Category Archives: Trends
Cultural Stagnation
Kurt Anderson wrote an article in Vanity Fair where he makes the claim that our culture is stuck.
For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.
As an aside – if you want to hear a great discussion of this article there is a podcast episode of the Slate Cultural Gabfest that inspired my article. In fact, they publish weekly, and I greatly endorse adding it to your podcast queue.
He points to styles, and how if you think of the 50s to 60s to 70s to the 80s you could easily pick out what decade they were in. But between the 90s and today it would be harder. He makes the obvious musical reference of the year – pointing out how Lady Gaga is simply warmed over Madonna. He even points out that after the rise of hip hop, no big musical swing has taken its place.
Make a couple arguments for why this is. Perhaps we have simply reached the pinnacle of design in many cases. Cars haven’t changed that much in design, but under the hood the technology is moving quickly. So while the appearance is stagnant, the workings change, but I suppose that isn’t culture.
Or, we have the ability now to portray our past and explore decades and the style of history like never before with costuming and technology. This might cause us to not look forward and instead gaze longingly backwards.
Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.
However, I tend to focus on an idea that he only gives short service to – one small line in the second to last paragraph.
And yet, on the other hand, for the first time, anyone anywhere with any arcane cultural taste can now indulge it easily and fully online, clicking themselves deep into whatever curious little niche (punk bossa nova, Nigerian noir cinema, pre-war Hummel figurines) they wish. Americans: quirky, independent individualists!
He dismisses technology almost wholesale. However, with the internet and shifting to new forms of media, we can connect with new people that we weren’t able to before. You might be the only fan of some certain band in your group of friend (and good for you!). Or, you might be the only emo kid in your town. However, through social networks you can find a whole community of people out there who share your passion.
This allows us to appreciate our own preferences, and not adapt to a greater “mass zeitgeist” of what is cool. My theory is this: You can’t imagine a national cultural concept because we are too fractured now. There isn’t one cool thing to listen to, or one cool way to dress. There are niches that are appreciated by small pockets. It isn’t that we stagnated, its that we branched out and became unique.
Subtle Signs of Luxury
I’ve written about this before, but I’m writing about it again because I am particularly fascinated by this topic. Slate has an article up about how during the recession the most wealthy are focusing on more quiet signals of luxury. Instead of flamboyant branding and logos, more subtle designs and a distinct lack of branding is popular. No reason to eschew the high priced goods, just don’t flaunt them.
In a last-ditch attempt to escape the guillotine, the top 1 percent are resorting to ever more devious tactics. First and foremost, they have adopted a bizarrely nondescript way of dressing: It’s spare simplicity with foncy labels; it’s a white gold Rolex that resembles a plain old tin Timex; it’s L.L.Bean-style basics with haute-couture prices. Simply put: The 1 percent are occupying Hermès (the luxury retailer most synonymous with understated extravagance).
This breathy, low-key mode of camouflage is described by its proponents as “quiet luxury.” It speaks in a modulated voice, and only to fellow Quiet Luxurians. It’s an Upper East Side/Mayfair/Palm Beach kind of a thing. It’s not a Gowanus Canal kind of a thing, or, God forbid, a Zuccotti Park thing. No Zuccotti denizen would be capable of decoding the subtle nuances of this particular style. That’s how deathly quiet it is.
Last week I clocked a Quiet Luxurian boarding a plane for Florida the day before Thanksgiving. To the untrained eye, her sensible and discreetly accessorized slacks ‘n’ sweater ensemble rendered her all but invisible. Her monochromatic, tawny, fawny outfit was severely ascetic and suggested a raging antipathy toward self-indulgent glamour. And yet… My estimate of the total cost of her outfit, including T. Anthony nylon tote,Hermès purse, Tod’s drivers, and gold bangle? A quiet 25 grand.
I noticed this even back in college. But back in the middle 200s it wasn’t trying to blend in. No, pre-recession it was about trying to separate the truly wealthy from the newly rich.
People with more cultural capital in a particular domain prefer subtle signals because they provide differentiation from the mainstream. Such insiders have the necessary connoisseurship to decode the meaning of subtle signals that facilitate communication with others “in the know.”
