Kawaii

After all the minimalist androgyny (predicted, realized) is over, girls and young women are going to get all Japanese-style kawaii.  This is sort of what Lady GaGa does already, and actually what Gwen Stefani does with Harajuku Lovers.  I don't think it'll just be the decora-chan style of Harajuku District, though --

I think maybe it will get more mainstream to dress up in a costume, like goths here already do, or as the Lolitas and others do in Tokyo:

It's predictable since what's popular in Japan becomes popular in the U.S. oh like 15 or so years later, and also because it's a very appropriate style for celebrities and, later, people who are apparently all becoming "avatars" of themselves through fashion.

I put that in quotes like to be sarcastic, but the whole public-persona-as-avatar concept is actually really cool.

Unintended irony in street fashion

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.html

Seeing 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.

Bring back the phone!

So for lots of people, e-mailing has replaced the phone, and it's almost considered intrusive to call anyone but close friends and family at this point.

I was just e-mailing back and forth with one of my best friends, and was about to send yet another e-mail to clarify something, and then I was like: "What the hell am I doing?  Why don't I call her on the phone?"  And so I did.  And we had...a conversation.  And it was great!  It relieved the loneliness of working at home much better than typing.  I think people should e-mail and text less, and talk on the phone more.  Especially when it actually saves time (There's this assumption that you cut out some kind of unnecessary chatter by e-mailing/IMing, but I think that's exaggerated).

Talking on the phone is also cool in a romantic, retro way.  I even think people should talk on land lines more -- as much as possible.  First of all it's less potentially-carcinogenic.  Secondly there's not all that trouble with bad reception.  And thirdly, it can feel really nice to hold a good old-fashioned receiver.  I have a non-cordless phone and love it.  It's the wall-mount-option kind, and I even wish it were the big clunky desk model.

Talking on the phone more is also a way to counteract all the overproliferation of "hot" media by chilling out with a nice "cool" medium.

Of course, I'm not the only person who's said exactly this same thing: the Times is aaaallll over it (here, here).  But I think they're mainly speaking to an older audience about their work environments.  I'm talking about social phone calls, here.  We need more of them.

Cultural beauty

I'm reading the second book by Ellen Dissanake (whom I wrote about before here), Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why and it, like her first book What Is Art For?, is awesome. There are a lot of ideas in it I want to blog about, and the first is something she points out in explaining how humans use art to turn something "natural" into something "cultural," thereby making it special. Something I thought was particularly interesting was what she pointed out about the art of personal beautification and adornment: that in traditional cultures, what constitutes true beauty is adherence to the culturally-mandated form of beautification:

To the Temne, the Igbo, and many other West African groups, beauty is inseparable from refinement so that it is said that a homely but well-groomed Temne woman with refined ways would be more likely to attract male attention than a fine-featured woman who appears disheveled. In such societies, beauty, like morality, comes by acquisition, and is achieved by manipulating nature: it is not a natural endowment.

This reminded me of a conversation I'd just been having with someone about how funny we thought it was that certain naturally-unattractive women will dye their hair, put on lots of makeup, dress up a certain way, and still (to us) be obviously hideous--but that to plenty of men and other women, they look attractive because of how they're done up. We discussed how we thought this was bizarre; but in fact, culturally speaking, of course it is we who are bizarre. Even though our modern culture does place value on natural beauty, it still places a great deal of value on cultural, "artificial" beauty. People really pay a lot more attention to the signification of others' appearances than they do to their actual aesthetics. And Dissanayake seems to think that this is evidence of a healthy engagement in the meaning-giving power of shared culture.

She really thinks postmodernism sucks, and that its whole aesthetic is symptomatic of our bankrupt culture: "It seems worth asking whether the confusing and unsatisfying state of art in our world has anything to do with the fact that we no longer care about important things." I guess that could apply, also, to the postmodern standard of beauty, which my friend and I have, which looks right at someone's actual body and face and judges their beauty based on that. That, culturally, is bizarre and alienated. And yet until now I unquestioningly assumed that I was "correct" to think I knew what beauty was. And I did--but not in a cultural sense. And I'm not sure I can, at this point, appreciate cultural beauty, because I'm not used to looking in that way.

Women and men

I was talking to a baby boomer the other day who in the course of our conversation referred to a contemporary of mine as a "woman."  Immediately I sensed the problem with this and felt compelled to fix it, and also to unnecessarily make my boomer friend feel uncomfortable.  So I informed her, faux-offendedly, "Um, we call them girls."

Because it's true: most unmarried/childless urban females under the age of, say, 40 refer to themselves and each other as "girls," and their male equivalents are "guys" or even "boys."  "Woman" sounds like a fat or boring person; "man" sounds like a strange, be-suited fellow.  Both are waaaaaaaay too mature-sounding for the ineffectual, directionless, adult children we feel ourselves to be, and too old-sounding for the sexy, with-it hipsters we hope we are.

And yet right after I issued my official Millennial correction, I realized that I wasn't actually so sure about it.  I'm not so sure I want to be called a "girl" anymore.  Although self-identifying as a "girl" is superficially self-affirming, since it suggests that one is cute and fun, it's starting to seem a little depressing.  After all, does it really feel good if at 26 I fall into the same category as a 5-year-old?  The problem with "girl" no longer has anything to do with feminism (see above, "boy" -- there's no double standard) -- it has to do with the issue of Millennial/Gen-Y maturity.  And as I started thinking here and a bit here even, it's maybe time we started working on that.

