Fashion is the democratized art of the masses. It is also the most symbol-heavy. When you’re selling such aspirational commodities, the goal is not to simply sell the clothes, but the lifestyle that goes with it.
This sort of trickery really wouldn’t work if the audience didn’t implicitly understand that meaning can be communicated non-verbally, that objects can also be symbols. Because the connection between the function of the actual product and what it symbolizes can be almost arbitrary, pretty much anything can have a designer label on it.
Like old tribal affiliations, in our modern consumerist society, the logos and labels function like modern ‘group affiliations’, and serve to signal status and exclude the ‘other’. ‘Exclusive’ labels are only exclusive because they exclude - otherwise they’d be ‘inclusive designer labels’. How many of those have you heard of?
In ancient Greece, Canaan was known as Phoenicia, ‘Land of Purple”, because it was the centre of the ancient Tyrian Purple dye industry. Produced from the mucus of certain species of marine molluscs, it took 12,000 of these creatures to produce just 1.5 grams of dye. Only the very very rich would afford to wear purple cloth. Purple implied you were wealthy, connected, and important.
Purple was the original bling.
We talked a lot about technology and how it will bring about change, and we also talked a lot about the future of cool. But as the discussion incited by Anders presentation shows, sometimes we are so stuck in our own culture that it becomes difficult to envision things being different at all, so how credible really are our predictions of the future if we can’t even fathom how things once were in the past?
Technological change drives social change, but many forecasters failed to address social change not because they had a stake in the status quo, but simply because they were embedded in the culture of their times - an unquestionable, unchanging given. Ideas of the future from the past often tell us more about the past than the future.
See, Popular Mechanics sees great advances in materials and manufacture, but no change in the role of the housewife.
But they couldn’t have, right? Networking site, peer-to-peer commerce, blogging and online dating are all changing the way we interact, meet, do business, live, and love - our social culture.
As Arthur C. Clarke would argue, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The only successful prediction we can make about the next 50 years will be that as technology becomes more integrated into our lives, our culture will change just as dramatically.
Cool and Sex.
Does being cool get you laid, or does getting laid make you cool? This is definitely one of those ‘chicken or the egg’ things.
In any case, this quote by John Waters (if it is indeed by John Waters, you never know with these text-superimposed over an image deals) defines cool as something that makes you sexually attractive and distills it down to a means for social change.
Is there really any way to use cool in this manner anymore? In this day and age of manufactured and commodified cool, it seems that the power to dictate what is cool and what is not cool remains out of the grasp of the common people. Obviously you have a choice in what you buy, but your tastes are influenced by what you see, and your choices are limited to the options available, so like I said, it’s difficult to escape the feedback cycle of “buying into cool”. But the internet for the most part is largely free from this sort of in your face commodified cool. Don’t get me wrong, you can still see commodified cool online whenever someone who does buy into commodified cool states their opinion, but the point I’m trying to get at is that the internet itself, is not inherently geared towards commodified cool. At least, not yet.
Facebook, for example, is mostly devoid of advertisements, and almost all of the content you see on facebook is user generated. Say what you want about facebook and the downfall of society, but the truth is it (and really, most of the internet) is one of our last remaining bastions of freedom and mediums for social change.
If a large movement of people decided to try to make books cool again by not having sex with people who don’t read books, as suggested by John Waters, whatever social change it actually enacts can only be greatly compounded by the power of the internet. Funny pictures and interesting stories easily garner tens of thousands of likes within the short period of days on Facebook. If used properly, it could be a huge agent of change! I just wish our efforts and energy weren’t spent on things so pointless as the web 2.0 equivalent of your grandmother’s favorite chainmails.
A generic manifesto template for your own personal movement:
1. We, the Undersigned, have a unique and important Big Idea; an idea that will change the world.
2. We, the Undersigned, will think of a nifty and memorable name for our Big Idea, probably ending in -ism.
3. We, the Undersigned, will promote the Big Idea loudly and without compromise, for we believe it is the only valid thing worth doing.
4. We, the Undersigned, will do our best to discourage and discredit opposing views, for they are plainly wrong, and it is obvious at least to us that our Big Idea is the answer to everything from high art to the price of cauliflower.
5. We, the Undersigned, will put people’s noses out of joint, but sacrifices must be made, and anyways it is your fault for not understanding the Big Idea because you’re either too old, too educated, too bourgeois, too uneducated, too stuck in your ways, too unintelligent, too comfortable, or just don’t know what’s good for you.
6. We, the Undersigned, will then fall out amongst ourselves due to different interpretations of the Big Idea, and bitter infighting will ensue.
7. We, the Undersigned, will then split up amidst mudslinging and recriminations, go our separate ways, and become part of the group mentioned in Paragraph 5 that the next group of young punks will react against.
Signed:
_________________________________________________
Quoted from Cult-ure by Rian Hughes. Figured it was an interesting, if not hilarious take on cool from the inside.
In some ways, isn’t that how we define cool? Or at the very least, classic cool? People who just can’t be bothered to care, be it about societal restrictions, or the opinions of people around them. People who are truly free because they are not restrained by the constant fears and worries that dominate our daily lives. Fear of dying, fear of failure, fear of social ostracism, fear of not being loved, etc.
But ‘the system’ wants you to live in fear. In fact, the argument could be made that it runs on fear. Fear sells. Classic cool is all about the fearless.
I recently read about an extremely fascinating movement occurring in the Congo called Le SAPE, or Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes (Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People for you English speakers). Members of Le SAPE, called Le Sapeurs, adhere to a strict professional and moral standard while cultivating a flamboyant and impeccable style based on dandies of French origin. What’s more, they are based in slum communities throughout the Congo. A few of their axioms:
- A Congolese Sapeur is a happy man even if he does not eat, because wearing proper clothes feeds the soul and gives pleasure to the body.
