NIGHTCLUB
CLOTHES
Pants: Jeans by 7, Slimmy Fit, bought new
Jacket: Boss blazer, thrifted
Cardigan: Ben Sherman, thrifted
- name unknown, Quito, Ecuador, 1984
- The Back Alley Nightclub, Calgary, Alberta, 2000s
CLOTHES
Pants: Jeans by 7, Slimmy Fit, bought new
Jacket: Boss blazer, thrifted
Cardigan: Ben Sherman, thrifted
The club in Quito felt like this. Table service and sunken booths, an elevated dance floor. Less formal, more vodka and tequila than wine, No Al Pacino. Nothing faux Grecian or machine-gunny that I can recall.
South American 80s Discos
I am 14, I'm in Quito, I'm at the disco. I can’t tell if I’m in ecstasy or whether that breathlessness I feel is sheer terror. Three years before I’m attending Rosemont Elementary in Regina, and now I’m surrounded by debonair Quiteño gallants a decade or two older than me, and the smoke from the cigarettes of Latinas mixes with their perfume and it’s intoxicating, I’m intoxicated: there are bottles of vodka and rum and tequila on the table, and I must be drunk, but this is the first time I’ve been in a nightclub, and I am too excited to get drunk.
We’re seated in a sunken, circular booth, and the disco ball dance floor adjacent is full, and I’d dance if I knew how to, but the only dancing I’ve ever been taught is square dancing, because welcome to 1980s Regina. I haven’t been taught how to do any of this. My parents, guardians and teachers—all fundamentalists, evangelicals or both—have sought to protect me from the world. What they’ve done is leave me insatiably curious and utterly defenseless. But the people I’m with aren’t like that. It’s an older brother of a friend we’re with, him and all of his friends, and I've never been more secure. No one in the club would dare lay a hand on me, even look at me funny. I’m like a cultural mascot, and I feel safer with them than I do with any of the Christians.
Not that the Christians don’t protect me. I’m thoroughly protected—in the same way prisoners are protected by their captors. Me being out at the disco is no mean feat. First of all, the punishment, if caught, is expulsion. Secondly, I’ve actually had to escape, just to be there.
The dorm in which I live is a three-storey brick building. Both the main front door and the rear fire exits are locked at night. The windows allow no egress. The building itself is on a compound surrounded by an adobe wall, about seven feet high. Like most mud walls here the top is encrusted by shards of glass encased in cement. Both of the compound’s main gates are locked. An Ecuadorean guard, with pistol, circulates the campus.
It’s lights out at ten p.m. in my dorm and the first challenge is the hardest. Stay awake until one a.m. Can’t set an alarm, because it would wake my roommate, who is not in on the plan. The promise of a nightclub, of girls, of rebellion is strong. At the appointed hour I slide myself out of the covers and walk downstairs in the dark. It's pretty nerve-wracking walking by the dorm parents' room.
I walk to the weight room, which no one ever uses, a lot of barbells and unused machines. I've planned this out and this room isn't a random selection. Water pipes from upstairs pass through this floor before joining the pipes outside. They are housed in a small panel in the wall. I've got in there before, but it's tricky. There is just enough space in the wall for me to fit. Being skinny for once is working out just swell. Once I’m in, I shimmy myself up between the brick wall and the hard plastic pipe until I can reach the latch. It opens, and a panel facing outside swings open. I climb through it. I am now outside the building.
I close the panel, but leave it unlocked to repeat the journey in reverse when I return before dawn. A short run to the shadows of the wall. Getting over a wall with glass on it is easy once you’ve done it a few times. Even with arms resistant to pull-ups, no trouble really. Mostly the broken glass serves as a visual deterrent. Safely down on the other side, I run to the corner we’ve agreed upon in advance, and I wait.
At 1:30 my two friends—both of them Americans with 50% Latin DNA—stride into view. One’s the son of American military stationed at the embassy, the other’s the handsomest Ecuadorean who has ever lived (honourable mention goes to Tupac, Inca Tupac. Dude was a stud), a beautiful bad boy from a family of means, who likes to “borrow” his dad’s pistol and a full clip when we’re out. “Don’t worry,” he reassures us, “I’d never kill anyone. Shoot them in the leg.” The night of the escape—one of three I managed—we’re five kids aged fifteen or younger (two girls from the non-Christian high school have joined us) attached to a party of young adults. We join a party in full swing.
Kirsty MacColl once said, as explanation for her music's move into Latin territory, that the gaudy covers of her dad’s mariachi records gave her this idea that Latin Americans had more fun. She says that once she heard the music—its promise of good times all the time—she became convinced of it: “I think that's where I got it into my head that anybody who spoke Spanish was having a better time than me” (Spencer, 2000). She wasn't not right. Quito nightlife was totally exciting like the cover of a mariachi record.
The abandon I felt in the night club that night, the socially sanctioned recklessness of it, the civilized descent into hedonism that everywhere surrounded me was life lived so intensely that nothing in North America ever compared. Two things: 1) By "North America" I mean Regina, where I lived in a duplex-bungalow and loved the lord; 2) To reiterate: all night clubs in Latin America are not better than all Canadian nightclubs. This is a one-on-one comparison I'm attempting here, so much I am not wishing to extrapolate broad cultural conclusions from the analysis of my own childhood memories. Alright, let's add a number three just to be sure: 3) There is no such thing as a Joy Measurement Device that anyone can or should want to use to invalidate the happiness experienced subjectively by others. Example: it is entirely possible that regular patrons of the now defunct The Back Alley night club in Calgary—a place I regard as the nadir of all clubs ever in recorded history—recall it as their own, unique jouissance generator. Although I doubt it, based on this online review:
I am 14, I'm in Quito, I'm at the disco. I can’t tell if I’m in ecstasy or whether that breathlessness I feel is sheer terror. Three years before I’m attending Rosemont Elementary in Regina, and now I’m surrounded by debonair Quiteño gallants a decade or two older than me, and the smoke from the cigarettes of Latinas mixes with their perfume and it’s intoxicating, I’m intoxicated: there are bottles of vodka and rum and tequila on the table, and I must be drunk, but this is the first time I’ve been in a nightclub, and I am too excited to get drunk.
