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.

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.

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.

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.

I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes

The darkness isn't going to go if you turn your head, though.  More darkness is on the way.  In fact it would be appropriate, if you see a red dress, to paint it black, because black and more black is what we're going to be seeing this summer.

That's right, here it is, my favorite time of year: time to make the New York Downtown Young Ladies' Summer Fashion Trend Report.

It's all about separates, neutrals, minimalism, utilitarianism, lots of skin, and a tough attitude.

All the outfits worn by New York Downtown Young Ladies are a variation on this theme:

• white, black, gray, denim, or khaki short shorts or short skirt, high-waisted
• + white, black, or gray top of some kind
• OR black or white sundress BELTED AT THE WAIST -- NO empire line
• potential vest, layered shirt, or jacket in white, black, or denim -- NO SWEATERS

Guidelines for accessories:

• sandals, esp. gladiators or anything with an ankle strap, leather NOT jelly, espadrille, or other, TRUE sandal NOT FLIP-FLOP -- OR leather or canvas black/white/neutral lace-ups OR boots -- tough boots as motorcycle or winkle-picker, NOT round-toe scrunchy
• NO bag -- OR utilitarian bag - backpack, fanny pack, or as last resort TRUE handbag (no shoulder straps and especially NO HOBOS)
• the best accessories have some sort of significance or symbolism: for instance, political pins, wedding rings, friendship bracelets
• earrings are long and made of feathers or fringe or are hoops or simple studs but are NOT chandelier.  multiple ear piercings are good.
• chokers

Grooming:

• hair: should not be styled -- it should be air-dried and left in its natural state.  If it's frizzy in its natural state, it should be frizzy; if it's flat, it should be flat.  your growing-out bangs should be in your eyes.  don't trim your hair.
• makeup: pretty skin, some mascara.  NO EYELINER.  lip balm.
• no nail polish

Underwear

• I was a little wrong about bras.  it's OK to wear a bra, but it shouldn't be a heavy-duty bra.  It should be a garment and not an undergarment.  it should show -- the straps should show, or the color should show through your shirt.  or you can wear it on its own -- if it's a sports bra.  that could be really cool, actually.

The following are forbidden:

• irony
• color
• notions of "luxury" or "glamour"
• boho

Other notes:

• the right denim is old, thrifted, men's denim -- ideally a little torn.
• don't try to be sexy.  it's an election year, get over yourself
• shoes are going to be getting more and more utilitarian.  sandals this summer will give way to sneakers this fall and hiking boots and flat boots this winter.  notice how the nineties are coming back?
• also in that vein: perhaps instead of long hair, a bit of a sinead/ani moment?
• this winter the black turtleneck will succeed these black winter clothes.

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.

Movie trailers and the dangers of virtual reality

Trailers for old movies are really weird. Since I was born in late 1981, I didn't really see many movie trailers until the late '80s. What I didn't realize until recently is that that means I exactly missed the transition between the old style of movie trailers and the new. But now that movies' original trailers are almost always included in the special features of DVDs, I've been exposed to lots of these old trailers, and I'm blown away by how different and old-fashioned they seem.

What makes the old trailers so different is how focused they were on the narrative of the films advertised. This hits you right away in the voiceover. Whereas lots of trailers today -- maybe the majority -- have no voiceover at all, it seems like every trailer back then had voiceover, and a lot of it. These old voiceovers functioned like narrators, introducing you to the characters and giving you lots of exposition. In contrast, voiceovers in trailers today are spoken by a remote-sounding, Godlike man in vague, stereotyped phrases such as "In a world where...," "...one man...," etc. which set the scene and mood with as few words as possible. The clips in pre-'90s trailers, too, tell a story; they're loooong clips, all of uncut dialogue, all in order, mostly of the same length, going all the way up to the end of the film and often essentially giving away the ending. In contrast, trailers today show you lots of short, out-of-order clips of varied lengths, many of them atmospheric shots of setting, silent action, or even just text on a blank screen, and the clips containing dialogue are always edited down and compressed, creating more of a collage.

