Maximizing the contradictions

I've already complained about how, in this twilight of the Late Modern collage aesthetic, consumers are required to put a lot of time and effort into expressing themselves through creative consumption. So now I'd like to propose a better, newer, more advanced transitional aesthetic -- a tide-over until the recession-delayed New Sportswear.

I mentioned it in my post about Unhairdos. My idea is called Beautiful Ugliness and would consist of ensembles, in various mediums including but not limited to fashion, in which disparate elements are combined without regard to aesthetic harmony and in fact with the goal of creating dissonance.

I think Beautiful Ugliness is a good next aesthetic step because it's a clear way to acknowledge a problem that I think we as a culture are avoiding: that our current mash-up culture is a temporary, uneasy compromise at best and is not helping to move us forward. Because, I think, we are so afraid of facing the huge difficulty of collectively fabricating more original cultural forms to meet our modern human needs, we're procrastinating by obsessively trying to make mash-up culture "work." And of course it feeds into consumerism, too. If everything is original and different but everything has to "match" and "balance," etc., you have to spend a lot of time shopping for the right-color, right-style, right-"wrong," in a way, products. Magazines and TV shows are full of advice on how to make all the crap work together. Obviously it's a big strain on everyone. Why not put a stop to it with something a little more "real" and honest?

Instead of "right-wrong," I propose "wrong-right." This means, instead of trying to sublimate the apparent "wrong"-ness of our mismatched culture into the "right"ness of matchy-matchyness, let's put it out there, create obviously "wrong" mash-ups, and decide to accept these as the new "right."

Think about it: when you look around as you walk down the street, does everything match? It absolutely doesn't. When you walk around in nature, in a forest, say, everything matches to some degree. But in artificial human environments, aesthetic continuity exists within individual, self-contained environments such as stores, sure -- but not (except in the strip-mall environments that almost everyone agrees are heinous) in larger blocks of what actually constitute our living environments. If you look at a whole block, a whole street, together -- everything clashes. Everything is a jumble. Because it wasn't masterminded; it's the result of evolution, not intelligent design. And lots of city planners would tell you that that's precisely what makes good neighborhoods good. So why don't we expand this aesthetic, which is so expressive of what's good about melting-pot culture, and apply it more deliberately?

I love what Andy Warhol wrote in THE Philosophy of Andy Warhol about his own version of Beautiful Ugliness:

I really look awful, and I never bother to primp up or try to be appealing because I just don't want anyone to get involved with me. And that's the truth I play down my good features and play up the bad ones. So I look awful and I wear the wrong pants and the wrong shoes and I come at the wrong time with the wrong friends, and I say the wrong things and I talk to the wrong person, and then still sometimes somebody gets interested and I freak out and I wonder, "What did I do wrong?" So then I go home and try to figure it out. "Well I must be wearing something that somebody thinks is attractive. I'd better change it. Before things get too far...So I think, "How weird. I know I look bad. I made myself look especially bad--especially wrong--because I knew a lot of the right people would be there, and still someone somehow got interested..."

Of course this, like a lot of what Warhol wrote, is intentionally facetious/misleading, as what he called looking "awful" and "wrong" was a large part of the cult of personality he deliberately fostered in order to get the attention he claims he was avoiding. This ironically-ironic ambivalence towards the positive-attention-getting potential of "ugly" aesthetics would be one of Beautiful Ugliness's contrbutions to the cleansing transition out of irony into Post-Postmodernism.

Arguably some hipsters dress Beautifully Ugly, but most try to make stuff match and "look good." I just think it would be so cool if more people tried to "look bad." And wouldn't it be amazing if "bad" became the new "good"? Maybe that extreme of topsy-turviness would be enough to "reset" us aesthetically so we could come up with some good new stuff.

Tuck it in

There's this consensus that tucked-in shirts on girls look ugly, nerdy, and wrong. Almost no young women wear their shirts tucked in unless they have to as part of the dress code for their jobs. For as long as I can remember (since the mid-eighties), tucked-in shirts have been extremely uncool as part of casual wear. Why is this?