We’re seated in a sunken, circular booth, and the disco ball dance floor adjacent is full, and I’d dance if I knew how to, but the only dancing I’ve ever been taught is square dancing, because welcome to 1980s Regina. I haven’t been taught how to do any of this. My parents, guardians and teachers—all fundamentalists, evangelicals or both—have sought to protect me from the world. What they’ve done is leave me insatiably curious and utterly defenseless. But the people I’m with aren’t like that. It’s an older brother of a friend we’re with, him and all of his friends, and I've never been more secure. No one in the club would dare lay a hand on me, even look at me funny. I’m like a cultural mascot, and I feel safer with them than I do with any of the Christians.
Not that the Christians don’t protect me. I’m thoroughly protected—in the same way prisoners are protected by their captors. Me being out at the disco is no mean feat. First of all, the punishment, if caught, is expulsion. Secondly, I’ve actually had to escape, just to be there.
The dorm in which I live is a three-storey brick building. Both the main front door and the rear fire exits are locked at night. The windows allow no egress. The building itself is on a compound surrounded by an adobe wall, about seven feet high. Like most mud walls here the top is encrusted by shards of glass encased in cement. Both of the compound’s main gates are locked. An Ecuadorean guard, with pistol, circulates the campus.
It’s lights out at ten p.m. in my dorm and the first challenge is the hardest. Stay awake until one a.m. Can’t set an alarm, because it would wake my roommate, who is not in on the plan. The promise of a nightclub, of girls, of rebellion is strong. At the appointed hour I slide myself out of the covers and walk downstairs in the dark. It's pretty nerve-wracking walking by the dorm parents' room.
I walk to the weight room, which no one ever uses, a lot of barbells and unused machines. I've planned this out and this room isn't a random selection. Water pipes from upstairs pass through this floor before joining the pipes outside. They are housed in a small panel in the wall. I've got in there before, but it's tricky. There is just enough space in the wall for me to fit. Being skinny for once is working out just swell. Once I’m in, I shimmy myself up between the brick wall and the hard plastic pipe until I can reach the latch. It opens, and a panel facing outside swings open. I climb through it. I am now outside the building.
I close the panel, but leave it unlocked to repeat the journey in reverse when I return before dawn. A short run to the shadows of the wall. Getting over a wall with glass on it is easy once you’ve done it a few times. Even with arms resistant to pull-ups, no trouble really. Mostly the broken glass serves as a visual deterrent. Safely down on the other side, I run to the corner we’ve agreed upon in advance, and I wait.
At 1:30 my two friends—both of them Americans with 50% Latin DNA—stride into view. One’s the son of American military stationed at the embassy, the other’s the handsomest Ecuadorean who has ever lived (honourable mention goes to Tupac, Inca Tupac. Dude was a stud), a beautiful bad boy from a family of means, who likes to “borrow” his dad’s pistol and a full clip when we’re out. “Don’t worry,” he reassures us, “I’d never kill anyone. Shoot them in the leg.” The night of the escape—one of three I managed—we’re five kids aged fifteen or younger (two girls from the non-Christian high school have joined us) attached to a party of young adults. We join a party in full swing.
Kirsty MacColl once said, as explanation for her music's move into Latin territory, that the gaudy covers of her dad’s mariachi records gave her this idea that Latin Americans had more fun. She says that once she heard the music—its promise of good times all the time—she became convinced of it: “I think that's where I got it into my head that anybody who spoke Spanish was having a better time than me” (Spencer, 2000). She wasn't not right. Quito nightlife was totally exciting like the cover of a mariachi record.
The abandon I felt in the night club that night, the socially sanctioned recklessness of it, the civilized descent into hedonism that everywhere surrounded me was life lived so intensely that nothing in North America ever compared. Two things: 1) By "North America" I mean Regina, where I lived in a duplex-bungalow and loved the lord; 2) To reiterate: all night clubs in Latin America are not better than all Canadian nightclubs. This is a one-on-one comparison I'm attempting here, so much I am not wishing to extrapolate broad cultural conclusions from the analysis of my own childhood memories. Alright, let's add a number three just to be sure: 3) There is no such thing as a Joy Measurement Device that anyone can or should want to use to invalidate the happiness experienced subjectively by others. Example: it is entirely possible that regular patrons of the now defunct The Back Alley night club in Calgary—a place I regard as the nadir of all clubs ever in recorded history—recall it as their own, unique jouissance generator. Although I doubt it, based on this online review:
- There is a certain Feng Shui you feel when you walk in to this place, and it's pretty much a violation of all five senses. 1. The place looks like shit. 2. The music played is consistently the top 40 every night, and it's played so loud that your ears will ring on the ride home GUARANTEED. 3. The liquor is watered down and the cheapest possible shit you can get. 4. You are afraid to touch things because everything is sticky and dirty. 5. The smell is a lethal combination of sex, cigarettes, Axe Body Spray, and fear (Hayden H. ).
Double Indemnity, James Cain claimed, was based on a news story he'd been told by a former editor, about a printer who'd accidentally put an 'f' instead of a 't' in the word 'tuck.' The sentence was, "If these sizes are too big, take a tuck in them." Hauled before his boss, the printer confessed, "you do nothing your whole life but watch for something like that happening, so as to head it off, and then, Mr. Krock, you catch yourself watching for chances to do it". (Brookes, 2017, p.99). Pictured above is a QSL card in which the Quito printer has "accidentally" substituted Miss September, from a promotional pin-up calendar, for a photo of a missionary lady and radio host named Mildred Reed. It was the second time the same printer accidentally confused a card for a religious radio station with a pin-up model: the first time it was the Catholic station that got it. HCJB was the radio station up the road. Quito was selected for its altitude, ideal for radio transmission. The international success of the broadcast "Voz of the Andes" sent missionaries and money pouring into the country. The Alliance Academy was founded in 1929.
