Smaller, Thinner, Already Sold Out
Late 2012 had this particular strain of consumer enthusiasm that felt almost performative—every new gadget arrived slightly smaller and more powerful than the last one, each limited-edition shoe dropped and disappeared before you could think too hard about it, and somewhere in the middle of all this, Lana Del Rey was lying on a Jaguar looking bored.
The GoPro HERO 3 Black Edition was the action camera that convinced a generation of weekend warriors they were filmmakers. Smaller and lighter than its predecessor, waterproof out of the box, shooting at resolutions that made previous models look like they were filming through wax paper. The footage from these things has a specific visual grammar now—tilted helmet mounts, fish-eye wide angles making every ski run look steeper than it was. GoPro sold the idea that your weekend adventures were worth documenting in cinematic detail, and honestly they weren’t wrong about the camera.
Samsung’s Chromebook was a different kind of proposition: a $250 laptop that ran Chrome OS, which meant Chrome was your entire operating system. No other browser, no local storage to speak of, everything flowing through Google Drive and Gmail and YouTube. It was genuinely interesting as a vision—computing as pure cloud infrastructure, the laptop as a thin window into someone else’s servers—and also genuinely limited in ways that mattered the moment you tried to do anything without internet. But at that price it made a certain kind of sense for a certain kind of person.
Rocksmith was Ubisoft’s answer to the question Guitar Hero had raised accidentally: what if you could actually learn to play? Where Guitar Hero gave you a plastic toy and a soundtrack, Rocksmith plugged in a real guitar and taught real fingerings, real scales, real songs. Now available on Steam, which meant the barrier to entry was basically just owning a guitar. Whether it replaced a real teacher is a different argument, but it at least asked the right question.
Nike’s Livestrong 15th Anniversary sneaker—the Cheyenne in black and yellow—arrived at perhaps the worst possible moment. The USADA had released its doping report on Lance Armstrong just eight days before this shoe dropped, and the yellow bracelet had been quietly coming off wrists for months already. And yet here was a limited-edition indoor shoe that existed primarily to be coveted and missed, dropping in tiny quantities through one online store and one shop in Texas. Tribute and exclusivity and institutional denial, compressed into a sneaker.
And then Lana Del Rey for H&M, lying across a Jaguar with that signature expression somewhere between bored and specifically bored. She wore the autumn collection, which was apparently selling well enough that fashion bloggers were spotting it on strangers. What was interesting wasn’t the clothes—it was how H&M had looked at her whole aesthetic apparatus, the melancholy and the vintage glamour and the general air of someone who has given up on everything while remaining very beautiful, and thought: yes, that’s what we want selling our November knits. Brands are always honest about something, even when they’re trying not to be.