Japanese haircuts

Japanese people have really, really cool haircuts.  The stylish ones are way more sophisticated than what most Americans get.  And they are just totally different in the way they're layered.  For example, try looking at this link: and specifically click on the woman in the thumbnail third from the right, and mouse over the back view of her head.  See how extreme the layering is, with that very top-heavy design?  That is so cool!  Why don't Americans get that?  I have a Japanese hairstylist and have been wanting to ask her to do something similar for a long time but my hair is only now long enough to try it.  I'm thinking of doing it soon and am hoping my hair will be the right texture, and that she's into giving that kind of haircut (hopefully she doesn't hate the Japanese style and that's why she moved here in the first place).  Anyway, that site has a bunch more amazing hairstyles, I get obsessed with it, so I hope you have fun too.  The "gel nail" section is also incredible.

So, prediction I guess?  Eventually people in the U.S. will catch on to how awesome Japanese hair is and try to get it themselves?  There's no doubt we're influenced by that style, but no one's really going for it.

The dress is dead, the pant is dead, the jacket is dead, long live the new sportswear

This Times Style piece covers the news that "the dress" "is dead."  As usual, no concrete reason is given -- apparently, “the eye is looking for something new, and so is the psyche."  Whatever.  I think all these old categories -- "the dress"; "the pant" -- are outdated, and that it's the entire dizzying, lucrative dance of separates that consumers, their eyes, and their psyches are sick of.

So, my big, long-range prediction is that old separates categories, which have been eroding, are going to finally wash away, and in their place more total-look, perhaps one-piece, minimalist, body-con-influenced outfits will come into fashion.  And as has been the way this happens since always, the new look will come out of sportswear -- actual sportswear, like you wear to play sports in.  The modern equivalent of what the stuff we call "sportswear" now used to be.

This trend has begun with the interest in dancewear and the "superhero" look.  It could continue with a revolution in material.  Comfortable, high-performance, eco-friendly, temperature-control, sweat-wicking fabric will finally cease to exist exclusively in the realm of exercise clothes and move into regular casual and formal clothes.  Design features of activewear, such as protective padding, zip-in-zip-out coordinating garments, etc., could then follow.

A really modern men's suit, for example, would be a form-fitting garment made of high-tech fabric worn over some kind of  body-shaping or -enhancing "armor."  Very Japanese, very superhero, very Aeon Flux.  Very Clockwork Orange.  Very environmentally-friendly, inexpensive, no-fuss, tough, modern.

A really modern women's outfit would, indeed, include some kind of leg covering.  (It's the extraneous fabric and modesty-related inconvenience of dresses and skirts that really makes them old-fashioned.) It would be basically along the same lines as the above-imagined men's garment, only cut to flatter a woman's body.

Update 5/6/08: Madonna may have chosen sportswear as her new look.  Her clothes in the video for 4 Minutes are a perfect example of New Sportswear.

Update 7/4/08: If even Free People is making corset-influenced clothes, something must be going on.

Long hair for men

I've been floating this idea to lots of people recently and everyone hates it.  But I still think it's a good trend.  Nothing grody, just to-the-collar or a little past.  No ponytails, necessarily (although that could be a great dirtbag look).  Kurt Cobain stuff.  It's how the high school boys wear their hair, and trends start in kid culture more and more these days (here's another youth hair trend (chunky highlights) that I think adult women will start wearing soon), so I think once those kids are in their twenties (in just a couple years) this could start to get big-time.  And with all the employers rushing to accommodate the lifestyle demands of Millennials (while whining piteously about having to do so), a less-clean-cut look will get accepted more easily than you might think.  There's already a movement towards this in the slightly-oily mini-mane that the kind of bankers who idolize Patrick Bateman have been sporting.  This also fits with the long hair trend with women.

No shoe is a good shoe

An emerging clothing trend that matches the theme of New Humanism (a reconsideration and redesigning of lifestyle around "natural" human biological/psychological needs) is the interest in shoes which attempt to replicate being barefoot, with the theory that this is what's best for feet and the body.  This week's New York Magazine has an article about it.  The aesthetics of the no-shoe shoes might need some working out, but overall I think the "barefoot" trend has good potential to catch on.

