'An electric belt adapts to Climatic Changes'
This video (ta to Kiri for the link) illustrates what the fashionable man and woman about town will be wearing in the 21st century. Of course, as discussed by IT and Limited Inc, the general uniform of fashionable folk, with slight adjustments according to social class (ie, shellsuits vs american apparel) is currently akin to a kind of adult romper suit. What, we must ask for the thousandth time, went wrong...
posted by owen hatherley at 1:51 pm
5 Comments:
The casual, markerless style, in the U.S. at least (brandless t-shirt, jeans, etc.) is a reaction, I think, against the similarly petit-bourgeois style of the 90s in which "personality" was channeled through increasingly ambiguous or empty signs of non-conformity--the vintage clothing nostalgia industry, body piercing, universalization of the four basic tattoos.
The frenzy for boutique differences, consumption of difference, could lead nowhere but the choice to refuse such markers of hipster capitalism.
But, of course, this is a mostly white, urban and mostly middle class phenomenon and much more marked among men.
So do you think it's some sort of No Logo residue...? Regardless, it seems to me the Scylla of piercings or the Charybdis of frumpiness...
I want an electric belt that adapts to Climactic Changes! Truly, that is the clothing choice of the future. And I bet it could be accessorized with pyjama ware!
About which - didn't pyjama ware originate among the bungalow set? In the Heart of Darkness, as I recall, all the traders traipsed around in their pjs.
Having been a knowing participant in the "American Apparel" fad, I can attest to the fact that, even though the frumpy togs ARE markerless, an AA wearer can always spot the AA clothing of another. It's a subtler version of a consumer status symbol, but it's a consumer status symbol nonetheless. Either way, AA's fad days are numbered, and I think we'll be seeing a lot more "green futurism" of the NAU sort very soon... https://www.nau.com/homepage/index.jsp
I haven't read the Klein book but I'd say that, consciously or not, it's something like that. A realization that in these sterilizing spaces one can't purchase personality, only its spectacular pointers that hide a terrifying sameness. Maybe the pyjamization (a term that suggests a collapse between inside/outside) is a kind of honesty. Not that I would ascribe any kind of political value to it.
American Apparel is an amazingly pernicious little company, a kind of capsule version of everything that is wrong with consumption-as-activism politics.
Green shops are the new exploitation! If you're not up to date, a quick google search should reveal some information about their innovative forms of exploitation.
Not to mention the mind-blowingly bald-faced sexism.
Bringing the sweatshops home!
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