Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.
Joe Zee, creative director of Elle and TV vet, has signed on for Sundance Channel's newest fashion special, Revealing: Extravagance. The four episode special is one part documentary, one part social experiment, and all parts an exploration of the modern "obsession" with luxury, according to WWD.
Zee will act as a reporter, conducting interviews with Iman, Zac Posen, Narciso Rodriguez, Carolina Herrera and Valerie Steele, among others, as well as going "undercover" in search of a group of young girls, christened by the media as the "Rainbow Girls," who steal high-end items from stores around San Francisco.
This show will also design social experiments that purportedly reveal things about the regular Jane's relationship to luxury stuff. Per WWD, the experiments include "dressing a suburban soccer mom in couture clothing, Christian Louboutin shoes and a Birkin bag" to find out if fellow soccer moms reject her, and testing whether people buy cray items like "rubber chicken handbags" because it's at a sample sale. Since reality TV is already a kind of meta-social experimennt, this is like meta-squared reality, yeah? We're game.
· Joe Zee: "I Wore It on the Subway and Kids Were Mocking Me to Death" [Racked]