I think it's because it's so hard to make a tucked-in shirt look flattering on a woman's body. First of all, it draws attention to the waist, which can be bad if the waist is too wide, too high, or too low. It also makes the hips look wider by making the waist look smaller. And tucking in can make you look heavier than you are: if you're overweight, it draws attention to your tummy, and if you're thin, the blousing effect can hide your flat stomach. I'm guessing that untucked shirts became mainstream because women realized that it was easier to look good in them. The women who contined to tuck in their tops were either very conservative dressers or not very fashion-conscious ones. Tucking in became associated with conformity and nerdiness, and therefore came to be considered not only unflattering, but uncool as well.
Of course, the uncoolness of tucking in makes it ripe for coolness. Now that 70s and 80s styles are so mainstream, I think authentic 70s and 80s styling should come back, too. Plus, as I discovered just now while looking for images of nerdy tucked-in shirts, even L.L.Bean now shows its shirts worn untucked on models on its website. If L.L.Bean has decided tucking in is too uncool for its customers, then it is definitely time for it to become cool for trendy people. (L.L.Bean is a great barometer; they also started producing bootcut pants just as those were about to become unfashionable.)

It's all in the execution, of course. For knit tops, I think it's best to go small and simple: a form-fitting (but not skintight) T-shirt or tank tucked into jeans (the high-waisted ones are perfect). For blouses, form-fitting is a bad idea; tops with very shaped waists that slip perfectly into pants or skirts will give the bad, conservative look. It's better to choose a looser-fitting top, accept that the blousing is going to happen, and embrace it.

Burn your bra

Okay, here's the first fashion prediction I want to share with you: bralessness is going to be in.

The history of the brassiere tells us that the modern bra evolved out of the corset. In the late nineteenth century, concerns about corsets’ health risks and physical restrictiveness led to the invention of a new, supposedly more comfortable undergarment. This new underthing was like a corset split in half, with the bottom part cinching in the waist and the upper part supporting the bust. Over time, the waist corset evolved into the lighter, elasticized girdle, which in turn fell almost completely out of usage in the late 1960s, when control-top pantyhose rendered it obsolete. Today, of course, most women’s below-the-waist undergarments consist of nothing more than panties. The top half of the corset, in contrast, changed very little over the course of the twentieth century; most bras retain the corset’s boning (underwire) and rigidity (padding). The brassiere’s function, as well, has remained the same as that of the corset: the reshaping of the breasts into a desirable, artificial shape. The bra remains, essentially, a corset for the breasts.

If the top half of women’s undergarments had kept pace with the bottom half, then today, instead of brassieres, most women would be wearing the upper-body equivalent of panties: camisoles. Why did it not happen that way? It seemed for a time that it might: in the ‘60s, some women stopped wearing bras, and many continued this trend into the 1970s. In the ‘80s, though, the switch to “power dressing” and a backlash to feminism caused the bra to regain its status as a crucial foundation garment, which it retains today.

In my opinion, wearing a bra is extremely uncool. Apart from being shockingly old-fashioned, bras are uncomfortable, prudish, ugly, and expensive. So why do most women still wear them? I’ve heard large-breasted women say they find going braless uncomfortable. There’s also the aesthetic factor: bras can disguise the appearance of breasts that are droopy or asymmetrical. But why do women with nice-looking, regular-sized breasts still wear bras?

It all has to do with sexual repression. Un-bra’ed breasts are very sexy; they have shape, personality, and a natural bounciness. Breasts in a bra are comparatively much less sexy; molded into perfect, geometric hemispheres, “supported” and held in place, they are sanitized, and, I think, desexualized. The contemporary “hottie,” with her skintight T-shirt over her Victoria’s Secret bra, has transformed herself into a safe and unthreatening visual treat for men. Her cartoon breasts—nippleless and immobile, like Barbie’s—give no hint of their actual functions as secondary sexual characteristics or milk-producing organs. Bras do the same thing to breasts that corsets did to waists: they objectify them, turning them into symbols of femininity by distorting and destroying their natural, feminine shape.

I think it’s time for women to stop wearing bras. It’s “been time” for a while, but I think American culture might actually, finally, be ready for it. There aren’t that many clear signs that the trend is coming—the most obvious is American Apparel’s promotion of the no-bra look in its ads and online product photos—but I think that bralessness would extend and resolve too many existing, long-term trends in fashion not to become a fad. For one thing, the women most visually associated with fashion—models—do not wear bras. That's partly because they don’t need them because they’re so skinny and have small breasts as a result. But it’s also just not the convention for models to wear bras on the runway. Why should it be any different in real life? Women are getting more and more interested in high fashion, and wearing clothes just like runway models do would be another way of being authentically stylish. Secondly, I think that small breasts in themselves should become trendy because of their above-mentioned association with thinness—which, of course, continues to be quite the fashionable body type for females. A bralessness trend would give thin women yet another way to show off how thin they are. Finally, I don’t understand why bralessness hasn’t been “in” despite being so inherently rebellious and punk. In a society where we are constantly searching for the new, hip thing, the no-bra option is just too obvious of a potential fashion statement to be ignored.

