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.

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.