PoSo: The Trend to End All Trends

ASK: The Ask a Stylist Blog, 2010

Once upon a time, fashion trends represented privileged knowledge. Today, in the age of hyper-accessibility, consumers shuffle through fashion identities noncommittally. What role will trends play in the future, when their inherent social meaning is so diluted as to be interchangeable?

Post-structuralism in fashion

Structuralism is a study of underlying structures. It's the name given to a philosophical discourse focused on the connections between things. Post-Structuralism, or Deconstructivism, responds to structuralist theory by denying that anything exists independently of the structure that defines it. Nothing has an objective, inherent meaning.

Contemporary French philosopher and post-structuralist Jacques Derrida uses the concept of différance to examine meaning. The heart of differance is that understanding anything requires understanding what it isn't. It's the idea that we define something by our understanding of all the things that are different from it. Différance can be used as a sort of don't-know-what-you-have-until-it's-gone lens. It’s a mechanism for imagining the difficulty of understanding the formal characteristics of black in a world without white. It implies the difficulty of assigning social characteristics to physical characteristics in a world where everyone looks exactly the same.

(source: http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/786/always-already/)

The process of defining something by its opposite, a definitive part of post-structuralist philosophy, exists in Zen Buddhism, and is a conclusion drawn from quantum mechanics as well. In Buddhism, all is connected; there is no objective self or independent meaning inherent to any being.

In the creepy echo filter of mind-warping quantum mechanics, a principle popularized as the "quantum enigma" similarly states that no event can be observed without changing it by observing it. According to the principle of the quantum enigma, you can't know for sure what an atom looks like when it's not under a microscope, in the same way that you can't know what your best friend says behind your back, or what a tree sounds like if it falls when nobody's around. The observer is included in the observed.

This is important to our understanding of post-structuralism in fashion, because by post-structuralist fashion, we mean fashion that finds meaning by instigating a visual conversation with the very things that it isn’t. This can be seen in the wow-power of an icon blond going brunette, and in the rule- breaking redefinition of trends that attends the replacement of your go-to black cardigan with a pink one.

Hyper-accessibility and the form forum/emporium

Searching out ways to wear a particular trend used to involve finding people wearing it. Hunting them down, checking them out, sharing their geography, breathing their air. Or, at least, physically searching for products. In a library copy of Vogue, in fifth grade, I saw a photo fashion spread, with big rubber boots and short denim shorts on a girl hopping rocks in a pond. This image became for me the epitome of clever and functional fashion. I didn't know where to get rubber boots like the ones I’d seen, period. There was nothing to Google it with. They weren't at the mall, or in the Delia's catalog; no one I knew had them. I saw a pair of Wellington boots for the first time several years later; they were being used decoratively in a gardening tool display at a Smith & Hawken store, where they gave me the contact information for the brand Hunter. They only came in green, and only in men's sizes.  They were shipped internationally from Scotland, which was a big deal.

Ten years ago, to be the first girl on the block wearing, say, striped stockings, you had to know how to acquire them. It wasn’t enough to know how to use them to enhance your style. You had to have been to a place where the novelty wasn't novel. Today it's easier; we can acquire products at the same venues that disseminate knowledge of trends. Successful emporiums of form are also forums on form. This has always been true, to some extent, of catalogs and storefronts, but the aggregation of fashion trend knowledge into single sources that contain

1) information about which items constitute a certain style, and

2) access to those items

represents a new age of hyper-accessibility. Anyone with the base level of fashion awareness and literacy sufficient to read about a trend online and type it into a search engine can take part in that trend. Clothing no longer represents privileged knowledge; its only meaning is subject to interpretation and rapid change.