Plum

An article today in the Times discusses the implications of the trend of businesses naming products and services after the color/fruit "plum."

Lots of associations with plum are tossed around in the article. Plum the color is said to evoke royalty, sophistication, emotion, individuality, class, calm, cleanliness, health, vitality, and purity.
Plum the fruit, in its literal form, is described as connoting sweetness and naturalness. But most of the discussion of plum the fruit centers around its metaphorical connotations, which have to do with something highly desirable and elite -- "something you strive for" -- such as a "plum job" or "plum assignment." One CMO quoted in the article mentioned the sayings "sweeten the deal" and "juicy deal" and noted that "in many societies, plums are given as rewards or gifts."

The article doesn't do much to relate all these various connotations of plum together in a way that explains the zeitgeist of the trend. What's missing is a theory that relates the creativity and hedonism of the color plum's meanings to the business-speak, achievement-oriented overtones of plum the fruit.

My theory is that this "plum" trend is all about the convergence of commerce and art in marketing. With art's makers priced out of cities and its products priced out of the budget of most consumers, art for art's sake is a less and less viable pursuit. The tide is turning, and aesthetics is ceasing to be an end in itself and beginning to be a means of "making special" Western culture's main socially shared significance: capitalism. Consumption is now the most meaningful way for an individual to participate in the group; modern self-transcendence takes place through transactions.

The growing sophistication, beauty, and pervasiveness of marketing are evidence that advertising is fast becoming the art of the post-postmodern age. Plum is the perfect motif of this evolution because its multiple meanings as color and fruit encapsulate the hallmarks of the ascendant superrich whose purposes are served by consumer culture: their obsession with luxury; their equation of creativity with entrepreneurship; their monopoly on self-realization; their status as the new royalty; their ability to afford health and well-being; their power as patrons of the arts.

Plum is very much a business branding trend -- not a fashion or general aesthetic trend. The author mentions this point only at the very end of the article, in a bit of a throwaway. But I think it's quite significant, as it points out the exclusivity of "plum." Plum is not for the masses; it's for the rich, creatively-entitled elite, and in a type of self-enforcing sumptuary law, it will not be glimpsed outside their world.

African names

When/if Barack Obama is elected president, there will be a huge surge in African-American parents giving their kids traditional African first names.

Currently, it seems to be more common for African-Americans to give their kids African-inspired names as opposed to strictly "authentic," letter-for-letter African names. According to this article, this trend began when, "spurred by the black power movement and media phenomena like "Roots," certain prefixes and suffixes inspired by Islamic and African names, like "Lat," "isha" and "ika," became fashionable for black girls in 1975: Tamika (No. 3 among black girls in 1975), Latoya (16), Latisha (20), Latasha (75) and Shameka (88)."

If Obama is elected, the resulting wave of black pride will probably go even further in the direction of authenticity, with African-American parents researching traditional family names, looking into the meanings of African first names, etc.

Maybe parents of non-African backgrounds will give their kids African names, too. I could definitely see non-African-American, hard-core Democrats naming their sons "Barack." This could lay the groundwork for an increase in name-swapping among all ethnicities.

Perhaps we'll even see a reversal of the long-term trend of upwardly-mobile, non-Anglo parents giving their children Anglo names. For example, maybe in a few decades it won't be weird or offensive for a non-Hispanic couple to name their son "Juan." Such a trend could be a healthy personal-branding response to the increasing size, power, and importance of traditional ethnic minorities in the United States.

Homespun chic

The cheapest clothes are often the coolest. Subcultures tend to discover cheap ways of dressing (Edie Sedgwick's girls' skirts from the LES; hipsters' thrift store clothes; grunge rockers' work clothes), which then get knocked off mass-market style. You can still go out and try to buy "the real thing" for cheap once that happens, but the price of the original often goes up, and wearing the original is never quite the same again once everyone's wearing a copy from Urban Outfitters. There's one type of cheap clothing that can never be knocked off by mass merchants, however, and that's homemade clothing. I'm predicting that homemade clothes are going to be the next subculture fashion trend.

People are clearly interested in this. Teen Vogue has had a "DIY" section almost since it launched, I think, in which they show you how to turn an existing piece of clothing into a clone of some designer garment. Built by Wendy sells a book called Sew U, which teaches the basics of home sewing, as well as patterns. Project Runway obviously has people interested in making their own clothes, too.

