Friday, February 1, 2008

The Conquest of Cool

In the late fifties, boys and girls tuned in to coolness. Boys like me were groomed by older siblings. What were the fashions? Ducktail hairdo, Lee jeans, white t-shirts, Marlboros, black leather jackets and shoes with taps—all modeled from the now dominant media, television and movies. Think Marlon, Elvis and James Dean.













From Lead Us into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, by James B. Twitchell, Columbia University Press, 1999.
What separates the way we live now from earlier times is that the style leaders tend to be younger than the style followers. Once kids were the only ones with sufficient disposable time and money to consume, once advertisers realized that you sell to those who have not made brand choices, and once television became the primary medium of learning, trickle down reversed directions and became bubble up. As you gradually captured the machinery of consumption and the delivery of entertainment, groundswells passed through commercial culture. What started in the 1920s, chronicled by Fitzgerald as the defining aspect of the Jazz Age, has become the norm: upper and lower crusts sprung unpluggable leaks.

Never underestimate television. In print/magazine culture you show a picture of a debutante or royal beauty puffing on your cigarette, or washing with your soap, and social aspiration does the job of inflating the diffusion bubble. With movies, so much the better, simply insert a movie star. But television is different. It is programmed by those who don’t care about diffusion theory, and this audience doesn’t know top from bottom. As Seinfeld, showed, the changes now jump all over the place, George is not the usual avatar of fashion.

To be sure, modern fashion has always been willing to absorb sideways influence, the look of the street. Where would high fashion be without prostitutes and perverts? Think only of how successfully the cosmetic industry adopted facepaint and lipstick of streetwalkers. Where do you think short skirts and four-inch stilettos come from if not from the red light district? Over the last thirty years, fashion designers have also spent many hours in the fetishist’s closet. How else to account for all the corsets, pointy bras, rubber macintoshes, frilly underwear, leather and latex gear, body rings, and tattoos? These appropriations have been so masterly that most trendy dressers who have adopted them have no idea about the fetishistic roots of their fashion. Meanwhile, there are doubtless fetishists running around fretting that their magical objects have been drained of the magical power.



The height of chic is cool, and nothing is more cool than to look poor, downtrodden, and beyond style.

Body piercing, scarification, nose rings, lip rings, unmentionable rings, plus that old standby, tattooing, are not so much the signs of rebellion as of the colonization of the personal space left. Quick! Brand yourself before the worldwide conglomerated package goods company headquartered somewhere out in the American Midwest does it for you.

This kind of self-customizing is stunning, literally. It is on the edge. The epidermis, which the ancient Romans branded as punishment for disobedience (a stigma, literally a brand), has come full circle with self-stigmatization. In a world where second-hand smoke, sugar, saccharin, and asbestos are the hobgoblins, in a culture that spends part of its energy telling kids how great they are and the rest saying there is no room for them at the inn, in a commercial world in which adolescents can drive the car, but only to the clotted mall, it is not unreasonable that youngsters should turn to such rites of self-imposed initiation. Where is the risk of danger in a world of air bags, training wheels, and curbs on sidewalks? Such self-branding seems to say, “been there, done nothing, don’t care, on my own.”