Looking at your social media activity and your Tumblr, in particular, it looks like you’re focused on propagating a certain kind of imagery--that is, people of color in classic styles. I suspect this is what “The Other 1950s” refers to. What should we make of this? What are you trying to say, if anything?
The tumblr is largely me digging a hole to research something, then tossing out little pieces of what I find for people to see. I do have a point, so there’s usually some trail of breadcrumbs to find.
It’s interesting--I’ve had art directors and creative directors ask me: ‘why is your tumblr so fragmented?’ But what they don’t realize is that it’s actually really concise. A tumblr is, at least in my estimation--people will use the platform for whatever they want--for sharing things about oneself and personal inspiration. On the flipside, tumblr makes it really easy to propagate the status quo. Ninety-percent of the brands out there look the same because they reference each other instead of having their own voice. It’s like those boilerplate mission statements I mentioned: take any handful of clothing lines, swap the labels, and you would never know the difference. A brand is supposed to have its own handwriting, and the people behind it should have the same. The stuff I put on my tumblr are genuine sources of inspiration.
This brings me to a weird shift in design and in the sociology of design, if you will. A lot of these younger cats say, ‘I want to make stuff that is just like that guy’s stuff but my version,’ or, ‘just like what he does, but my way.’ Because of this, there’s a ton of reference points that people don’t even bother to look at. They don’t care about what was actually going on in the eras they draw inspiration from. You always need to go to the root if you want to understand why shit was the way it was—what was happening economically and culturally.
Since you bring up the connection between style and economics/culture, to what extent can we make these connections today? If you look at photos of people before the total saturation of the internet, I think it’s pretty easy to infer from their clothing the culture or lifestyle to which they belonged. Can we still do this today, or have things changed?
Things have changed. The phrase you usually hear is, “the internet has created a level playing field.” And it has, but it’s also created a disconnect between real culture and its corresponding image. Here’s a story that speaks to this:
I was working at a skate shop in Hong Kong when this kid came in wearing a Misfits hoodie. Even his Vans had the crimson ghost on the toes and I got super psyched; he had the spiky punk hair and everything. I started talking to him in broken Cantonese with some help from my friend, Brian, asking: “do you like the Misfits?” He says, “yeah, yeah, yeah.” So I start playing some Misfits on the speakers, and the kid asks: “Brian, what is this? This is The Misfits?”
He didn’t know they were a band. His knowledge of The Misfits stopped at Lil Wayne on Hypebeast wearing their shirt with the gold tooth, so he just bought whatever he could that looked like that. This icon meant something to an entire generation--then, through blogging and reblogging and whatever else, it became yet another image among countless regurgitated images.
The kid was pretty bummed, so he bought a new sweatshirt.
The internet can’t be all bad, right?
It’s a double-edged sword. I know my friend’s kids who are both punks and ill breakers, which shouldn’t be surprising because both punk and hip-hop were popular around the same time and were about similar shit; both genres started on the street and a lot of these bands ran together in the 70s. But most people forget that, so the internet has helped kids make these kinds of connections.
“I think I just miss that old sense of discovery.”
At the same time, what usually happens is that people like what the guy with the most followers likes. Few do the research themselves anymore. There’s no digging, you just click from page to page and eventually you end up at Amazon or iTunes. You’d think the internet would make us more well-rounded, but both Facebook and tumblr deliberately heard people. They say, “Be in trend!” by constantly showing us what everyone else is talking about. This is a Huxleyan, Brave New World way of making us sheep.
I think I just miss that old sense of discovery. There used to be more room to develop your own style even if it fit into a larger aesthetic group. But now it’s more like a uniform because each thing comes pre-packaged. Even smaller companies will package outfits for you, which I think is making people lazy.
What we wear does not reflect music-based subcultures anymore. And some people would argue that it’s a good thing. Maybe they’re right.
Our cultural tendency, and this isn’t limited to fashion, is to appropriate and sample different cultural aesthetics, old and new. Contemporary music is very similar in this regard. That being said, where do we go from here? Are we trapped in a vicious circle, or should we still expect something genuinely new? If so, how do you envision this change coming about?
I think two things are going to happen, and this is the way history generally works. First we’re going to get full-on branded people (like in Idiocracy): the “7-11 guy,” for example. And as much as I like Uniqlo, you’re going to see it there.
Then, and this is the way history always works, someone starts something new. It’ll start small then, like a single-celled organism, split. And then split again. Streetwear happened like this. A bunch of kids around the world that were sick of The Gap and Ralph Lauren had a lot to say, politically and musically. These people gravitated toward each other, created an industry, and eventually became the status quo. This is the cycle.
That being said, I think the “traditionalists” will always be around—the skinheads, the mods, the rockabilly revivalists, goth kids, etc.. They will always be in their own worlds living as they always have.