I think a potential home-sewing trend would take a slightly different direction than the above examples, however. The reason more people don't make their own clothes is that sewing is so difficult and time-consuming. If more people are going to make their own clothing, it has to be easier and faster to make than conventional tailored garments. So, I think that body con will combine with the classicism of New Humanism to create an aesthetic of simple, easy-to-make knit clothing in a Nouveau-Ancient-Greek style (which has also been popular lately, with all the Greek drapery styles and the relaunch of Vionnet).

I'm wearing a dress today that I made in thirty minutes for $21. I learned how to make it by doing a little research online about how Greek chitons were made, got some fabric at Mood, and used my sewing machine (the pricey initial investment for doing this). I'll try to write up some instructions on how I did it, hopefully with a photo, sometime soon. It took me a few tries to figure out a pattern that didn't look like I was in costume, but what I ended up with actually looks pretty modern and vaguely Calvin Klein-minimalist.

Body con

I wrote earlier about my prediction that underwear would be "cast off as an unnecessary artifice standing in the way of fashion’s reimagining of the body." I now have a clearer sense of how that reimagining is going to take place. We're seeing its beginning in the body-conscious or "body con" trend, which I believe is related to the trend of "new humanism" in society and culture.

Superficially, body con is a sexy, show-off-y look. But at a more basic level, it's about the body, and letting the body beneath a garment determine the shape of the garment. No other style could be more human-, as opposed to fashion-, centric. This return to the body, after seasons of shapeless baby-dolls, sacks, and bubbles, signals the beginning of a turn away from "art" and towards "life" as the model for fashion.

In May of 2006, during the heyday of the shapeless dress, a representative piece of fiction appeared in Harper's. The story, "A change of fashion" by Steven Millhauser, chronicled the rise and fall of a spectacular fashion trend in which women's dresses grew to be as large, sculptural, and complex as houses, to a point at which women could withdraw into them and remain incommunicado for days at a time; suddenly, at the height of the trend, it reversed itself, and women went back to wearing regular, person-sized dresses. I think this story was about the overgrown artiness of our culture, for which fashion has been only one outlet.

A similarly representative piece of writing for the body con trend just ran in the New Yorker: Michael Chabon's essay "Secret Skin: An essay in unitard theory" (March 10, 2008). Although Chabon's topic was the archetypal superhero costume, his theory of its significance is just as applicable to contemporary body con fashion: "it ultimately takes its deepest meaning and serves its primary function in the depiction of the naked human form, unfettered, perfect, and free."

Just as the ancient Greeks celebrated their humanistic worldview by wearing draped garments and exercising in the nude, we are beginning to manifest a return to a human-centered view of things by wearing human-centered clothing. But also like the Greeks, we're striving toward not a completely "natural" human form, but an idealized one. This idealization is evident in two currents within body con: the unification and re-shaping of the body.

The drive toward unification is evident in the trend toward one-piece garments. Prada, Halston, Stella McCartney, Betsey Johnson, and many others showed jumpsuits for spring. The "one-piece" category at American Apparel is also going stronger and stronger. This new enthusiasm for all-in-one garments indicates a high regard for the aesthetic of the body-as-a-whole -- a regard high enough to overturn the shifting collage of separates that has been the basis of styling for decades now.


The re-shaping tendency is showing up in the growing popularity of all-in-one shaping garments. This got started a couple of years ago when a retro-ish corset trend showed up. But now, with Spanx, which celebrities are always talking about in tabloids, and products like the Dreambody, which I learned all about from a mesmerizing infomercial at the gym, there's a new market for undergarments that take a lumpy, out-of-shape body and magically streamline it.


The new unified, reshaped body is a sign of what the new humanism is looking for: a way of life modeled on the icon of inherently-perfect homo sapiens. I'm predicting that the "body con" trend will continue and extend past its roots in sexiness and provocativeness into a more general wide-range, long-term, minimalist, form-fitting trend in clothing.

Update 4/9: The Met is planning a May exhibit that "will explore the symbolic and metaphorical associations between fashion and the superhero" and "reveal how the superhero serves as the ultimate metaphor for fashion and its ability to empower and transform the human body."

