Excessive Consumption in the Spotlight by Zhong Lin for Vogue Taiwan January 2025
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AOC is surely the only fashion website that gasped upon seeing photographer Zhong Lin’s [AOC] fashion story for the January 2025 issue of Vogue Taiwan [IG].
The images evoked a mysterious, confrontational familiarity to my imagination and memory, triggered by their kindred-spirit DNA with one of the Top 5 posts ever on Anne of Carversville.com: Vogue Taiwan January 2022 story ‘Heat Wave’ by Zhong Lin.
I didn’t have to read the cover messages ‘Never Enough’, to understand that Vogue Taiwan had commandeered yet another fashion story in their credentialed and sincere efforts to wrestle with one of the essential questions of the 21st century.
Can one ever have enough stuff?
Model Zoe Fang is the creator muse for the story ‘A Song About Excessive Consumption’, styled by Chen Yu./ Hair by Miley Shen; makeup by Sting Hsieh
Our jumping off point for this new story should be Vogue Taiwan’s January 2022 story ‘Heat Wave’ featuring Peng Chang lensed by Zhong Lin.
I noted in that post that more than one fashion story seems born of the absolutely disruptive DNA in Steven Meisel’s story ‘Water & Oil’ for Vogue Italia’s August 2010 issue.
Featuring the perfectly-chosen model Kristen McMenamy, ‘Water & Oil’ was published in the months after the Deepwater Horizon disaster that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010.
An estimated 134 million gallons of oil into the ocean over 87 days; and AOC Renewed the fashion story upon news of Vogue Italia EIC Franca Sozzani’s death on December 22, 2016.
In reviewing Vogue Taiwan’s ‘Heat Wave’ in 2022, AOC wrote:
. . . it’s the first environment-focused fashion story to have equal visual impact . . . and perhaps more than ‘Water & Oil’.
My secondary comments about ‘Water & Oil’ were that ‘Heat Wave’ might have more impact than Vogue Italia’s grab-us-by-the-throats visual narrative, due to its lack of a triggering, disgust factor. I explained the science behind that statement.
For you’ lazy bones’ who won’t follow the link, AOC referenced new research and psychological analysis via the New York Times article ‘How Disgust Explains Everything.’
The connections between disgust over women’s body and functions is a defining fact of human thought patterns. Psychologists who study disgust go deeper, calling it a primal emotion that defines — and explains — humanity.
That’s a very big statement, I know. But post-publication research since 2022 has produced an enormous amount of brain-scans-generated research about just how important the disgust factor is — not only in human relations — but in political preferences research.
Because AOC is now so invested in this trilogy of interconnected articles, let me highlights the words about today’s story from Vogue Taiwan’s website — with further commentary from Nicole Lee and Chen Yu and none from me.
Vogue Taiwan’s Speaks to Our Global Environmental Crisis
In 1972, a group of thinkers wrote the book The Limits to Growth, which simulated the future situation that human beings may face, but this vision is not beautiful. They predict that the world is moving towards an orbit beyond the earth's capacity, and such an orbit comes from overconsumption. If we continue to act in the existing way - excessive consumption of resources - it will lead to a global environmental collapse by the end of the 21st century. But 50 years later, we are still in the quagmire, even because of the epidemic and the rapid boom of online shopping, over-consumption is more serious than what scholars imagined half a century ago.
As Sun Yi, editor-in-chief of Vogue Taiwan, said, "Overconsumption itself and its impact on the earth have caused environmental degradation, resource depletion, ecosystem destruction, and accelerated climate change. This idea, through the perspective of our long-term photography partner Zhong Ling, has given rise to a new prediction about future habitats: in a world where the land is limited due to rising sea water, we have become seasonal nomads and constantly migrate due to unpredictable weather. The animals and plants we once relied on for survival have disappeared, and when the soil cannot give birth to life, we have to cultivate green plants on our bodies, and we begin to carry our own home like snails.
When people's desires are carefully packaged, the misplaced illusions generated by the connection between the object and happiness are deeply bound, and excessive consumption has become a kind of civilization disease, which is also like a sleep elelegy, which finally allows us to say goodbye to the beloved environment.
In the scene full of smog, the girl carried the difficulties of a snail-like home. The excess of clothes on her body was mixed with dirt, almost crushing her body. Looking around, too many images have become a visual obstacle, making it impossible to distinguish between real and illusory.
When the slow price of fast fashion is ignored by us, when the wardrobe is full but still feels there is no choice, when the head of the family is wrapped and filled, the heart still feels empty, the torrent of material becomes the wasteland of the soul, and the only thing that can really nourish the soul is to make a conscious choice.
Writer Anna Lappe once said, "Every time you spend, you vote for your ideal world." When we click the buy button to satisfy our selfish desires, excessive consumption is no longer a personal choice, but a collective syndrome of the whole era. We consume not only goods, but also resources, time, and understanding of our real needs.