Different motives, same method.
Manufacturing Meaning
No doubt you have seen your friends posting photos on various picture sharing sites that look like they were taken with an old 70s camera, or a polaroid. But you were in the photo. You know they used their iphone to take that picture. What’s the deal?
Due to the popularity of smartphones, there has been an explosion of “faux-vintage” apps that apply a filter to pictures you taken and make your normal looking photographs look vintage. I have commented several times how much I loathe these fake photos. We all are very interested in how many megapixels our cameras and cameraphones have so that we can get crisp, true, vivid images. Then we run them through filters so they look crummy. Beyond that simple gripe, it also seems to me there was something desperate about trying to make our pictures look interesting, maybe because we felt they weren’t important or interesting enough on their own.
The author comes up with two theories, but equally intriguing.
Grasping for Authenticity
What I want to argue is that the rise of the faux-vintage photo is an attempt to create a sort of “nostalgia for the present,” an attempt to make our photos seem more important, substantial and real. We want to endow the powerful feelings associated with nostalgia to our lives in the present. And, ultimately, all of this goes well beyond the faux-vintage photo; the momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past.
He argues that technology has made taking pictures and cataloging our daily lives with photos has become easier than ever. I am willing to bet you have a camera within 3 feet of you right now. Therefore, because it is so easy to take pictures, especially compared to the past, we have a desire to make our photos stand out. We can do this by adding these vintage filters. For one, it changes the image from just the normal static image you see in most pose-smile-click photos. Second, it make the photos look like those old style pictures. The kind you had to take to a photo shop and wait an hour to develop. You only took photos of important things, because you had film that ran out. And you had to go pay to get it developed. We are trying to impart that same importance to our largely disposable pictures.
I submit that we have chosen to create and view faux-vintage photos because they seem more authentic and real. One does not need to be consciously aware of this when choosing the filter, hitting the “like” button on Facebook or reblogging on Tumblr. We have associated authenticity with the style of a vintage photo because, previously, vintage photos wereactually vintage. They stood the test of time, they described a world past, and, as such, they earned a sense of importance.
The two problems with this are that, of course, they aren’t authentic. They are imitating authenticity. They are, like the author writes, like those 50s style diners that crop up in suburbs now. An imitation of a bygone era, trying to briefly grasp a cherished time in a way that is too self aware.
Nostalgia for the Present
His other argument is a bit wider in its implications. He describes how as a society, we are constantly cataloging our lives, not really living them anymore. I am guilty of this myself. Instead of enjoying a moment, a sunset, a good meal, a concert – we take a picture, or check in, or tweet it, or record it.
The rise of faux-vintage photography demonstrates a point that can be extrapolated to documentation on social media writ large: social media users have become always aware of the present as a potential document to be consumed by others. Facebook fixates the present as always a future past. Be it through status updates on Twitter, geographical check-ins on Foursquare, reviews on Yelp, those Instagram photos or all of the other self-documentation possibilities afforded to us by Facebook, we view our world more than ever before through what I like to call “documentary vision.”
Documentary vision is kind of like the “camera eye” photographers develop when, after taking many photos, they begin to see the world as always a potential photo even when not holding the camera at all. The habit of the photographer involuntarily framing and composing the world has become a metaphor for those trained to document using social media. The explosion of ubiquitous self-documentation possibilities, and the audience for our documents that social media promises, has positioned us to live life in the present with the constant awareness of how it will be perceived as having already happened. We come to see what we do as always a potential document, imploding the present with the past, and ultimately making us nostalgic for the here and now.
The faux-vintage app helps us to reclaim a bit of this. It reminds us of the analog limitations of life. It makes things imperfect.
His closing is an especially interesting point – and is often the crest and downfall of all trends. Eventually those things that make us “different” and “cool” become mainstream. Enough people have them, and you no longer are set apart, but a part of the crowd.
