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Thursday, May 27, 2021
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
OPINION

T

he strawberry dress. The 
crossover 
leggings. 
The 

Vivianne Westwood pearl 

choker. There are endless examples 
of fashion trends that TikTok has 
breathed into existence. This relatively 
new smartphone application has 
so much ownership over these 
trends that their original names are 
frequently tossed aside in favor of “the 
TikTok (insert article of clothing).” As 
an Aerie employee, I saw the buying 
power behind TikTok firsthand as 
I watched girls swarm to our store 
for months in search of “the TikTok 
leggings,” a term that can be linked 
to both Aerie’s crossover leggings 
or 
Amazon’s 
scrunch 
leggings. 

TikTok’s seemingly endless amount 
of discomfiting content and young 
audience have built a connotation of 
thoughtlessness around the platform. 
But seeing droves of people who had 
never been in an Aerie before walk 
in with such purpose and interest 
illustrated the tangible effects of this 
deceptively simple app. 

For an app that is so commonly 

deemed to be “stupid” or “for middle 
school girls” — an insult rooted in 
the well-established tradition of 
delegitimizing female interests — 
TikTok has created an impressive 
amount of careers for users in a 
relatively short period of time right 
from their own bedrooms. However, 
TikTokers are rarely given the 
respect that influencers on other 
apps are given. Whether or not their 
content deserves this respect is 
dependent on both the TikToker and 
the perspective of the viewer. With 
their problematically superfluous 
associations with the fashion industry, 
fashion TikTokers are often seen 
in a materialistic manner. However, 
considering the 156,000 emails Aerie 
received from customers asking to be 

put on the waitlist for the crossover 
leggings, this “materialism” resonates 
with audiences of a multitude of 
different backgrounds.

At some point, we have to ask 

ourselves: Is liking clothing and the 
way it can make you feel frivolous, 
or is the assumption that these 
interests are frivolous, frivolous itself? 
Similarly, is TikTok thoughtless, 
or is that connotation a result of 
thoughtlessness? Many people make 
a pointed effort to separate themselves 
from what society generally considers 
to be unimportant. In terms of 
TikTok and fashion, two subjects that 
are frequently discredited, TikTok’s 
ability to get people to spend money — 
a metric American capitalism places 
particular emphasis on, for better or 
for worse — stands in stark opposition 
to the perception of frivolity around 
the two.

The subject of a TikTok does not 

seem to affect the popularization 
of a specific piece of clothing. Even 
videos that have nothing to do with 
what the creator is wearing have 
gone viral due to their clothing. The 
particular TikTok that sparked the 
frenzy around the aforementioned 
leggings was a simple dancing video. 
This trend embodies the constant 
presence of the fashion industry in 
our lives. Just by dancing, Hannah 
Schlenker, the creator who made the 
video that began the craze, caused 
Aerie stores all across the country 
to sell out of the leggings — an item 
that, from my experience working 
there, had not been performing well 
for months.

W

ho is the first Colombian 
you can think of? Maybe 
it’s a popular musician, 

like Shakira or J Balvin. Maybe it’s 
an athlete, like weightlifter Oscar 
Figueroa or soccer player Carlos 
Valderrama. Or maybe it’s an actor, 
like “Modern Family” star Sofia 
Vergara or “Ice Age” star John 
Leguizamo — who, in researching 
this piece, I was surprised to find was 
born in Colombia.

In any case, the answer is probably 

not former President Alvaro Uribe. 
This is not terribly surprising; the 
only foreign leaders most Americans 
consistently seem to recognize 
are British Prime Ministers and 
long-time leaders of enemy nations, 
like Fidel Castro. Nevertheless, he 
is probably the most important 
figure in shaping Colombia over 
the last two decades. During his 
administration from 2002 to 2010, 
he 
implemented 
far-reaching 

neoliberal economic reforms such 
as privatization of state-owned 
enterprises and strong economic 
deregulation. He also cracked down 
on the Revolutionary Armed Forces 
of Colombia, or FARC, a guerrilla 
insurgency that had been on one 
side of the nation’s decades-long 
civil war, reducing its membership 
from 20,000 to 8,000. He was 
incredibly popular throughout his 
presidency, winning re-election in 
2006 with around 62.4% of the vote 
and leaving office with an approval 

rating of 75%. It is unsurprising that 
both of his successors, Juan Manuel 
Santos and current President Iván 
Duque, are both deeply connected to 
Uribe, with the former having been 
his Minister of National Defense and 
the latter’s party, Democratic Center, 
having been founded by Uribe.

All of this popularity comes in 

spite of the fact that Uribe and his 
government’s security forces, in 
their effort to vanquish FARC, 
enacted untold amounts of brutality 
toward Colombian civilians. The 
most notable examples of this 
are the series of murders known 
as the “false positives” scandal. 
During Uribe’s presidency, civilians, 
often poor and mentally ill, were 
promised high-paying jobs, lured 
into remote areas, killed by military 
officials and officially recorded as 
FARC militants to inflate military 
kill totals. Until these murders 
were revealed in 2008, the military 
officials involved were frequently 
given promotions for the estimated 
10,000 killings between 2002 and 
2010. Additionally, Uribe and a 
number of his allies were found to 
have ties to right-wing paramilitary 
groups, which over the course of 
the civil war killed around 100,000 
civilians. Horrifyingly, all of this 
was carried out with U.S. funds as 
part of the Plan Colombia program, 
which pledged $10 billion between 
2000 and 2015 to Colombia to fight 
both FARC and drug trafficking. Its 

principal advocates included then-
Senator Joe Biden.

Why is this relevant to today?
Over 
the 
past 
few 
weeks, 

Colombia has been engulfed by 
protests. These protests started 
over a since-scrapped plan by the 
Duque administration to raise taxes 
on the poor, but they have now 
broadened to include frustrations 
over the government’s handling 
of the COVID-19 pandemic and 
the fact that it has broken the 2016 
peace deal with FARC — killing a 
number of social movement leaders 
and former FARC fighters. The 
police’s response to these protests 
has been swift and brutal, killing 39 
protestors, arbitrarily detaining 900 
and sexually assaulting 12, according 
to human rights group Temblores y 
Indepaz. One of the most prominent 
voices in favor of this crackdown 
has been Uribe himself, whose 
tweet 
expressing 
support 
for 

police was removed by Twitter 
for “glorifying violence.” This type 
of violence against protestors is not 
unprecedented for Duque. In 2019, 
protests over police brutality were 
met with police brutality themselves, 
with one estimate stating that 13 
protestors were killed by police in 
the first two days alone. 

TikTok: A fashion marketing 

monster

Colombian state-sanctioned murder: the 

U.S.’s darkest secret

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Ann Arbor, MI 48109

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