Tuesday, June 26, 2007

answers for hippos

Hippo,

What you've said makes sense, and the trucker hat phenomenon encapsulates the velocity. This reminds me of Baudrillard's work on the hysteresis of the millennium:

This kind of acceleration by inertia, of the 'racing', the exponentiality of extreme phenomena, produces a new kind of event: strange, altered, random and chaotic events which Historical Reason no longer recognizes as its own. Even if, by analogy with past events, we think we recognize them, they no longer have the same meaning... Now, we are in a history which is being unmade - this is why they appear ghostly to us.
--from "Paroxysm: The End of the Millennium or the Countdown"

There are two ways to talk about fashion, first in the sense of personal style and second as an industry. Personal style today is defined by the lack of coherence you mention. Rather than how past decades were marked by particular looks, the new thing seems to be a mishmash of past artifacts, which, in their arrangements and knowing, decontextualized historical setting, are exciting. It's the 80's hippie renaissance cavewoman look, or a composite of every ten years since whenever and into the future. I don't think the speed at which things are co-opted makes the possibility for fashion--defined this way--impossible. The meaning just tends to be more individualized. That's what endures--not the clothes themselves. The fashion industry operates on seasonal trends and biannual shows. It's an old model; the clothes are supposed to last for a given amount of time. Trends like this summer's hippie thing and the mid-90's ankle boots for fall will appear ghostly to us as soon as they hit the stores.

The main exception to Baudrillard that I can think of comes from my East Village neighborhood, where tight black jeans have been cool for over thirty years. I'd argue that at least here, their meaning hasn't changed.

Another thought: unlike hippie pacifism, or even the brash nihilism of punk, we kids today don't have a generational ethos. (My mom once pointed out that if the hippies had one, they don't remember it. Even so!) Is there even a counterculture? I raged at my desk today. Anyway, it's easier to come up with very clear clothing-related signifiers when the youth culture has something to talk about. I saw Mama Cass-style caftans at a thrift store last weekend and just thought they looked cool, if not dated.