Here's a comparison: the upcoming Pineapple Express has a trailer that I love to watch over and over again because of the way it massages my mind's visual and aural pleasure center with its lovely rhythmic cutting while not taxing it with anything but the most basic evocation of narrative; contrast that to the relative clunkiness of the trailer of a similarly-themed movie from 1978. What a difference. And yet I'm sure that if someone made a new trailer for Up in Smoke, it could look just like Pineapple Express, because compared to trailers, the style of movies hasn't changed at all. It would also be funny to try cutting an old-style preview of Pineapple Express to see just how unenticing it could be made to look.

Anyway, basically, the people making the trailers figured out that what they were selling wasn't a story, but an experience of a story. And that's what trailers show you: an extremely heightened, compressed sense of what the full-length experience of seeing a movie will be like. And they work really well; movie trailers are like crack, and all human beings readily admit that they love the previews.

But in terms of the actual movie, people are there for the story, right? The importance of the story of a movie gets lots of emphasis from filmmakers, especially recently, in my experience. Seemingly all film schools aggressively proclaim that their curriculums are centered around "storytelling," and most screenwriters and directors emphasize how their main drive is to "tell a story.” It starts to sound a bit defensive – and with good cause. Because the vast majority of the movie-going public, I’m pretty sure, does not go to movies for stories; they go for the same thing they like about trailers – the experience, which is primarily the experience not of the story but of the alternate world for which the story is only a fourth-dimension framework allowing you to pass through that world in time.

But if you didn’t need a stable framework for the fourth dimension in a world – what then? Well, that’s what’s possible in virtual reality. And virtual reality is the direction we’ve been moving towards for a long time. It’s what goes on in the movie-franchise phenomenon, which allows you to experience a movie in multiple media – the film, books, websites, TV shows, theme parks, food, music, weddings, furnishings, clothing… – to the extent that you’re essentially participating in an alternate world. New electronic media, as well -- the internet, video games, even DVR and OnDemand to some extent – break down the artificial structure of time created by the story and open up untold new dimensions through which humans and their senses can travel. Interestingly, this surrender of the fourth dimension in media is coinciding with new advances in the exploration of multiple dimensions beyond the fourth in reality.

What’s happening is the implosion of fixed-time narrative in media and its replacement by experiences of other worlds in which we the audience create the narrative ourselves.

But wait. What happens when we get rid of the story?

I think bad things might happen. Bad, bad things.

Stories are what communicate meaning and truth. They’re normative. They’re stable. They provide reference points for comparison, standards. So when stories are completely eclipsed by experience, which is amorphous and amoral, we lose a way of examining and agreeing on central significances in life. Is it a coincidence that the most successful virtualesque video game, Grand Theft Auto, is about a chaotic and amoral world? No.

Not only do storyless media experiences dispense with frameworks for meaning, but they also create a very problematic illusion of free choice. In the phantasmagorical hyperreality of a Disney franchise or packaged-goods brand universe, we have the illusion of traveling into a new world, where we can try being ourselves in a different atmosphere. The problem is that this atmosphere is not a neutral playground for our senses; it is a highly fake fantasy designed expressly to sell us things. There is in fact a built-in message in these artificial universes, and the message is BUY ME. And this message gets across so successfully exactly because of the way it exists apart from narrative and time. A commercial, which is like a story, tells you one thing once. A world, which when very successful can get confused with reality, brainwashes you constantly.

Rethinking monogamy

I've been meaning to predict this for a while and putting it off, but since it's been showing up more and more in the news I thought I'd go ahead and put it out there. Basically, I think that non-exclusive sexual relationships are going to be getting more mainstream, and that this is going to have a huge impact on society.