- A real Sapeur needs to be cultivated and speak fluently, but also have a solid moral ethic: that means beyond the appearance and vanity of smart, expensive clothing there is the moral nobility of the individual.
- When the Sapeur expresses himself through the harmony of his clothes, he is returning his admiration to God.
- A Sapeur does not shed blood. Your clothes do all the fighting for you, otherwise you are not fit to be called a Sapeur.
So what we have here is a subculture not unlike the hipster in that their values are almost entirely concerned with presentation of external appearances. People talk all the time about bringing back the era of the gentlemen, the era of class, but if this is all being classy is, I don’t see the point.
“We are now in the middle of a long period of shuffling away. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam attributed the dramatic post-war decline of social capital—the strength and value of interpersonal networks—to numerous interconnected trends in American life: suburban sprawl, television’s dominance over culture, the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the disintegration of the traditional family. The trends he observed continued through the prosperity of the aughts, and have only become more pronounced with time: the rate of union membership declined in 2011, again; screen time rose; the Masons and the Elks continued their slide into irrelevance. We are lonely because we want to be lonely. We have made ourselves lonely.”
“Lanier and Turkle are right, at least in their diagnoses. Self-presentation on Facebook is continuous, intensely mediated, and possessed of a phony nonchalance that eliminates even the potential for spontaneity. (“Look how casually I threw up these three photos from the party at which I took 300 photos!”) Curating the exhibition of the self has become a 24/7 occupation. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the Australian study “Who Uses Facebook?” found a significant correlation between Facebook use and narcissism: “Facebook users have higher levels of total narcissism, exhibitionism, and leadership than Facebook nonusers,” the study’s authors wrote. “In fact, it could be argued that Facebook specifically gratifies the narcissistic individual’s need to engage in self-promoting and superficial behavior.””
“Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.”
I’d recommend you read the whole article. It’s fascinating stuff.
So we often discuss the topic of the overt sexualization of females in todays culture. But there seems to be a growing trend of women “learning to embrace their own sexuality”. Whereas in days of old the only place you could see a stripper pole was in those dark dank and dust corners of town where the junk and refuse of society chose to pay tribute to their dark desires, nowadays there are aerobics classes based around teaching a woman how to properly pole dance.
If sexualizing is a woman is a way to oppress them by constantly reminding them that they are mere objects of desire, then is not this counter-movement of women embracing their own sexuality, of women learning how to use their bodies and their movements, attitude, personality, vocabulary and locution to manipulate the desires of men simply a way to reset the status quo? To tilt the tides of gender inequality, the power struggle that has resonated through generations upon generations of women who still earn but $.75 to the man’s dollar.
If women are sexualized to oppress them as objects of desire, are women who learn to use their sexuality to manipulate men not oppressing them as animals who are no more in control of their desires than their desires are in control of them?
It’s a two way street folks. Perhaps instead of trying to swim against the current, women should try to go with the flow, piggybacking on the slipstream created by the misogynistic cultural norms until eventually they find a way to come out on top.
And I think I’m speaking on behalf of most of my fellow man when I say that sometimes, it’s nice to have women on top. ;)
Cool and Happiness.
Most people in the world aspire to be happy, and they take actions which they think will lead them to a state or experience conducive to being happy. These actions take the form of many different pursuits, such as the pursuit of love, the pursuit of money, the pursuit of fame. Cool is something people pursue, and they believe that it will bring them happiness as well, but be it classic cool or cool in the broader sense, the happiest people never seem to be cool at all!
Perhaps cool appeals to a deeper, more complex desire. Perhaps a desire of cool requires an understanding that happiness is perhaps not the ultimate desireable state. Or perhaps those who chase for cool are just blindly chasing after secondary pursuits such as popularity and acceptance without acknowledging that to be cool might be a state which doesn’t necessarily lead to satisfaction and long term fulfillment.
So what’s the deal? Is being happy cool?
On the subject of memes, creativity, originality, and remixing.
There is a lot of hubbub going on about how the movie Hunger Games stole it’s original idea from a Japanese movie made in 2000 called Battle Royale. They both share the core theme of human hunting. Needless to say once you go beyond that basis they do touch on wildly different subject matters.
But the idea of human hunting as some sort of sport, has been around for longer than you think. In 1924, Richard Connell wrote a short story called The Most Dangerous Game, in which a big-game hunter becomes the game when he finds himself being hunted by a rich aristocrat after finding himself stranded in the Caribbean. A sort of inversion on the sort of big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America which was fashionable with the wealthy Americans of the 1920s.
But if you look back even further…about 4000 years further, you see that Mr. Connell wasn’t exactly the pioneer of this sort of arena based human-hunting meme either. Ever heard of the Legend of the Minotaur? As the story goes, King Minos of Crete had waged war with the Athenians and was successful. He then demanded that, at nine-year intervals, seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls were to be sent to Crete to be devoured by the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster that lived in the Labyrinth created by Daedalus.
Perhaps you’re right. There is no more new ideas to be had. Nothing original to be created anymore. But I know for a fact that there are people out there watching Hunger Games who don’t know about Battle Royale. And to a pragmatist, because they’re enjoying it just as much, the artistic value of the work is unquestionable. I also know people who BECAUSE they’ve seen Battle Royale, appreciate Hunger Games as a new twist on an old meme. I don’t see this remixing of ideas to be bad at all, regardless of whether or not people remember.