Clockwise: The form forum/emporium at work. (Source: http://www.americanapparel.com/rsaphss.html?cid=203)

Click to buy. (Source: http://www.whattowear.com/#q/I-have-a-tough-time-finding-the-right-bra-to-fit.-I-have-up-several-
ye/12997 ) Social learning. (Source: http://www.amazon.com/Women-Stripes-Stockings-Various-Colors/dp/B00350ZSBS/

ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=apparel&qid=1282114880&sr=1-4)

Any mechanism for acquiring a product can be viewed as an emporium. Catalogs, websites, swap shops and sisters’ closets—all types of emporiums. An emporium functions as an access point to the meaning we give objects and forms, letting us embody a product's meaning by acquiring it. Today's online emporium has also become a forum for the exchange of ideas, a venue where trends unfold. The emporium defines the product through an accrued history of usage suggestions, improvement recommendations, and masturbatory anecdotes that shape the product's function and give it new social associations. This transfer of information, and development of meaning, is only possible with the hyper-accessibility of products via searchable online clearinghouse emporiums.

Sample Paths to Fashion Acquisition:

I. The classic way attaches privileged knowledge to a product.

1. GO to a niche hangout.

2. OBSERVE PRIMARY SOURCE FASHION IN CONTEXT on the street. Tease trends from raw data. Draw your own conclusions about who wears what.

3. ACTUALLY WALK INTO a retail store. Browse products shoulder to shoulder with people already wearing them. See how people are working the things they're buying into their individual styles, and what kind of people they are.

II. The Efficient Way strips products of their practical meaning.

1. ACCESS TEXT AND IMAGES in magazines and on websites.

2. OBSERVE FILTERED FASHION INFORMATION FROM SECONDARY SOURCES available as close to home as the computer on your lap or the magazine on your kitchen table. See how celebrities are working your favorite trends, and check out street fashion abroad.

3. GO ONLINE and search for the trends you like best. View a conglomeration of similar product options side by side. Choose from the same wide selection of products accessible to anyone who searches online for the same trend.

As enjoyable as it is to wax nostalgic about analog trendspotting and its rigid social castes, secondary sources are important, too. The neatly packaged briefings found on websites and in magazines organize the diversified fashion world into photojournalistic collages of trends in action. The creators of secondary sources adeptly scavenge for and disseminate hard-to-come-by trendformation, securing an indispensible role in the imaginings of the resourceful and the curious.

http://www.menuism.com/restaurants/yaffa-cafe-new-york-201532/images/8485

http://guestofaguest.com/nyc-fashion/bela-lugosis-far-from-dead

http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/fashion/galleries/trend_alert_thigh_high_boots/

trend_alert_thigh_high_boots.html

http://playbyplay.vox.com/library/posts/tags/russian+vogue/

http://www.like.com/search?btnSearch=all&searchText=striped_stockings

As information about trends becomes increasingly accessible, products become more accessible, too. Now that heightened accessibility of fashion products has made the specialized knowledge they required obsolete, the social codes we assign to trends are interchangeable. All that's left is a constant redefining of what's in and out of style. This deconstruction of meaning has spurred a proliferation of homemade modifications to store-bought clothes and a general reassignment of meaning from one fashion object to another. When pink is the new black and brunettes have more fun, the meaning we assign to fashion objects and forms is diluted and eventually dissolves.

I donated some of my old outfits, and essays about them, to a show at the Cornell Costume Collection Gallery called Street Style: An ethnographic study of fashion subcultures. Denise Green, fashion theorist and curator of the event, stocked the Costume Collection's display cases with Juicy sweatsuits, post-punk denim, and DIY shirts painted with Eminem lyrics, in an interdisciplinary study of the social meaning given to current fashion trends. She also made a documentary about meaning assigned to trends that screened at the Street Style opening, called Temporary Clash for Momentary Satisfaction. In describing the social groups defined along aesthetic boundaries, the project traced reactionary fashions from punk rock studs and spikes, up through do-it-yourself alterations and vintage re-appropriation. These are all response mechanisms intended to expand the clothing options at our disposal, though only reassigning meaning to slight variations of existing fashions. (Video links!! An early version of must-see Temporary Clash is available through the Cornell Costume Collection. I also recommend Denise's film for her MS in Textiles about fashion re-conceptualization at Burning Man, Somewhere in Between, and her short film collaboration about clothes at roller derbies, Fifty-Fifty.)