Something is currently brewing in fashion regarding women’s underwear, and it’s all bound up in this transparency thing that is so big for spring. I predict that within a year, that theme will be carried to the next level. Underwear has been revealed and examined, and next it will be cast off as an unnecessary artifice standing in the way of fashion’s reimagining of the body. But I suggest adopting this trend now, before it happens, when it is still weird, naughty, and utterly cool.

2nd Update: Camouflage

I wrote earlier about the street trend of camouflage prints here and here.

This second update is long overdue because I've been seeing more and new kinds of camouflage for over a month now.  Desert camo prints have been gaining on the woodland ones I saw most at first.  But more curiously, there are now lots of camo-like prints in mass market clothes.  I've been seeing women's tops and skirts in floral prints that copy the look and colors of camouflage.  I also saw a skirt with a print of a collage of faces that formed a camo-like pattern.  There has been a lot of pixillated camo on skater-type clothes for men, too.

The transmutation of camouflage into traditional fashion patterns can be read in multiple interesting ways, such as:

• A symbol of how the foreign policy topic of the war has come to be seen also as a domestic issue
  
• An echo of the trend in contemporary art away from the abstract (camo's blobs and squiggles) and towards the figurative (flowers, faces)
• A gesture of solidarity with the troops
• An anti-war statement
• A motif of national insecurity (we want even our pretty patterns to "camouflage" and protect us in daily life)

These patterns haven't actually been having that much success: I've spotted them a lot on sales racks and in thrift stores.  People may be a bit put off by the potentially very loaded message of these prints.  Or they may just find them ugly and difficult to wear -- which they are.  I can't tell yet whether this trend is surviving into spring, but if it does, I'm sure I'll write about it again.

What's cooler than being cool?

How can our culture turn around from the dead end it’s reached with Cool?  This is something I think about a lot.  We’ve been stuck for way too long re-processing the same cultural material, in this hyper-ironic state of mind, and the feeling of stagnation is overpowering.

Marshall McLuhan would say we’re in a Narcissus phase.  In Understanding Media, he described what he called the “cooling” process, in which a culture uses play, parody, and miming to assimilate new (“hot”) information.  Cooling serves a healthy cultural purpose, but it can become unhealthy if overindulged in.  This often happens in the aftermath of the introduction of a new form of media.  In the hyper-cooling phase that follows the invention of a media form, people, not yet “understanding” the new form, become fascinated and enslaved by the extensions of themselves in it.  This enslavement occurs because people make the crucial mistake of thinking that the new media is separate from “real life,” when it is actually a part – an extension – of life and of people themselves.

In the present day, the hypnotizing media is the internet.  Because of the internet, the speed of culture and its cooling has gotten so fast that living with media is like watching a video of life that’s on a split-second time delay: disorienting, disturbing, and discouraging – but hypnotizing.  Hypnotizing because the split-second delay gives the false sensation of watching something fake, something different from our lives – a fantastic show that we don’t want to miss.

McLuhan would say that we’re making the same mistake as Narcissus, who, he emphasizes, did not fall in love with himself, but with a reflection of himself which he genuinely believed to be another person.  Similarly, what we haven’t realized, in relentlessly parodying, recycling, and remixing pop culture, then consuming it again, is that this parodied, recycled, remixed culture isn’t some “other” culture, separate from our own, better than it – it IS our culture.  Our problem, then, isn’t the common diagnosis of self-love, but rather self-alienation and resulting self-hate.  Who but a really, really messed-up person could look at her reflection in the mirror and think to herself, “That person isn’t me”?  But that’s exactly what our culture is doing.

And it’s clear that, subconsciously, the culture knows that it’s messed-up.  Because just as Narcissus’s initial happiness at meeting such a beautiful creature quickly turned to anger and disgust when he found his image unresponsive, the initial attraction we felt when discovering ourselves on the internet turned quickly to ugly, hateful tearing-down when we started experiencing how empty it is to feed upon oneself.