Update 4/17: The NYT reports how designers are being influenced by the comic book aesthetic

Luxury entertainment

You may have read about these new $35-per-ticket movie theaters that are about to start showing up, where you pay a higher price for nicer seats and food, etc.

I was just thinking, though -- even though these theaters are going to charge more to see a movie, they're still going to charge the same amount for every movie. Why is that? Why is it that you can buy premium vodka, designer clothes, etc., but there's no such thing as "designer" or "luxury" movies? Why does it cost the same amount of money to see Drillbit Taylor as it does to see Paranoid Park?

There always has been, and still is, a considerable cost difference between media formats made for elites (like ballet) and formats made for the common folk (network TV). But what about different styles and qualities of content in the same format? In some mass media, there is already a "premium" price for high-quality content. Most obviously, there's a price difference between cable and network TV; an even better example is the extra you pay for what are actually called the "premium" TV channels, such as HBO. Higher-tone magazines like Harper's always cost more than tabloids like US, and the same is true for newspapers. On the internet, until recently, you often had to pay for content on legitimate, recognized sites. Increasingly paid content is disappearing -- except, of course, for pornography: the Queen of Media.

But in a few other media -- namely, movies, books, and music -- there is no quality-based price differentiation. For instance, why not charge higher (instead of lower, which is the norm) admission for art-house movies than for blockbusters? Or more for movies starring A-list actors than with B-list actors? Also, why not charge more -- at least a little more -- for books of literature than for chick lit books? For singles by popular bands than for unpopular ones?

Introducing "luxury"-based stratification into consumption costs for movies, books, and CDs would also be much fairer to and nurturing of artists with new, edgy ideas. If ticket prices for indie movies were higher than for other movies, for example, indie filmmakers could remain "indie" while still being able to support themselves. And people who wanted to have "good" taste in movies would likely be willing to pay a premium for arty films, just like many people already do for fair-trade coffee or cage-free eggs. Paying slightly more "for a good cause" might actually raise demand by giving media consumers an ego boost.

I'm just going to guess that when you pay a uniform price for movies, books, and songs, the quality costs of indie movies/groups and books of literature are already built into the price, and people paying for chick lit and blockbusters are actually being overcharged, rather than indie filmgoers and literature-readers being undercharged. Anyone in film/publishing/record industries care to tell me if this is right?

If I am right, then these media are actually set up to nurture emerging talent. What does that say about the fact that two of them -- the publishing and record industries -- are supposedly in deep trouble? And what about the fact that increasingly content on the internet, the most cutting-edge form of media, is free? I guess it looks like the new model of media shifts most of the price of developing talent off of the media companies and onto the public. Non-contributing viewers/readers get "free" or at least underpriced media, but for contributors, the "price" of media viewer/readership is "built into" their labor in creating content.

So, I guess I'm paying Blogger right now. You're welcome!

Six human needs

Recently I've become a big fan of Ellen Dissanayake and her book What Is Art For?. Dissanayake defines modern art as distinct from the "primitive" arts in that modern art sees aesthetics as an end in itself, whereas humans originally used aesthetics as a means to the end of "making special," or emphasizing the importance of certain important rituals, objects, and occasions.  The reason "we" (really Western elites) invented modern "art for art's sake" is as a method of self-transcendence in a world in which literacy has destroyed the old ("primitive," "superstitious," "magical") ways of transcending ourselves.

Towards the end of the book, Dissanayake speculates about exactly what it is that modern Westerners are missing that makes them need art.  She identifies six "human needs," which are not being well met in our text-centered culture:

• Humans tend to construct, accept, and share with others systems that explain and organize their world as perceived and known, and feel uneasy without such explanation and organization.
• Humans tend to require the psychological (as well as physical) security of predictability and familiarity of knowing and accepting their role and place in life, and feel uneasy without such predictability and knowledge.
• Humans require psychological ratification or certification by others--by being an integral part of a group or family--and feel uneasy without this certification.
• Humans tend to bond or attach to others, and feel incomplete without this attachment.
• Humans recognize and celebrate with others of their kind an extraordinary as opposed to ordinary dimension of experience, and feel unsatisfied without it.
• Humans tend to engage in play and make-believe, and feel deprived if unable to do so.