How hyper-accessibility impacts object meaning

The dilution of social meaning assigned to trends is made apparent by the re-appropriation of fashion objects, and by the reassignment of meaning from one object to another. Blondcore icons can go brunette and back, borrowing mercurially from a selection of conflicting identities. Nicole Richie, after dying her hair brown at the end of last year, stated “I feel smarter already.” She was “ready for a change.” She acknowledges the distinction in social meaning between blond hair and brown, almost as if it's a charming anachronism, in an allusion to her ability to choose between two hair colors, a freedom that dilutes the meaning assigned to both. Even blondcore deity Princess Superstar had a brunette stint. Cameron Diaz, Jessica Simpson, and other blonds who just couldn't get any blonder turned un-blond around '06-'07, in keeping with the post-structuralist abandon that dilutes iconography by attributing its meaning to its opposite.

(sources: http://amiestreet.com/music/princess-superstar/bad-babysitter-12inch/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strictly_Platinum )

(source: http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/snippets/issue15 )

Icon blonds Simpson, Diaz and Richie. (Sources: http://www.simpsonwatch.com/brunette-or-blonde/;

W magazine via http://revue.idnes.cz/cameron-diazova-se-svlekla-pro-magazin-w-fdn-/sex.asp?

c=A061107_121116_sex_web; http://nicolerichie.celebuzz.com/page/2/

In a dramatic break from my understanding of everything I'd previously read and written about fashion, the person who introduced me to the concept of différance also told me he’d decided that his clothing should ideally convey as little information as possible. He was on to something. The more we successfully convey with our clothing, the more we say unintentionally. Why should observers have it so easy, that they can size us up in a glance? Conveying a certain image encourages all who behold it to draw conclusions based on a constantly changing style vernacular, soliciting us to remain attuned to its fluctuating meaning. Only the unfashionable discourage conclusions about their lifestyle being drawn from their style of dress, and they only barely manage to. Have all trends become so ubiquitously attainable as to represent meaningless instances of preference rather than lifestyle signifiers? Is it time to favor clothing solely based on intrinsic merits like silhouette, ease of motion, attention to detail, and sentimentality, rather than symbolic qualities?

Juliet Schor, economist, sociologist, longtime Harvard professor and author of such classics as Do Americans Shop Too Much? interprets the transience of trends as a ploy to boost retail sales, an ugly sprocket in a political machine that thrives on consumption. The new PVC shoes architect/designer Gaetano Pesce made for Melissa carry a DIY component that prods consumers to take up arms against dictated trends. These customizable booties may have been designed by an Italian for a Brazilian company, but there’s something authentically American about buying a specific (not inexpensive, not particularly nice looking) shoe for the purpose of buying the right to cut it up, and calling it a victory for personalization. It is a step in the right direction, if it will allow sticklers for trends to step outside their comfort zone, with a pair of shoes that says, Hey look, I carved this design with my own hands. The victory of function over form will owe much to the trend toward DIY because doing things yourself allows customization and increased utility. But using customization to make a social statement is passé, because social statements are cheap.

Schor’s Y2K compilation. (Source: http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1358)

R. Pesce told the New York Times, “…we can give people something that is half done and ask them to finish it.”

(Source: Melissa Shoes via http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/shape-shifters/?ref=t-magazine)

The extent to which our clothing speaks for us can be said to have peaked at Viktor & Rolf’s Fall 2008 Ready to Wear show, which took the typography trend, on the rise since we first glimpsed the ubiquitous popularity of t-shirt slogans, to a histrionic point of no return. That Spring, Martin Margiela had laid the groundwork for conceptually elegant fashions with little to say about the wearer in a runway line that begged a distinction between substance and absence. These runway trends are complementary to futuristic street fashions sacrificing sub-cultural identity to romance formal features. The most forward-thinking way to express ourselves through fashion is, of course, not to.

The noisy past: Viktor & Rolf Fall 2008 (source: http://www.style.com/fashionshows/powersearch?

designer=design_house236&event=show1702 )

R. A vision of the future: Maison Martin Margiela (source: http://www.style.com/fashionshows/powersearch?

designer=design_house114&event=show1622)