the bus in the winter. I believe I might order one. I will probably choose a slightly different neckline, though.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:50 PM on June 3, 2017 [12 favorites]

Also, eShakti has had that dress for sale for several years now. They offer different colors all the time, but red is almost always available. (Full disclosure: I own blue and green ones.)
posted by heurtebise at 1:51 PM on June 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

Yeah, there is no way that eShakti dress has anything to do with the Handmaid's Tale, other than that they both are influenced by current fashions. Also, roughly 70% of eShakti's dresses are extremely perplexing. You have to sort through a lot of very strange clothing to get to the eShakti stuff that you might actually want to buy.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 1:54 PM on June 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

On a (vaguely) related note, from the Beaverton.

The Beaverton is Canada's Onion.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:57 PM on June 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

When you start seeing ads for wimples, then it'll be time to panic.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:59 PM on June 3, 2017 [4 favorites]

Algorithms aside (and the awesomeness of eShakti aside, I too am a shopper), the second half of the article was interesting, about WHY people want to dress like Offred -- solidarity, symbolism, things you pay a lot of attention to getting into your subconscious. I was particularly interested reading the bit about how the clothes of your enemy are historically often popular during wartime.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 2:13 PM on June 3, 2017 [10 favorites]

Now Facebook wants me to buy one ton of beavers for some reason.
posted by Wolfdog at 2:13 PM on June 3, 2017 [10 favorites]

A group of beavers is referred to as a maple.
posted by Fizz at 2:21 PM on June 3, 2017 [10 favorites]

Now Facebook wants me to buy one ton of beavers for some reason.


Did you google "The Hudson's Bay Company" at any time between roughly 1670 and 1870?
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:22 PM on June 3, 2017 [40 favorites]

Hoyland, that is exactly what they are, minus magic. What are you talking about?
posted by koavf at 4:03 PM on June 3, 2017

Yeah, that's all algorithms are. Nobody except people marketing tech and newbie tech enthusiasts think there's anything magical about them. An algorithm is just a series of repeatable steps, carried out in a particular order. That doesn't mean organizing commerce and so many other things using them doesn't have unintended and sometimes terrible consequences, especially when those steps now being carried out more efficiently and automatically used to be carried out with some active human judgment and intuition in the mix, too.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:32 PM on June 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I think the point was that this particular algorithm was probably a lot more straightforward (this is a related item to an item you quite recently looked at) than the author makes it sound. However I think that "algorithms-that-be" bit was mostly a fanciful touch in the first place.
posted by atoxyl at 9:35 PM on June 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I know that an algorithm is a sequence of instructions (seriously, why do multiple people think I don't know this?). And, yes, "if user has been to eShakti in last X days, show an eShakti ad" is an algorithm.* But we're forever hearing about the "algorithms-that-be" or whatever targeting us with ads. This is not that and somehow I think we'd be better off understanding when we're getting targeted via a remarketing pixel and a manually created audience and when we're getting targeted because Facebook has divined we might like to buy a particular dress because we've been talking/reading about the Handmaid's Tale on Facebook, which is what the author implies happened.

I'm also not suggesting that checking set membership at scale and at speed is not an interesting problem (albeit a solved one), but it's pretty far removed from breathless talk about algorithms.

*There's more going on than that in the decision of which ad Facebook actually shows, since they're not making a single "show this particular ad or not" decision, but I believe that's the extent of "should we consider showing an eShakti ad". How sophisticated the decision of which ad to show is depends on a whole host of things about Facebook advertising that I don't know about offhand. I'm the person who decides which ad to show, but not at Facebook, not the person buying the ad space. Maybe that suggests I know something about what I'm talking about?
posted by hoyland at 5:32 AM on June 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

I'm also not suggesting that checking set membership at scale and at speed is not an interesting problem (albeit a solved one), but it's pretty far removed from breathless talk about algorithms.

But surely the best way to address emerging social-scale phenomena/behaviors we don't like is to mystify them. {/}

TBF tho, on reading the article after reading the comments, I was surprised that so much attention was given to what seemed to me to basically be isolated to a (admittedly thoughtlessly-zeitgesity-sensationalist, also the pull-quote) half a paragraph at most. 95% of the word count seemed to me to be pretty purely about the intersection of politics-of-resistance and fashion.
posted by PMdixon at 8:16 AM on June 4, 2017 [1 favorite]

Clearly this whole thread is covert advertising for eShakti, because the multiple raving comments finally convinced me to go there and I just submitted an order for way too many things, so thanks you guys. And now we're all going to end up wearing the same dresses, so Handmaid's Tale indeed.
posted by Ender's Friend at 8:35 AM on June 4, 2017 [5 favorites]

If ever a piece needed an editor. Twice as long as it needed to be.
posted by Ideefixe at 10:24 AM on June 4, 2017 [2 favorites]