Most damming for Hipstamatic and Instagram is that these apps tend to make everyone’s photos look similar. In an attempt to make oneself look distinct and special through the application of vintage-producing filters, we are trending towards photos that look the same. The Hipstamatic photo was new and interesting, is currently a fad, and it will come to (or, already has?) look too posed, too obvious, and trying too hard (especially if the parents of the current users start to post faux-vintage photos themselves).
Do you use these apps, such as Instagram or Hipstamatic? Why do you use them?
Like this:
Dressing Simply
When you dress this simply, you should be wearing clothes of good enough quality and fit that you look sharp. You should be aware of texture. You should avoid pictures and words. You should always have a point of difference. You needn’t be afraid of looking uniform from day to day. You should be comfortable and confident.
Fashion Is For Kids
For men, fashion is for kids. I always thought Prince Charles was a stylish dresser. Lots of Englishmen think he’s old-fashioned, but my Italian friends agree with me. Men should be stylish, not fashionable.
-Michael Drake, Wall St. Journal
De-Branding Ourselves
A few months after I started attending a prestigious private liberal arts university known for its wealthy student body – I had a discussion with someone from home. They put forward a though about how the student parking lot must be full of lexus, BMW, and Mercedes badges. While there were certainly a fair share of those – there were also a surprising number of Fords, Chevrolets, and Jeeps. And there certainly weren’t any expensive “rims” or custom body work.
For the students I went to school with, this didn’t raise an eyebrow. It is just the way things are. There isn’t a lot of status or value in showing off wealth. Too ostentatious to show off that you have money.
If you truly are wealthy – generations of family money – then people just know you are wealthy. Only those who recently have come into money feel the need to show it off. They have to prove they belong in this class – by buying fancy labels and brands that loudly show off their expense.
Recently I found a NY Time article discussing a new study showing that the very rich and very poor both like brands that don’t use a lot of logos. My thoughts on the reasons:
Anything we buy with prominent branding serves to signal to others. What it signals depends on the brand. A luxury car might signal you have money to spend on a nicer car with greater performance or safety features, while driving a Toyota might show you prefer reliability.
For the lower class purchasers – any brand they could purchase would probably only serve to signal that they were low class. Imagine if Wal-Mart put out a line of “wal mart” clothing. Those people who were striving to get out of the lower class and into the middle or upper classes wouldn’t want to brand themselves as low class by putting wal-mart all over their bodies. So, instead they purchase clothing with few brands on it. Hard to label someone without clear identifying signals.
For the extreme upper class, the motives are slightly different. The study thesis states:
people with more cultural capital in a particular domain prefer subtle signals because they provide differentiation from the mainstream. Such insiders have the necessary connoisseurship to decode the meaning of subtle signals that facilitate communication with others “in the know.”
Revisiting Twitter
Despite Twitter’s increasing popularity (and the downtime and failings that come with exponentially increasing usage)I still get looks of cluelessness and mocking when I tell friends I am on Twitter. (Not as many as I get when I tell them I am also on Foursquare, but I almost expect that now)
Most of these people don’t “get” it still. They don’t know why everyone wants to know what they are eating, or that they just bought new shoes. This is small thinking based on punchlines from old jokes.
One of the outspoken celebrities who rejected twitter when it first came out was Roger Ebert. He made fun of being notified that someone is “eating a tuna sandwich”. But he also gave it a try (kudos to trying new/scary things!) (Also, whatever happened to kudos? I would love a kudos bar right now…). And he is “an addict” now. Why?
I am in conversation. When you think about it, Twitter is something like a casual conversation among friends over dinner: Jokes, gossip, idle chatter, despair, philosophy, snark, outrage, news bulletins, mourning the dead, passing the time, remembering favorite lines, revealing yourself.
Its about keeping connections alive with those who aren’t physically near you all day. This is what I don’t understand about Facebook users who don’t adopt Twitter. You use Facebook because you want to keep in touch with friends and loved ones. However, people use facebook to update their relationship status, or post photos, or organize events.
Twitter is for those uses that maybe aren’t worth the effort of creating a facebook event for. Maybe you simply want to celebrate a new job, or ask a question that Google can’t answer for you. Perhaps you have a random funny thought. These are conversations we all have daily with friends near us. Twitter enables us to have these conversations with our friends (and new, wonderful strangers!) both near and far, and that is the value.