I'm a cautious proponent of the "fake it till you make it" strategy, so I'm going to go right ahead and start promoting the trend of females over the age of 18 calling themselves "women" again, in the hopes that this symbolic gesture will make us feel more like adults (in the best sense of the word).  And boys should be men, too.  Doesn't it all sound more exciting?  To be women and men--to know women and men?  I think it does.  It kind of casts everything into a different light, to think of things that way.  It's kind of radical--so I like it.

Is it going to become a thing, actually?  I don't know.  Maybe.  Maybe a different word will become popular.  "Lady" has had a bit of a comeback.  Maybe other slang terms will come back instead.  But I do think I see "girl" on its way out.  It's not right anymore.

I was right: Obama's influence on names

I predicted here that Obama's candidacy/presidency would prompt more black Americans to give their children traditional African names, and that this trend might extend to Americans of all ethnicities giving their children names borrowed from other cultures.

What's happening instead, already, as this NYT article reports, is that grown Obama supporters are giving themselves his middle name, Hussein, as their middle names, adopting it as a symbol of solidarity in the face of all the anti-Muslim hysteria about his background.

So far Obama's campaign has done an extremely good job of managing Obama's "brand."  Obama-sponsored memes ("Yes we can") have been extremely successful.  And a couple of (planned?) physical-gesture memes that started out looking potentially damaging (the Jay-Z brush-off, the terrorist fist jab) were swiftly picked up and championed by pop culture (no question, the fist-bump is the new high-five).

Obama's imagery is powerful.  And the reason it's so powerful is that it's impeccably, vertically unified.  The campaign's power comes from the bottom up, but its themes and aesthetic come from the top down.  People interact with that imagery in a grassroots way -- make their own posters, buttons, etc. -- but they're using as their raw material the Obama "look."  That look is incredibly well-thought-out and designed to look right, sound right, feel right -- so when it gets repeated and repeated as it trickles through culture, it all reinforces the Obama message.  

What doesn't work is for the grassroots to come up with a meme and force it upwards, because it will clash with Obama's visual and rhetorical aesthetic.  And Hussein clashes.  Although Obama's middle name is a part of his "brand" (part of his name/"brand name") whether he likes it or not, it's not been chosen as part of his brand messaging.  And so what these kids are doing becomes unintentionally subversive of what Obama's trying to do.  The main problem with their gesture isn't that it adds to the false association between Obama and Islam (because, although it does, Obama is already treading the line on offending Muslims), but that it picks apart Obama's image when what's clearly been working best for him is summing-up, generalizing, unifying.  And because it picks apart instead of generalizing, it distracts from the candidate, leading us away into a debate on religion and race between individuals instead of back toward Obama and the mass movement.

Radical Chic redux

Along with the natural/afro hair, politicized hip-hop style, and authentic African names that I think an Obama candidacy and presidency is going to bring to the forefront, I'm starting to wonder if some Black Power-influenced style is going to come back in 2009.

I mentioned in this post that I think the color black in general is going to only get more pervasive, and that in the winter the classic black turtleneck is going to be huge. I'm also imagining lots of sober, simply-cut (minimalist) black jackets, suits, and coats, and flat black boots. And I'm thinking that the camouflage trend of this winter/spring is only going to get bigger and encompass a generally militant-ish look. Plus, I continue to insist, long hair for men. Add to that a dumbing-down of (or maybe even dispensing-with?) makeup (here, here), the continuation of skinny jeans, the not-dying popularity of sunglasses, especially still the Wayfarers, the seemingly-random turban and hats-in-general trend, and it's all sounding a little familiar:

...Christ, if the Panthers don't know how to get it all together, as they say, the tight pants, the tight black turtlenecks, the leather coats, Cuban shades, Afros. But real Afros, not the ones that have been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge and sprayed until they have a sheen like acrylic wall-to-wall--but like funky, natural, scraggly . . . wild . . .

...The Panther women...are so lean, so lithe, as they say, with tight pants and Yoruba-style headdresses, almost like turbans, as if they'd stepped out of the pages of Vogue, although no doubt Vogue got it from them. All at once every woman in the room knows what Amanda Burden meant when she said she was now anti-fashion because "the sophistication of the baby blacks made me rethink my attitudes." God knows the Panther women don't spend thirty minutes in front of the mirror in the morning shoring up their eye holes with contact lenses, eyeliner, eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, occipital rim brush, false eyelashes, mascara, Shadow-Ban for undereye and Eterna Creme for the corners . . . (from Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers ©1970 by Tom Wolfe)

Of course Black Power overtones are exactly the last thing Barack Obama needs, so I hope this doesn't come back too strong or too soon. Hopefully not really until he's in office. And I really, really hope it'll be about black pride instead of black separatism.

Ideally it will represent, also, not the nihilistic defeated attitude of 1969, but a non-materialistic, honest attitude, and be part of a sweeping-away of the overconsumption-oriented style that has reigned for almost this entire first decade of the 21st century.