Trendiness and Timelessness

An intermission

Hi Dear dear reader,

There’s no podcast this week, but I’ll be back soon. This is just a little intermission.

Making a story every other week has been super fun and exhausting: I’ve made eight so far this year and I’m on the hook to make eight more. Those are in the works and I think you’ll really like them. But man they take a long time.

So I’m catching my breath and catching up on future stories. And in the meantime, these are just some thoughts. From me to you.

To think about fashion is to think about time, and your place in it. To decide how to dress really amounts to a simple, binary decision: are you a part of your time, or are you not?

I promise this is not a loaded question. It sounds like a veiled way of asking “are you a mindless sheep, or are you cool and genuine?” The latter option, duh, seems to be the correct one. As Thomas Frank gets at, in his seminal The Conquest Of Cool, “the rebel” is perhaps the most agreed-upon marketing trope since the invention of creative marketing. In the 50s, products were sold to help you keep up with the Joneses. Consumers were made to buy things to fit in. Starting from the 60s, inspired by youth culture, products were supposed to make you unique and different. Now you bought new things to stand out from the Joneses. You don’t want to be like everyone else! And hip young marketing executives knew it:

lol this was to sell you Gin

So there came to be this tired insistence that “I don’t follow trends.” Or the idea that being trend-resistant is de-facto the superior way to be. This has taken on an even heavier morality with its environmental implications: that if our clothes are somehow timeless, we will keep them longer and stop buying new clothes so often. Maybe that’s true, maybe not. But for the sake of this thought exercise, let’s take volume and frequency out of it. Pretend this is about one given garment. One that you intend to wear a lot. Let’s say you need a new shirt. One shirt. Which do you choose:

One is obviously more “timeless” than the other. It is saying less. It says almost nothing. The other is a little more expressive, a little more of its time. Even just slightly. So which do you choose?

If you play this game, you will be shown an image, and asked to guess what year it was taken. It’s surprisingly difficult. And some of the only clues are the clothes that people are wearing. Ok, sometimes the cars are also telling. But mostly it’s through clothes. They are how we wear the outside culture on our skin. Unless you opt out. Or try to.

These are both from 1996

In her excellent Trend Forecasting textbook, Lorynn Divita puts forth that, when it comes to clothing, there are two kinds of “cool.” One kind changes and evolves constantly (Madonna, David Bowie), and another kind stays constant (Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen). The interesting thing, Divita notes, is just because the later kind doesn’t change, it doesn’t make them exempt from the world. Even if they don’t change, the tastes around them do. In her career, sometimes Patti has been in style, and sometimes she was not. That’s just the way taste cycles work, whether or not you chase them. And if you don’t follow the style of the moment, it requires a true comfort with the discomfort of sometimes being uncool. And sometimes being misunderstood.

When the Oculus first opened in 2016, I respected the daring nature of it. But it felt so trendy. It is bright, shocking white, lined with glass, and it is also entirely shocking white inside. To me, it looked like an Apple Store. Or the big white glassy SF MoMA extension that just opened. Or the big white glassy Broad Museum that had opened the year before. It looked like any number of big white glassy buildings from that period. So my critique was that I thought it would look dated. My critique was that it wasn’t timeless. I said this to a friend of mine who is an architecture critic. And then he turned and said a simple thing that totally changed my life.

What’s wrong with something looking like it’s of its time?

I don’t think he knows that that offhanded remark rejiggered the way I think about aesthetics. I now see the oculus as a relic of a certain era of American history. A product of a time when the future was thought to be clear and gleaming bright. When purity and transparency were equated with luxury. And yeah, it’s dated. But I love it for that. The same way I love looking at embarrassing pictures of me from 2009 where I am wearing gold lame American Apparel leggings. It’s fun to reflect one’s era a bit.

And it’s fascinating to simply feel that passage of time. To see yourself as a reflection of the whole world. It’s also more than a bit cringey.

The brilliant Eugene Rabkin sent me this classic essay by Roland Barthes, pitting the fashion designerAndré Courrèges against Coco Chanel. It’s a standoff of trendiness against timelessness.

Fashion (as we conceive it today) rests on a violent sensation of time. Every year fashion destroys that which it has just been admiring, it adores that which it is about to destroy; last year’s fashion, now destroyed, could offer to the victorious fashion of the current year an unfriendly word such as the dead leave to the living and which can be read on certain tombstones: I was yesterday what you are today, you will be tomorrow what I am today. Chanel’s work does not take part at all—or only slightly—in this annual vendetta.

Basically, at this time, Chanel was more or less making little tweaks and variations to a fairly steady look.

While Courrèges played with new designs and materials that had never been seen before. I mean this was some FAR OUT stuff.

As Barthes writes of the two designers:

So, on one side we have tradition (with its internal acts of renewal), and on the other innovation (with its implicit constants); here classicism (albeit in sensitive mode), there modernism (albeit in mundane mode). We have to believe that society needs this contest, because society has been ingenious at launching it—at least for the last few centuries—in all domains of art, and in an infinite variety of forms; and if we now see it clearly breaking into fashion, it is because fashion too is also an art, in the same way as literature, painting and music are. ..And all this suggests perhaps a way of understanding the Chanel-Courrèges contest (if at least you have no intention of buying either Chanel or Courrèges). As part of this broad everyday culture in which we participate through everything we read and see, the Chanel style and Courrèges fashion set up an opposition which is much less a matter of choice than something to be interpreted.

And the cool thing is, with clothing, this is all something we each have to interpret for ourselves. When we wake up and decide to what degree we will reflect our time. That’s the thing- it’s (of course) not a simple yes or no. Because there is no way to truly escape your wider encompassing context (even the plain white t has design decisions) and there’s no way to truly escape yourself and your individuality. The only way to remain comfortably trapped— in your person, in your time, and in your clothes- is to just enjoy the tango. And see it as less a matter of choice than something to be interpreted.

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Other Articles Of Interest

• Utopian fashion from Georgia (the country) in the 90s

• Chainmail (or rather faux-chainmail) is popping up. Which makes sense, when you think that people are wearing silver, sheer see-through stuff, and fun textures. I mean look at the latest collections from Doublet and Lanvin

• But I like these weirdo ren faire ones from the 20s and I am so happy for you, whoever bought this chainmail-knit dress.

If I may be achingly earnest for a moment, I just wanted to thank you, to everyone who has written in, donated, or even just listened. And really, the donations help me a lot- I’m very moved by them. But most importantly, you make me believe that the work I do is part of an ecosystem. If the way I spend my days helps the way you spend your days to help others through their days…. then that’s what its all about right?

Ok. Until soon. Thanks for being so understanding.

~Avery