Alpha Female?
There is a much talked about an article from The Atlantic that is being linked to constantly. Basically it points out how women are more successful (especially in this economy), going to school more, have better skills for the fastest growing jobs, and are the preferred choice of gender for new and hopeful parents.
This is a shift from the past when male dominated industries were key to the economy. An unintended bi-product of the shift from manufacturing to service based economies. But it seems to be wider than simply jobs. There are changes in relationships. Through the article there are hints about how women are the “head of the household now”. Perhaps there is a darker message to that Dockers commercial about men not wearing the pants anymore.
I can’t fully describe why- but this scares me at a very deep core level.
Men are described as not feeling adequate enough for their female counterparts. I know, some of you girls are rolling your eyes. Oh, poor boys. The problem is that society has not fully shifted to accept this change. Men are still supposed to play the part of seducer – the chaser, the convincer. However, when women are outperforming us- in income, education, etc – what tools are we to use to gain and keep your interest?
And before you smirk ladies, think about what those consequences mean for you. There is an increasingly smaller chance you will meet that prince charming to sweep your off your feet. The percentage of men who meet your list of qualifications is getting smaller as you read this. Prepare yourself for a life of either being single or unsatisfactorily settling. Hyperbole? Take this example from Japan the article describes:
As the traditional order has been upended, signs of the profound disruption have popped up in odd places. Japan is in a national panic over the rise of the “herbivores,” the cohort of young men who are rejecting the hard-drinking salaryman life of their fathers and are instead gardening, organizing dessert parties, acting cartoonishly feminine, and declining to have sex.
Trembling with anticipation ladies? Perhaps the social balance could shift. Maybe girls will be the pursuers. But, I don’t know if society is there yet.
Perhaps I am just succumbing to angry white male syndrome. Maybe I am comfortable in my position of relative ease and power. I have had it pretty good as a gender. Maybe I am simply uncomfortable making room on the platform for competition and equality? Perhaps I am just scared of an uncertain place in my future?
What do you think of the article? Sure there has to be some level of hyperbole. Masculine focused jobs will return when the economy picks up and manufacturing gears up again. Boys will still go to college. But, are the roles of men and women forever shifted? Have they even gone so far as to swap?
W&L Alum Men’s Clothing Company – Ledbury
A friend of mine posted about a boutique men’s clothing shop in Richmond, Va – Ledbury. Their goal is to be “a brand that offered European quality, English fit and American style; all at an attainable price.”
I have been on a small personal journey for a while to find a perfectly fitting shirt. Too often, (probably because of the obesity problem in America) men’s shirts are cut very large around the waist. This is why you see men’s shirts billow out from their pants. Its kind of like a muffin top, but with fabric. It looks like this:
So, to get around this I buy “slim cut” shirts, which use less fabric. These guys seem to have that concept down, while also focusing on other great details, and having great “classic” style – which is what I like to think I subscribe too. Not quite dandy enough to be Trad or Preppy, and not stuck up to be too formal. Think Clooney.
You can tell they have a put a lot of thought into their shirts. Even down to the button placement.
Ledbury’s “Work Shirt” has a lowered second button that creates just the right amount of man-cleavage for the tieless business casual environment favored by many entrepreneurs. “Unbuttoning one button on a standard shirt is too constrictive while opening up two buttons is a little aggressive for the workplace,” Ledbury’s founder, Paul Trible.
Here is a video from one of the founders talking about their shirts:
A nice side note is that one of the founders is a fairly recent W&L grad. Always love to give my school any attention I can – so alums who read my blog should go and check these guys out. I only wish I had known about this place when I was in Richmond and could have gone and visited. For you DC readers, they have a Georgetown store you should go peruse.
Does Fashion Need Copyright Protection?
I have quibbles about a few of her points that she seems to gloss over, but a thought provoking presentation on copyright protection, and reform or rethinking of it. Great TED talk from Johanna Blakley.
