For the first time this morning I saw a street style blog post with a picture of someone who
had not dressed up trying to be fashionable or ironic. It was the first time I've seen the
photographer make the decision that the person was going to be those things. Here it is:
http://com-onpeople.blogspot.com/2009/03/housein.htmlSeeing the above really shocked me. Housein is not trying to be fashionable or cool! Who knows why he ended up buying that jacket, but it wasn't because it made him giggle. But still he was wearing a jacket that a hipster might buy because it made him giggle, and so the photographer photographed him. So I guess intentionality is now moot in the production of sartorial irony? Will everyone become un-P.C. like me and start taking pictures like
this?
Interesting how, obviously, Housein's unironic orientation towards clothing goes right along with a completely different set of values. Whereas the legginged-out girl a couple posts above him reported her inspirations for this outfit as "Santangela,pulp,common people,1991," Housein's were his country, family, and friends. No hipster raised in the United States would ever say this. And yet, it's a much cooler response, in my opinion, than any of the rather boneheaded ones that most people spout when asked.
I've been spending some time with my friend's crowd of international-relations students here in D.C., and one bit of fashion trivia which they frequently cite is the Third World's position on the fashion food chain--how apparently after clothes have made it all the way from the manufacturer through discounts and more discounts at department stores, to second-tier bargain stores like T.J.Maxx, to thrift stores, they finally make it (seasons, years later) to poor countries in big bags, and people there shop by fishing things out of the bags.
The resulting outfits are representative of the trend I wrote about
here called "Beautiful Ugliness," in which the goal of an outfit is to create an effect of aesthetic dissonance. However, I was completely wrong about this idea. Instead of being created on purpose, the new aesthetic dissonance will be created by accident; and instead of acting as a fashion catharsis for the "problem" of collage Late Modern culture, it will expose the fact that the "collage" is an illusion, a false construction of affluent Westerners trying to explain and contain the surging multiethnic, multicultural richness and vitality of the world beyond its ken--and to assuage its guilt over destroying the continuity of the past by obsessively recycling it.
This Beautiful Ugliness is the first modern fashion that the American-born
cannot attain--or that at least very few of them can attain--because the prerequisite for it is a certain attitude: one that prompts a person to instinctively list as his inspirations, "My country Bangladesh, my family and my friends." Though hipsters and celebrities, especially M.I.A., dressing up in a version of Beautiful Ugliness, they still can't help doing it all on purpose. They have learned aesthetic preferences which it's very hard to unlearn, and have aesthetic associations that may never be wiped clean. They are doomed to look at Husein's jacket and think, "1980s. Ironic." They just can't wear this style!
Of course, is it a style? Does an aesthetic have to be intentional to be a style? I'm not sure. It does to be a "fashion" -- but all traditional cultures have extremely well-developed styles, and those emerged not from a designer's sketchbook but from centuries of evolution, elaboration, and perfection. Now they're gone. And what the descendants of those cultures have left to work with are the cast-offs of the culture that demolished them. And, repeating the pattern of unconscious evolution, the style that's emerging expresses much more perfectly the reality of the modern aesthetic than its rich overlords do.
That is real street style.
