In the immortal film The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway plays Meryl Streep’s hapless assistant who, at the beginning of the movie, has no fashion knowledge despite working at the world’s most famous fashion magazine. The sartorial transformation that Hathaway’s character undergoes is one of my favorite parts of the movie, but the true highlight that I come back to (at the behest of the brilliant Jais Brohinsky) is Meryl Streep’s iconic monologue as Miranda Priestley, when she admonishes an ignorant Hathaway for scoffing at the fashion industry:
This..."stuff?" Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis; it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? (I think we need a jacket here.) And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room...from a pile of "stuff."
I'm in awe of both Streep’s devastating delivery and the monologue’s casual brutality. Toxic work dynamics aside, Miranda Priestley’s history of cerulean offers a perfect example of what compelling research tries to do: to explain how something as pedestrian and unremarkable as a sweater can actually help us understand more complex phenomena like the political economy of the fashion industry. In the same way anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll uses machine gambling to explore digitally mediated life, so too do I use data visualization to understand the relationships between automation, labor, and disappearing expertise. "Use an object to explain a broader system” is the magic formula to many successful narrative podcasts like 99% Invisible, which explores how design, architecture, and the built environment influence our everyday lives. But this podcast is about design the same way that Moby Dick is a novel about whales or Priestley’s monologue is about color.
This is what linguistic anthropologist Chuck Goodwin calls professional vision—a way of looking at the world shaped by and codified through social practice. It is a method of close reading cultivated through apprenticeship and cultural norms, where professionals don't necessarily learn to "see better" but to recognize patterns, practices, or social dynamics that a community finds meaningful. Miranda Priestley is not relating a history of cerulean so much as she is identifying the institutions, financial dynamics, and organizational processes that make the fashion world tick. Trends like color percolate through multiple layers of the industry, especially with the volume of rapidly manufactured disposable dupes. The business of fashion is therefore a system of cultural circulation, where everyday consumption reflects and reproduces hierarchies of wealth and taste.
While I am not advocating that researchers follow in the monstrous steps of an exploitative boss, it is helpful to remember that the process of doing research is the process of learning to see differently. It begins with a brief shift in perspective—to train your analytical eye until the ordinary stops looking ordinary.