Inside the Alliance Academy dorm, in Quito, where my parents sent me. I can't tell if it's the second or third floor in this clip, and there was no "Guys" sign during the years I lived there, from 1982 until 1987 (not continuously; I was expelled then readmitted then expelled again). I moved in for the first time a month after my 12th birthday; before Christmas I will have been dragged up and down that hallway wearing nothing but my underwear by five or six boys ranging in age from 13 to 17. The puss-filled scabs on my knees and elbows are gruesome and so I ask for some medical supplies from the school nurse, who reports the injuries to my "dorm father." He tells me he is disappointed I didn't come to him first, that's what family does. I write a letter to my parents, who live in Chile. I write "The Dorm Sucks." That is the letter in its entirety. All outgoing mail must meet approval. My letter does not. My dorm father tells me receiving a letter like this would allow the Devil a "foothold" in my parents' life. He asks if I want to help the Devil. Then he takes me downstairs to one of the sound-proofed music practice rooms and punishes me with a paddle. He says that "sucks" contains sexual connotations and it's sinful to use words that refer to lewd acts. Not ideal conditions for learning what a blowjob was, but what are you going to do.
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Holy, I dreaded soccer tryouts. I started getting queasy about them weeks before they began. I knew I wasn't going to make the team, but knew there was no way I could not try out without suffering an irreversible loss in social standing amongst my peer group. So many laps, so liquid the sound of ten kids hurling. We were the Spartans (not pictured), and the long-term coach of the team was an angry, sadistic drill sergeant of a man, and one of my unpublished novels is about him. It's called The Coach of Santiago Christian, and really it is definitely the worst thing I've ever written, although there's a few reasonably fine passages of description in that one on account of the real Coach's face is etched in my memory, an image of pure terror, forever (and that's only slightly hyperbolic).
Getting in touch with my parents was a cinch. The internet had yet to be invented, there was one telephone per floor, in the dorm parents' office, and we were never allowed to call our parents (so we didn't disrupt God's work) unless it was a grave emergency. Outgoing mail was censored. All I needed was to learn how to drive manual transmission, steal a car, teach myself Spanish in a jiffy, and procure provisions for a not at all unsafe solitary, pre-teen roadtrip through the Andes. Only four days if I drive continuously and just keep my eyes open, should be a blast, no sleep 'til Pichidangi, y'all!
Mi barrio es primero, man: Down slope on Mt. Pichincha, in the Iñaquito neighbourhood of Quito, Ecuador: unregulated, religious orphanages in foreign countries-not all they're cracked up to be.
The escape route: In each of those central columns of bricks, at ground level, is an external panel that opens from a latch on the inside. The pipes from the floors upstairs run through it. |
The clubs I attended in Quito were discos, indigenous versions of the discos of 1970s New York City. Disco might have died back home, but it was not dead in Quito.[1] In Regina, before I moved south, tough kids at my elementary school wore “Death Before Disco” shirts. It was a metal neighbourhood in a metal town. Except all my friends’ parents owned Boney M’s Nightflight to Venus (1978) and we spun “Rasputin” all the time. We loved disco. We said we hated disco. We were in Grade 4.
In our rush to invent the next thing, our culture frequently forgets the things that once made us happiest. When newness is a value superior to happiness, but which in itself is supposed to have become synonymous with that which it has replaced, consumers must believe themselves to be happy. Indeed it is possible to do so because happiness, as a category detached from newness and acquisition, is no longer an experience for which they have a name or a precedent. This is the single catastrophe Walter Benjamin perceives in the violently propulsive speed that prevents the present from understanding the past quickly enough. The system society created now exceeds the species’ ability to slow it down. The speed of constant change in the name of the new is the same wind that continually creates a supposedly new future, a future that looks suspiciously the same as the one before. “The storm,” Benjamin writes, famously, in his Ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, “propels [The Angel of History] into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (1969, p.258). Superficial, rapid change to mask continual substantive degradation.
Whit Stillman's Last Days of Disco (Sloss & Stillman, 1998) serves as an important reminder that our culture’s necessary obsession with newness extends not just to music itself, but also to the spaces devoted to dancing. Disco gave way to a lot of things, but as a space devoted to the pursuit of jouissance, almost every space to replace the disco has been a degraded, inferior version of the original postmodern nightclub. This monologue from that film explains the cognitive dissonance that exists between those who experienced disco firsthand, and those who know it only from its latter-life caricature:
But disco is dead. That it lived on for several years in an undead state is undeniable. As Will Straw observes, the death of disco did not result from a lack of popular interest in disco music, or disco clubs. Disco died because it ceased being a place of subcultural expression centred around the expert and unique taste of idiosyncratic Djs, and became instead a place where the music played was dictated by radio stations, as homogenous as the dance floor: “The truly revealing moment in disco’s decline came when researchers found that people who listened to disco radio stations shared the same dispositions as those who listened to Beautiful Music stations: both wanted an unobtrusive, unchanging soundscape as the backdrop to their daily lives” (Straw, 1995, p. 250).
Because the degraded mass version of disco continues to dominate the collective popular imaginary, the return of real disco seems improbable on any significant scale. Stillman isn’t a false prophet, and he didn’t even really get the call wrong. But theories of cyclical culture (everything old will become new again) mostly didn’t anticipate the seismicity of the widespread individual global adoption of a single communications technology.