The subject of nonmonogamy is back on my mind this week because it was featured in the winning essay in the NY Times's Modern Love College Essay Contest. It struck me as significant that, in choosing an essay about love in a contest specifically for young people and therefore really by definition specifically about "what's next," the Times settled on a piece that included such as this:

“The main thing,” he said, “is I don’t mind if she sleeps with other people. I mean, she’s not my property, right? I’m just glad I get to hang out with her. Spend time with her. Because that’s all we really have, you know? I don’t want her to be mine, and I don’t want to be anybody’s.”

At this stage, I guess, editors at the Times can put this stuff out there and say, "This is something young people are doing." But looking just a step ahead, what they're really beginning to say is, "This is what people are doing."

Part of the impetus for this is what I'm calling New Humanism -- a focus on our ever-growing understanding of intrinsic human psychological and biological needs as a guide for reforming our lifestyles. There's been a big increase in interest in trying to understand human sexual behavior in biological terms, which lately has taken the form of studies showing how sensory stimuli play a huge part in subconsciously influencing mate choice. Recently, for instance, there have been articles about how women's pheromones make them more attractive to men when they're ovulating (article) and how women are more attracted to men with deep voices (article). And many people are probably familiar with the "sweaty T-shirt experiment" from a few years back that showed women were more attracted to the armpit smell of men whose immune systems were different from theirs (article).

The growing awareness that so much of our sexual behavior seems to be subconsciously, biologically determined is beginning to spark questions about the extent to which our instinctive drives about sex invalidate our cultural norms regarding it. But most people are still pretty nervous about discussing this topic with reference to humans. The Times was able to approach the topic, a propos of the Spitzer scandal, with regard to animals, just hinting at the implications for humans (article). Slate went a little further on the topic of sperm competition (article). The anthropologist Helen Fisher is focusing directly on the question of what the human psychological predispositions are in the realm of sex and love and has written some cool books about it. Her basic opinion, which seems to be the preliminary consensus generally, is that humans are hardwired for long-term pair bonds -- on which they're hardwired to cheat.

I don't think that human pair-bonding or social monogamy will ever go away, because I do think it's what people are naturally predisposed to do and what they're happiest doing. However, I think that cultural norms are going to shift over the next few decades with regard to marriage, family structure, and romantic relationships in a way that will reflect at least a more open acknowledgment of the fact that lots of people want to cheat on their partners, and that lots of people do.

One change may be that the "serial monogamy" that is so often disparaged, yet is the most common love life model of young people, will become the accepted one. Serial monogamy, or something like it, is in fact what Helen Fisher thinks human psychology may be set up for, for the purpose of child-raising, with the infatuation that causes sex followed by the romantic love that leads to bonding, which is followed by the long-term attachment suitable for child-raising -- which then, after 4 years or so, at about the same time that children in primitive cultures reach a milestone of independence from their mothers (leaving the mothers in less need of help from the fathers), fades away unless another child is born to the couple. Of course, the lifestyle of a primitive culture is not that relevant in modern industrialized countries. What is relevant is the possibility that in an increasingly liberal social environment, people may be naturally drifting toward a more "natural" system of forming and dissolving multiple monogamous relationships over the course of their lifetimes. Currently the "serial monogamy" model gets a lot of criticism since it's a rather painful way of doing things under our current model of marriage and family, with its built-in reliance on parents sticking together, socially and financially, for decades. But if the current rates of divorce continue, which they probably will, it may be time to give up and tinker with the institution of marriage a bit for the sake of kids and their parents. Not sure how this would play out, but one idea is for couples to figure out theoretical child custody arrangements in case of divorce along with the financial plans they make in prenups (Op-Ed).

I also wonder what will happen with how our culture handles cheating. This is much more difficult. Even though the biological motives for preventing cheating aren't relevant anymore because of birth control, the psychological feelings of jealousy about one's partner cheating are extremely strong and will never go away, no matter how much the polyamorists try. The most pressing need in this area is to prevent the disease and violence that can result from cheating. But I also wonder whether gender-specific norms of cheating may develop, sort of along the lines of the "double standard" -- for instance, whether women may get a little more comfortable with men having sex with other women so long as they don't show them too much affection or support, while men may become tolerant of women getting affection and support from other men so long as they don't sleep with them. Of course, this system doesn't make any logical sense, since some of these women would have to be having sex and some of the men giving affection and support. Although, I guess this is kind of what already goes on with women who're close with gay men and men who sleep with prostitutes.