McLuhan doesn’t provide an answer for how to overcome the problem of over-cooling.  He does mention something called a “break point,” however, which seems to be the point at which a trend tips and reverses to the other direction.  We simply have to be approaching such a break point now.  How will the tip happen, though?

I’ve been trying to figure this out by extending the metaphor of cooling, asking myself, what happens when something over-cools?  The short answer is that it freezes.  That would translate into the speed of internet “cooling” breaking the speed of the internet itself.  Literally that’s impossible, since it would mean images of real-life events would have to appear on the internet before they occurred in real life.  Conceptually, however, that’s just the right idea.  We have to put things on the internet, and out into the internet-adapted culture generally, before they “happen.”  Meaning, we have to put things out there that aren’t real -- that are, in other words, art.

And entertainment has started doing just that.  The NY Mag article about Gossip Girl pointed out that the most ground-breaking thing about the series is how all the gossip surrounding its actors’ real lives may be being manufactured by the same person who writes the show for the characters.  So that would mean that the gossip reported on the internet is actually being written ahead of time.  This is an old trick, of course – the film studios figured it out a long time ago.  This has also been happening on the super-scripted reality shows like The Hills.  Again, a kind of art sneaking in under the guise of life.  We say this kind of behavior is somehow reprehensible, but I think it's just what we need.

Because like I started thinking here in reference to the internet, I think that our almost-frozen culture is also paradoxically the “hot”test it’s ever been.  The question of which extreme the temperature is actually at doesn’t matter: the sensation is the same, and all that matters is how we conceptualize it.  Are we going to keep thinking of our fake culture as “cool,” and tricking ourselves into thinking that as we constantly disparage it we’re talking about something better than ourselves?  Or are we going to assert that we are part of it – very much a part of it?

What’s “cooler than being cool” is, as we all know, “Ice Cold.”  I think what Andre 3000 wrote about in "Hey Ya" was actually a quite profound message about the redemptive pain of breaking through alienation by embracing it.  In the video, Andre 3000 is the quintessential alienated artist in the act of transcendence.  He's supposed to "act like [he's] got some sense," but all he knows how to do is "play," because that's the only way he knows of dealing with the complete ridiculousness of the adulation of his public (both in the studio and through T.V. screens) -- by inciting it, embracing it, and raising it to even-crazier heights.  He does this by putting on a false persona -- not just one, but actually 6 personas (1 of them repeated 3 times), each with its own costume and personality and style of seduction.  The seduction is both overtly fake (the over-the-top suaveness of the singer, the girl who runs up on stage to hug him but then ends up mainly wanting to wave at the camera) and intensely real and personal (the sweet girl in the yellow top blowing a kiss to the keyboardist, who shyly smiles).  Both modes coexist and make each other possible -- embolden each other, perhaps.

The video parallels the love story in the song, which is itself a metaphor for the alienation in modern life.  The song is about romantic ambivalence: "But does she really want to / but can't stand to see me walk out the door" (these thoughts incoherently running into each other, they're so mixed-up).  There's this terror of committing to something, for fear that its disappointing reality ("separate's always better when there's feelings involved") will make the fantasy crumble ("got it just don't get it till there's nothing at all").  What makes love the exception?  There's no straight answer to that, other than not to try to pin down an answer.  Instead of listening to the words of the song, we should just dance; and instead of introducing Andre 3000 to our mother, we should just have sex with him.  We should just live -- and living necessitates a little fakeness, a little superficiality, but also a little faith, just like love.

In the video, the bizarre instantaneousness of media communication drives home the miraculous coexistence of superficiality and depth: real-life Andre 3000 transforms into a still image of himself on a poster waved at him by a fan; Polaroid pictures develop images of what's currently going on before our eyes.  But again, this can only happen (actually not, according to the Polaroid Corporation) if we "shake it."  Andre 3000 demands this participation, not just by actively seducing his audience, but by weaving a really infectious call-and-response into his song.  Even uptight Catholic school teachers can't resist the excitement of involving oneself in this kind of "play."

"Ice Cold" means that state of extreme “so-hot-it’s-cool”ness which "Hey Ya" is about, which is the best kind of coolness -- the kind in which you’re actually going out on a limb and owning what you create.  Instead of pretending you’re somehow above what we all do now – put on personas, wear costumes, fake attitudes, create brands for ourselves – generally “be superficial” – you’re identifying with it and even asserting that what seems “fake” is, in the world of modern media, actually the realest thing there is.