[1] As did other things North Americans forgot about. The first concert I ever attended (as always, at the risk of expulsion from school and country) was by an Ecuadorean Pink Floyd cover band called Musica Fuera de Moda. It was brilliant. No crowd control and such a crush of bodies that oxygen was in short supply. The cover band became Ecuador’s pre-eminent 80s new wave band, Umbral, which scored a minor Latin American hit with “A Donde Vas?” in 1988, (coincidentally the last year I lived in Quito). (Umbral, n.d)
In our rush to invent the next thing, our culture frequently forgets the things that once made us happiest. When newness is a value superior to happiness, but which in itself is supposed to have become synonymous with that which it has replaced, consumers must believe themselves to be happy. Indeed it is possible to do so because happiness, as a category detached from newness and acquisition, is no longer an experience for which they have a name or a precedent. This is the single catastrophe Walter Benjamin perceives in the violently propulsive speed that prevents the present from understanding the past quickly enough. The system society created now exceeds the species’ ability to slow it down. The speed of constant change in the name of the new is the same wind that continually creates a supposedly new future, a future that looks suspiciously the same as the one before. “The storm,” Benjamin writes, famously, in his Ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, “propels [The Angel of History] into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (1969, p.258). Superficial, rapid change to mask continual substantive degradation.
Whit Stillman's Last Days of Disco (Sloss & Stillman, 1998) serves as an important reminder that our culture’s necessary obsession with newness extends not just to music itself, but also to the spaces devoted to dancing. Disco gave way to a lot of things, but as a space devoted to the pursuit of jouissance, almost every space to replace the disco has been a degraded, inferior version of the original postmodern nightclub. This monologue from that film explains the cognitive dissonance that exists between those who experienced disco firsthand, and those who know it only from its latter-life caricature:
- Disco will never be over. It will always live in our minds and hearts. Something like this, that was this big, and this important, and this great will never die. Oh for a few years, maybe many years, it’ll be considered passé and ridiculous. It’ll be misrepresented and caricatured, and sneered at or worse—completely ignored. People will laugh about John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, white polyester suits, platform shoes, and going like this [abruptly, the speaker simultaneously raises his right hand diagonally while lowering his left hand diagonally along the same trajectory—mimicry of an misappropriated dance move], but we had nothing to do with those things, and still love disco. Those who didn’t understand will never understand. Disco was much more and much better than all that. Disco was too great, and too much fun, to be gone forever; it’s got to come back someday. I just hope it will be in our own lifetimes. (Sloss & Stillman, 1998)
But disco is dead. That it lived on for several years in an undead state is undeniable. As Will Straw observes, the death of disco did not result from a lack of popular interest in disco music, or disco clubs. Disco died because it ceased being a place of subcultural expression centred around the expert and unique taste of idiosyncratic Djs, and became instead a place where the music played was dictated by radio stations, as homogenous as the dance floor: “The truly revealing moment in disco’s decline came when researchers found that people who listened to disco radio stations shared the same dispositions as those who listened to Beautiful Music stations: both wanted an unobtrusive, unchanging soundscape as the backdrop to their daily lives” (Straw, 1995, p. 250).
Because the degraded mass version of disco continues to dominate the collective popular imaginary, the return of real disco seems improbable on any significant scale. Stillman isn’t a false prophet, and he didn’t even really get the call wrong. But theories of cyclical culture (everything old will become new again) mostly didn’t anticipate the seismicity of the widespread individual global adoption of a single communications technology.
[1] As did other things North Americans forgot about. The first concert I ever attended (as always, at the risk of expulsion from school and country) was by an Ecuadorean Pink Floyd cover band called Musica Fuera de Moda. It was brilliant. No crowd control and such a crush of bodies that oxygen was in short supply. The cover band became Ecuador’s pre-eminent 80s new wave band, Umbral, which scored a minor Latin American hit with “A Donde Vas?” in 1988, (coincidentally the last year I lived in Quito). (Umbral, n.d)
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I always feel like somebody’s watching me
There is an air of the rote in every recitation of what by now must measure as a litany of mobile technology’s evils: bad for brain development, killer of public space, giver of personality disorders heavy on the narcissism, making what Hjorth (2011, p. 443) refers to as living “the real through the lens of the reel,”[1] seem like the natural way to live: we’ve heard it all before, and really, at this point, so what? Whatever the cellphone has created is now the natural—as is, it would seem, the perpetual panic over new technologies. Chicken Little seems to be the default predilection of a certain sort of person when confronted with rapid change.
Yet, there’s no way to achieve certain a priori knowledge of how any technology of communication will change both the individual user, and also the society in which a new technology gains rapid, universal adoption. Change will happen, but not necessarily in the manner of areas of previous technological change: precedents here are not necessarily useful for future modelling. While eschewing the uncritical scapegoating of new technologies, one must also avoid the reactive response of suggesting that technologies change nothing, for clearly, as Raymond Williams (1974/2003, p.2) observes, they do:
It is not reactive, anti-technological hysteria to observe that the confluence of three simultaneously occurring conditions has caused a mass decline in both the quality and quantity of places for public revelry; and that social behavior has had to change—not because there was a social problem the cellphone was intentionally invented to solve (“You know what would be great? If only there was some way we could bequeath the world a never-ending supply of fresh new pictures of red-eyed, drunk people in bars cheersing sloppy shot glasses!” & “Whenever I pass out in my own puke, I want that moment to exist publicly forever!”), but because the reality of the technology’s mass adaptation made an immediate transformation of public behaviour necessary. Media and cultural analyses must not fail to interrogate the possible ways that changes in technological modes of reception enter into the meaning of the texts themselves. A portable camera disguised as a phone, containing mobile device applications that allow instantaneous one-click public dissemination, has been disastrous for socially sanctioned hedonism.
For sure, it’s the new natural. But it wasn’t always. The idea of unseen eyes on you was once a trope of the horror film invented (and perfected; hole-in-one) by Hitchcock and Psycho (1960). Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (Gordy, 1984, track 1) is about a guy afraid to take showers with Michael Jackson singing back-up because Psycho scared him too much. Sam Rockwell is the celebrity most people say I resemble. I do not know if the two Rockwells know each other. There's just one thing I wish I'd been told earlier: confusing Normans Rockwell and Bates is the opposite of a power move. Hall & Oates’ “Private Eyes” (Hall, Allen, Allen & Pash, 1981) is an ode to unwanted voyeurism. Alan Parson’s “Eye in the Sky” (Parsons & Woolfson, 1982, track 2) is not about surveillance drones but it is more fun to pretend that it is. Even in this golden age of beards, Alan Parson's beard cannot be rehabilitated.