She thinks that if we reorganized society with an orientation towards meeting these needs, we would all be happier and less alienated.  And, presumably, we would no longer need art, and aesthetics would retreat back into its role as a tool for "making special." 

Even though not needing art would mean we were "healthier," I still hate the idea.  I don't want to accept that something I grew up thinking was one of the big points of life is actually just a symptom of our civilization's sickness.  But then, I'm a classic alienated Western elite, and my feelings about art probably put me in a tiny minority of people worldwide.  Most people are probably better off not feeling a need for art.  And yet, the artification of culture worldwide (see Head-to-toe for my reactionary rant about that) seems to be proceeding at a quick pace.  Before too long everyone may be alienated out of their skulls.

Or maybe the artification trend will reach saturation and reverse itself automatically.  As I mentioned in B.O. is the new perfume, I do think that people are getting very interested in a "New Humanism" which looks to our natural, instinctual, inherent human qualities for guidance as to how we should live and structure society.  So maybe the "six basic needs" will get some attention after all.

So hot it's cool, so cool it's hot

I've been reading Understanding Media and thinking about how McLuhan's theories about hot and cool media apply to the internet.  It's clear that with its combination of "hot" text and "cool" electronic communication and participation, the internet does not fit neatly into either category.  But does that mean that McLuhan's theory doesn't apply to the internet, that it breaks down in our new media atmosphere?  Or does the mixing of "hot" and "cool" online make the internet "lukewarm"?

I think a good way of understanding the internet in McLuhan's terms is with the description used in a Pop-Tart commercial I remember well from the '80s, which seized on the phenomenon of how the burning sensation of freshly-toasted fruit filling searing one's tongue is indistinguishable from the similar "burning" coolness you feel when your tongue is stuck to ice.  The overstimulation of your senses in one direction leads to an inverted experience of the sensation.  And so, Pop-Tarts are "so hot, they're cool -- so cool, they're hot."

That's what the internet is like.  It is, I believe, an inherently "hot" medium -- so hot that we've come to experience it as "cool."  The internet's heat comes from its inherent characteristics:

• high definition (computer screens)
  
• high density of data
  
• high specialization (specialized function of transmitting text, images, and sound)
• intense engagement of a single sense (sight)
  
• high degree of fragmentation (on millions of web sites)
  

The internet's "cool" attributes have to do with its apparent effects:

• high audience participation
• unification of time in a continuous present
• inclusion of all
• retribalization

These "cool" effects have all come about precisely because of the internet's extreme "hot"ness: it's the "hot" qualities of data density and intense visual engagement that bring about the "cool" sensation of unified time and instantaneousness; "hot" fragmentation that is causing "cool" retribalization and all-inclusiveness; and the "hot" specialization of computer technology that requires "cool" participation.  The extreme hotness of the internet makes it "feel" and in some ways behave like a "cool" medium.  But it still lacks the essence of "cool"ness.

McLuhan theorized that electric technology would deliver us out of the literate (often misconstrued as "rational") mindset of mechanization back into an intuitive ("irrational") world, where myth, the "total field," non-illusionistic art, structure and configuration (as opposed to linearity), and oral culture would gain ascendency.  But I don't see that happening.  Sure, the internet's intensity creates a kind of buzz that gives a feeling of iconography, mythology, simultaneity, and complex structure; but, to me, in practice the internet mainly displays the characteristics McLuhan assigns to traditional, Western, "mechanized" culture: fragmentary, superficial relationships; sequentiality; the hiding or denying of causes; an over-focus on "point of view"; attention to specialized segments of information; the divorce of form and function; and written modes of communication.

McLuhan warns that cultures always make the mistake of trying to use new technologies to do the work of the old.  That's what we're currently doing with the internet by using it as the medium for our same old literacy-focused culture.  It's not impossible for the internet to "cool down" so that we can bite into it without burning our tongues; but in order for that to happen, I believe it would have to evolve dramatically from what it is today.  It's fun to think about the ways in which people initially "misunderstood" how to use the internet -- which suggests that we "get it" now.  But I think we're still mistaking a "hot" medium for a "cool" one.  That's a mistake that may have some disappointing consequences.