The media currently kind of doesn't know what to do with the few public figures, such as Will Smith and his wife, who are supposedly in an open marriage, who practice nonmonogamy. To me, it's astounding that Carla Bruni has been quoted saying, “I am faithful — to myself! I am bored to death by monogamy.” The current public reaction to stuff like this so far is basically denial, plus "Weird!" But I think we're going to start dealing with it a little more deeply soon.

Update 5/20: Looky here, an article about just this in the 5/26 NYMag: article

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.

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.

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

Shooting

I think going to shooting ranges as a hobby should be a new trend.

I'd thought this before but remembered the idea the other day when I saw that scene in American Beauty:

CAROLYN (cont'd): I was soooo stressed out.

LEONARD: Know what I do when I get that way?

Carolyn SITS UP for this, eager to learn from the master.

LEONARD (cont'd): I fire a gun.

And then they go to a shooting range and she loves it.

Apparently stressed-out bankers and lawyers have already discovered this hobby.  But what about all the young cool kids?  Why don't they try it? It's certainly a million times cooler than stupid overdone bowling.

And easier to do than you think!  For some reason -- perhaps because guns ARE FREAKING DANGEROUS -- I assumed that most shooting ranges were tucked away in backwoods-type places, inaccessible to major metropolitan areas.  But no!  It turns out that, if I wished to, I could go to the West Side Pistol Range ("conveniently located in the Flatiron District" (!!)) and fire a gun myself, today, because apparently "in the City of New York one does not need a permit to shoot a .22 caliber rifle."  Word!  

The only problem is, you probably aren't allowed to get drunk and then go.  That may be what's enabling bowling to continue to win.  In fact, that's got to be it.  But still -- I think it could catch on.

LEONARD: Oh, you have to try it. Nothing makes you feel more powerful.

My marketing idea

There's apparently this big problem where no one can figure out how to make money off of Web 2.0. I came up with an idea for this and I'm curious if anyone thinks it could work.

The problem is clearly that the old marketing paradigm (companies pay advertisers, who buy ad space from media, who show it to consumers, who buy the products advertised) is poorly suited to Web 2.0. The mass-market messaging of traditional advertising is just really clunky within the highly segmented realm of the internet. So far, marketers have been sticking to the old paradigm, tinkering with ways to insinuate mass-messaging into social networks, etc., in creative and sticky ways. But I think this is going at it from the wrong direction.

What if instead of changing how the ad space is used, marketers changed how the ad space was bought? Namely, why don't marketers start buying ad space from consumers instead of from media? This is already sort of what goes on when you watch TV episodes online on networks' pages and they make you watch a little commercial first: you agree to submit to advertising in return for the "payment" of entertainment. But the same idea could be expanded into an actual financial transaction between the company and the consumer. For example, marketers could pay MySpace and Facebook users to post ads for products they like on their pages. You can already be a "friend" of a product; but in this case, you would be a paid "friend." The catch would be that marketers would invent a new kind of spider to crawl social network pages and decide which people are the most popular and cool; these people would be paid more to post ads than other people. Similarly, on YouTube, the posters of videos that got the most views would get paid the most money for showing ads before their videos.

In other words, The Media would get cut out of the advertising loop. Instead of being providers of content, they would become providers of technology -- period. They would be paid by users, not advertisers. So, use of Facebook, YouTube, etc. would no longer be free. This transition from free to paid Web 2.0 would be similar to the transition from free T.V. to paid T.V. (cable).

This new marketing paradigm makes sense to me because it represents a true, complete adaptation to the user-created-content revolution. I'm not sure quite how it could come about, but I think it probably will.