Michel Foucault (1980, pp.104-105) argues that perpetual surveillance is a necessary function of a society where actual power is created not by extracting wealth from the earth’s natural resources; but by extracting the maximum amount of labour from the maximum number of human bodies. This type of power is “constantly exercised by means of surveillance” (1980, p. 104), which Foucault famously theorized as panopticism: “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1978/1995, p. 201). It is not necessary to actually monitor the minutiae of millions of people. All that’s required is for each of us to believe that there is always a chance of being observed, of getting caught. The powerful retain the ability to wield force, but need to do so far less frequently for: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (1978/1995, pp. 202-203). Canonical, for sure, but no longer entirely applicable: the speed of technological change has been such that at least two distinct iterations of power seem to have occurred since Foucault's thesis:
1) everyone watching everyone else.
2) Everyone is obsessed only with our own selves.
This new technological convergence delegates the responsibility of watching to its users: not them watching us; rather us watching us (on behalf of them). This smartphone provides individuals the power of the state, the destructive power of perpetual mass magnification of the minor faults of others: the magnification makes them major, the intensity of the focus, the duration—not the mistake itself. Why would anyone want to go out in public, get a little tipsy, get a little flirty—knowing that there is no guarantee that a certain moment captured in a certain way could ruin your reputation, your life really, forever? In a society in which the electronic self must be cultivated more carefully than the non-mediated self, savvy individuals understand that the best way to protect the electronic self is to not put one’s corporeal self in situations difficult to control. The result is narcissistic agoraphobia.
Thus, it is not reactionary theory so much as general observation to note that the cutting edge technological convergence preferred by youth (the smartphone) is the best thing that the 1870’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Canada never invented. If that is progress, it’s not the sort of progress for which I had heard anyone advocate ever—at least not prior to the mass adoption of the technology itself. Bohemian youth culture in Canada has always included public space and tolerance for intoxication of (just about) any substance at (just about) any level. These spaces (clubs, bars) have also been important spaces for sexual exploration with the obvious and obviously critical caveat: that one’s individual pursuit of pleasure, and/or enlightenment (an intentional rejection of enforced adolescent moral or religious training), causes no harm to anyone else. Consumption of liquor or drugs wasn’t compulsory: abstinence, from sex as well as from drugs, were common. Whatever your choice, the assumption was that there were public spaces where rules of privacy prevailed. The club was a public space in which the freedom to temporarily loosen or abandon personal inhibitions was a primary raison d’etre. In a culture without a carnival tradition, it is not a shift in time that provides the socially sanctioned release from the restrictive rules of everyday life, it is a shift in space.
[1] The narcissism of needing instantaneous, new bursts of group approval from social media makes every event or moment less important than the manner of its recording and electronic sharing. The voluntary abdication of privacy in both private and public spaces is equally transformative: it accepts as natural the state of being always surveilled.
There is an air of the rote in every recitation of what by now must measure as a litany of mobile technology’s evils: bad for brain development, killer of public space, giver of personality disorders heavy on the narcissism, making what Hjorth (2011, p. 443) refers to as living “the real through the lens of the reel,”[1] seem like the natural way to live: we’ve heard it all before, and really, at this point, so what? Whatever the cellphone has created is now the natural—as is, it would seem, the perpetual panic over new technologies. Chicken Little seems to be the default predilection of a certain sort of person when confronted with rapid change.
Yet, there’s no way to achieve certain a priori knowledge of how any technology of communication will change both the individual user, and also the society in which a new technology gains rapid, universal adoption. Change will happen, but not necessarily in the manner of areas of previous technological change: precedents here are not necessarily useful for future modelling. While eschewing the uncritical scapegoating of new technologies, one must also avoid the reactive response of suggesting that technologies change nothing, for clearly, as Raymond Williams (1974/2003, p.2) observes, they do:
- All questions about cause and effect, as between a technology and a society, are intensely practical. […] These are not abstract questions. They form an increasingly important part of our social and cultural arguments, and they are being decided all the time in real practice, by real and effective decisions. (Williams, 1974/2003, p. 2)
It is not reactive, anti-technological hysteria to observe that the confluence of three simultaneously occurring conditions has caused a mass decline in both the quality and quantity of places for public revelry; and that social behavior has had to change—not because there was a social problem the cellphone was intentionally invented to solve (“You know what would be great? If only there was some way we could bequeath the world a never-ending supply of fresh new pictures of red-eyed, drunk people in bars cheersing sloppy shot glasses!” & “Whenever I pass out in my own puke, I want that moment to exist publicly forever!”), but because the reality of the technology’s mass adaptation made an immediate transformation of public behaviour necessary. Media and cultural analyses must not fail to interrogate the possible ways that changes in technological modes of reception enter into the meaning of the texts themselves. A portable camera disguised as a phone, containing mobile device applications that allow instantaneous one-click public dissemination, has been disastrous for socially sanctioned hedonism.
For sure, it’s the new natural. But it wasn’t always. The idea of unseen eyes on you was once a trope of the horror film invented (and perfected; hole-in-one) by Hitchcock and Psycho (1960). Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (Gordy, 1984, track 1) is about a guy afraid to take showers with Michael Jackson singing back-up because Psycho scared him too much. Sam Rockwell is the celebrity most people say I resemble. I do not know if the two Rockwells know each other. There's just one thing I wish I'd been told earlier: confusing Normans Rockwell and Bates is the opposite of a power move. Hall & Oates’ “Private Eyes” (Hall, Allen, Allen & Pash, 1981) is an ode to unwanted voyeurism. Alan Parson’s “Eye in the Sky” (Parsons & Woolfson, 1982, track 2) is not about surveillance drones but it is more fun to pretend that it is. Even in this golden age of beards, Alan Parson's beard cannot be rehabilitated.
Michel Foucault (1980, pp.104-105) argues that perpetual surveillance is a necessary function of a society where actual power is created not by extracting wealth from the earth’s natural resources; but by extracting the maximum amount of labour from the maximum number of human bodies. This type of power is “constantly exercised by means of surveillance” (1980, p. 104), which Foucault famously theorized as panopticism: “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault, 1978/1995, p. 201). It is not necessary to actually monitor the minutiae of millions of people. All that’s required is for each of us to believe that there is always a chance of being observed, of getting caught. The powerful retain the ability to wield force, but need to do so far less frequently for: “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (1978/1995, pp. 202-203). Canonical, for sure, but no longer entirely applicable: the speed of technological change has been such that at least two distinct iterations of power seem to have occurred since Foucault's thesis:
1) everyone watching everyone else.
- As Jean Baudrillard (2011) discusses, once the absence of privacy became so normalized that it ceased to frighten anyone, once we came to enjoy our own unique “carceral niche with video walls” (p.114), a new form of control was needed to ensure that constant connection did not accidentally end up sowing the seeds of a new, communal rejection of the normality of a life spent working and consuming. Power remains internalized so long as our non-working hours are spent, not in organization against power, but immersed in the eternal geyser of excess information and entertainment always available from one screen or another.
- [T]oday the best way of neutralizing, or cancellating someone is not to know everything about him, it is to give him the means of knowing everything about everything—and especially about himself. You no longer neutralize him by repression and control, you neutralize him through information and communication. You paralyse him much better by excess than by deprivation of information, since you enchain him to the pure obligation of being more and more connected to himself, more and more closely connected to the screen, in restless circularity, and autoreferentiality, as an integrated network. (Baudrillard, 2011, p.114)
2) Everyone is obsessed only with our own selves.
- Egotism, not only socially sanctioned, but socially commanded is the final product. Enhancing the electronic self has become the narcissistic necessity of modern life. Technology that constructs promotion of the self as the greatest social good serves to ensure that the intellectual and creative energy of citizens at leisure is voluntarily dissipated in fragmentary and electronic, public celebrations of a carefully constructed and self-managed ideal self.
This new technological convergence delegates the responsibility of watching to its users: not them watching us; rather us watching us (on behalf of them). This smartphone provides individuals the power of the state, the destructive power of perpetual mass magnification of the minor faults of others: the magnification makes them major, the intensity of the focus, the duration—not the mistake itself. Why would anyone want to go out in public, get a little tipsy, get a little flirty—knowing that there is no guarantee that a certain moment captured in a certain way could ruin your reputation, your life really, forever? In a society in which the electronic self must be cultivated more carefully than the non-mediated self, savvy individuals understand that the best way to protect the electronic self is to not put one’s corporeal self in situations difficult to control. The result is narcissistic agoraphobia.
Thus, it is not reactionary theory so much as general observation to note that the cutting edge technological convergence preferred by youth (the smartphone) is the best thing that the 1870’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Canada never invented. If that is progress, it’s not the sort of progress for which I had heard anyone advocate ever—at least not prior to the mass adoption of the technology itself. Bohemian youth culture in Canada has always included public space and tolerance for intoxication of (just about) any substance at (just about) any level. These spaces (clubs, bars) have also been important spaces for sexual exploration with the obvious and obviously critical caveat: that one’s individual pursuit of pleasure, and/or enlightenment (an intentional rejection of enforced adolescent moral or religious training), causes no harm to anyone else. Consumption of liquor or drugs wasn’t compulsory: abstinence, from sex as well as from drugs, were common. Whatever your choice, the assumption was that there were public spaces where rules of privacy prevailed. The club was a public space in which the freedom to temporarily loosen or abandon personal inhibitions was a primary raison d’etre. In a culture without a carnival tradition, it is not a shift in time that provides the socially sanctioned release from the restrictive rules of everyday life, it is a shift in space.
[1] The narcissism of needing instantaneous, new bursts of group approval from social media makes every event or moment less important than the manner of its recording and electronic sharing. The voluntary abdication of privacy in both private and public spaces is equally transformative: it accepts as natural the state of being always surveilled.
Back in Basic: Calgary's The Back Alley.
Dancing like everyone is watching forever
While it is fun to blame technology for the naturalization of narcissistic agoraphobia (only the sickest of the sick find their fun on sticky dance floors), it seems equally likely that people stopped going out because clubs started sucking. Clubs got tacky. Clubgoers got gross. Pick-up artists and their pupils leering through smoky red light. (By pupils do I mean their eyes, or their students? Maybe both—let’s let it ride). Dancing became less about transcendental euphoria and more about humping someone's leg. The club that plays “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (Curtis, Hook, Morris, Sumner, 1980, track 1) will have different rules than the club that plays “Pony,” by Ginuwine (Garrett, Lumpkin & Mosley, 1996, track 2). The club that plays “Love Will Tear Us Apart” after “Pony” is obviously the best club in the world. If we discount technology from the equation we are left with some variation on this thesis:
Yes to all of that. But some of the decline points to technological causation: the universal, sudden collapse of public spaces does not seem to be purely coincidental with the rise of mobile mediated entertainment and a generation slogan, “Netflix and Chill.” It seems likely that the decline of night clubs has also been caused by a sensible unwillingness to risk public intoxication in a space which is supposed to be public (but private in public), but which is no longer. Public spaces are now hyper-public spaces. They are public beyond the space and time of the original occurrence. The technological apparatus in which most of our daily life now unfolds transforms the quotidian into a high wire act. Technology has deprived us of the freedom to make mistakes.
Dancing like everyone is watching forever
While it is fun to blame technology for the naturalization of narcissistic agoraphobia (only the sickest of the sick find their fun on sticky dance floors), it seems equally likely that people stopped going out because clubs started sucking. Clubs got tacky. Clubgoers got gross. Pick-up artists and their pupils leering through smoky red light. (By pupils do I mean their eyes, or their students? Maybe both—let’s let it ride). Dancing became less about transcendental euphoria and more about humping someone's leg. The club that plays “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (Curtis, Hook, Morris, Sumner, 1980, track 1) will have different rules than the club that plays “Pony,” by Ginuwine (Garrett, Lumpkin & Mosley, 1996, track 2). The club that plays “Love Will Tear Us Apart” after “Pony” is obviously the best club in the world. If we discount technology from the equation we are left with some variation on this thesis:
- This change was volitional. Its origins are in a broad social consensus that existed prior to the introduction of the technology. The smartphone drastically reduced the need to seek entertainment in public spaces. Our society was ready for a break from dirty dancing, shots with cheeseball names, VIP lounges and Djs with snapbacks. The smartphone may have accelerated change already in progress. It did not cause it.
Yes to all of that. But some of the decline points to technological causation: the universal, sudden collapse of public spaces does not seem to be purely coincidental with the rise of mobile mediated entertainment and a generation slogan, “Netflix and Chill.” It seems likely that the decline of night clubs has also been caused by a sensible unwillingness to risk public intoxication in a space which is supposed to be public (but private in public), but which is no longer. Public spaces are now hyper-public spaces. They are public beyond the space and time of the original occurrence. The technological apparatus in which most of our daily life now unfolds transforms the quotidian into a high wire act. Technology has deprived us of the freedom to make mistakes.
Johan and I
I'd say like the first twenty five times I brought up Club 8 in casual conversation I was met with an S Club 7 joke. I don't know why. It's not a joke: what is the punchline-that you can count downwards from ten, even without using your hands? That's I Love Lamp territory, cease and desist that shit.
The 26th time I tried to sell a friend on Club 8, I was pitching a new Arts editor at The Calgary Straight (a short-lived attempt at expansion into Alberta by The Georgia Straight). My pitch had just been to review the album, a couple hundred words. Already that was pushing it because free weeklies exist to sell tickets and shift product: Club 8 was never going to play Calgary. They were obscure. Their entire public in Canada I'd estimate in the double digits. Their Cds were released on their own label, Labrador Records. No store in Calgary then stocked that label. I'm not sure who stocks Labrador in Vancouver presently. Doesn't even matter because Club 8 still feels like a mail order band. The minimalist aesthetics of twee and indiepop have always existed in relation to their production by obscure, one-or two-person record label operations, organizations too small, often, to afford expensive production or access advanced distribution networks. The internet has simply made the pre-existing economic model of indie—mail order—easier to do. (Schultz, 2014). To reiterate, I am not advocating a nihilistic rejection of all new art and culture. Buy new and shop online by all means. Just try and mix it up, you know?
Implausibly, the new Arts editor was Michael White. White authorized not just a review, but a Club 8 feature interview. This surprised me. The prospect of talking to Johan also terrified me, the same way God feels when he's expecting a call from Bono. Please note that I am not really comparing myself to God: I just wanted to make fun of Bono before I forgot and here seemed like as good a place as any to tell you that the quote I chose for my Grade 12 high school yearbook is, "You broke the bonds/ and you loosed the chain/ carried the cross, all my pain/ but I still haven't found/ what I'm looking for" and yes, obviously: if I had known Bono was going to turn into Bono I'd have gone in a different direction.
The phone interview got off to a terrible start.
I told Angergård that I thought Spring Came, Rain Fell, the band’s fourth album, which had just been released, would obviously be the best record of the year, probably in any genre, maybe even of all time.
“But it’s only February!” he exclaimed. “How can you even say that yet? Why not wait a few months and see what other albums you like? You don't have to decide now!”
And then he laughed. And then he guffawed, and then I got flustered and my feelings were hurt. The interview was unsatisfactory, and the story I wrote worse. I think sometimes you can like a thing too intensely, so much that analysis alchemizes itself into fanaticism, and you're the only one who can't see it. I'm not trying to sell anyone on Club 8: I'm not attempting an objective evaluation. My affection for the band feels more personal, and not because of an ego-bruising 15-minute phone interview. The arc of the band, its musical and aesthetic progression, has seemed always to mirror the same changes in my own lived experience. It's music I imagine I would make if I made music. It seems to know things about me.
Above the City arrived in the mail a few years ago, at exactly the right time-when I was just first beginning to realize that what I missed more than anything was dancing in clubs to songs I loved surrounded by strangers who loved the songs as much as I. At first I thought it was just that small towns don't have good dance clubs. While that is more true than I hope you ever have occasion to find out, the decline of clubs seems to have happened everywhere including the big city. Rock shows, to be sure, remain popular, but swaying on your feet is not only not dancing, almost all of the time something just seems off about it, like the way evangelicals hold up both of their arms, hands outstretched in church when they're singing, as if they are expecting God's arms to swoop down and swing them around. Everything to do with rock, and with bands which play rock, seems to have become mostly ridiculous. As Jens Lekman sings (Jens is also Swedish, but as far as I know there is no JensandJohan connection: maybe they despise each other, I think that's more fun to imagine, the feud runs deep) on the song “I Know What Love Isn’t” (Lekman, 2012, track 9):
“‘Hey, do you want to go see a band?’
‘No, I hate bands, it's always packed with men spooning their girlfriends, Clutching their hands, as if they let go their feet would lift from the ground and ascend.”
If certain rock shows feel hetero-normative, with roles largely static, unsatisfactory and only vaguely participatory, the disco offers/ed greater potential for experiences more empowering and less prescriptive. The disco Club 8 offers its listeners, on this record and the next, 2015's Pleasure, is a reminder that subversive hedonism is a species-wide imperative that must occasionally be met. This is nostalgia for the night and electricity, for the carnival that public spaces once provided, for freedom. In "You Could be Anybody," Club 8's Karolina Komstedt, sings,
"You could be anybody
you could have anyone here."
Identity isn’t fixed. Desire is fluid. The preservation of space and occasion to perpetually explore these ideas is not unimportant.
In "Run", she sings, "I took the wrong way/I travelled far away." It's impossible not to detect a defiant pride in the mistakes she's made.[i] “Fuck it baby/We’ve got nothing left to prove/Taking off our clothes/Is all that’s left to do.” We lose a lot when we are not allowed to develop beyond the reach of the electronic eye. We are animals who judge ourselves like machines. Between technology that never forgets, and electronic selves that refuse to forgive, progress has increased both our capacity for fear and our appetite for hatred.
[i] a la the Morrissey of “Alma Matters,” (Morrissey, 1997, track 2) in which he sings, "It's my life to ruin my own way."
Nazi Boss (not pictured)
When I interviewed Angergård he was in Berlin, and so maybe he has some thoughts on what the ethical clotheshorse is supposed to do when encountering clothes made by the most problematic men’s clothier of them all—Hugo Boss. I realize that the segue from music to clothes isn’t skillful, but going from disco dancing to stylish Nazis was always going to suck. I'm sorry, Johan. I screwed up your story again. I think you make me nervous. Boss’s Nazi past is well known (Huang 2008). Evil has never before or since looked so well-tailored. Many German businesses, willingly or otherwise, were pressed into wartime military service—Adidas, Volkswagen. Puma, maker of two out of three pairs of soccer cleats I have ever owned, invented the panzerschrek (Kuhn & Thiel 2009). The extent to which historical connections to the Third Reich ought to colour contemporary consumer perception is an interesting question. I try never to buy branded athletic brands whenever a reasonable alternative exists. But not because I am seeking retribution against the Boss company for once dressing the SS.[1] |
"Oh hey buddy-Reggaeton, good choice."
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I’ve never bought anything by Boss new. It's not something I would ever have contemplated. Chachi-wear is not my thing. My reluctance is not the same when I come across it at Value Village. Should it be? Should one buy thrifted clothes from brands with ethical problems or judge them guilty by maker? What should be done with, for instance, the subtly checked blazer that I am wearing in the picture above?
I know—because I can read—that it is branded Boss. The blazer, of course, knows no such thing. Into that cloth went gallons of water to produce the cotton for a cloth milled in one of the best textile mills in Italy; the labour of all of the workers in the plant in Slovenia, where it was made. As a cultural historian, what then? Fine, I tell myself, I’m not so hard up for blazers that I need to go flirting with tainted symbols. With Nazis and yuppies is no place to be. Let the blazer go to someone who needs it, for surely need trumps my frivolous attempt to build a wardrobe as a research project, right? Love it! But what if no one buys it?
I bought this blazer at a thrift store, which would have kept it on the racks for four weeks. Unsold after four weeks it gets bundled to either an African or Latin American country. Fantastic! Every unsold, unwanted Yuppie glad rag gets a second life. Everyone in Africa gets Boss—just gotta wait their turn is all, AMIRITE?
No, I am not. The sheer quantity of totally unwanted shoes and clothes is too much. They’re sold cheaply—far less expensive than anything could be made locally. It so destroys the local textile and clothing industry that many countries have now banned, or are in the process of banning, the import of any second-hand clothing. The life of the African cotton worker is this: harvest cotton for clothes that you cannot ever hope to hope to own new. Wait three or four years, though, and that cotton will come back to you in the form of a shirt or a blazer once some rich, sleazy Lenny is done with it. Who doesn’t want to wait to eat the leftover slop of the meal they’ve prepared with their own hands!
Boss’s reputation within the fashion community seems to mirror that of Bose within the hi-fi one or Rolex with the watch-people. The product each makes and sells is fine. But for the money you can, and probably should, do better. A little bit of Internet research, and you’ll come across better options in all areas: quality of construction, method of production, design. But Boss fills a niche, and it fills it for the most part quite stylishly. Accounting for bi-annual haberdasher sales and such, each of my blazers would have sold for between $500 to $700 new. Boss has to compete at this price range. Boss menswear is the best, name-brand luxury younger professionals can afford before having reached their maximum earning potential.[2] It does what it does exceptionally well (Johnston 2017 GQ). It is a gateway to better designers. Anything cheaper and it would lose all its prestige. Anything higher would put Boss in competition with brands with far more cachet than it, and would take Boss out of the financial range of most of its target market. If Boss were to have produced these blazers in Switzerland—where, for instance, Ermenegildo Zegna produces its most finely constructed menswear—it could not (or would not?—I don’t know the profit margin for Boss blazers) make a reasonable profit at those prices. Switzerland's labour laws are no joke. It is not the quality of tailors for hire in Turkey, Slovenia or Romania that attracts Boss to those countries. Boss is able to keep its menswear on the low-end of luxury by keeping its labour costs low. Boss has to cut corners somewhere if it’s to survive. Of the three blazers I’ve thrifted and kept for myself one is made in Slovenia; one is made in Poland; and one (from the company’s quality fashion-forward youth-oriented line—“Hugo”) in Turkey. Good(ish) for Boss for keeping its labour in the EU. Horrible for putting its factories in parts of the E.U. where the E.U.'s worker protections aren't so hot; but probably if you’re thinking this, you’re not the target market Boss has in mind.
Whenever I return home from a successful thrift outing I ask myself the same question in the same incredulous way: “Who donates this stuff?”So far this is what I’ve come up with: what the rich throw away is astonishing. It’s either that or Elton John, one of the many international rock stars who, implausibly, own Okanagan McMansions overlooking the mostly impoverished towns below. [3]
It’s not that I’m not grateful. I am. Thank you, Elton! The new retail value of my thrifted wardrobe I estimate as a number so obscenely high I just deleted it. I got carried away. For awhile I felt certain that a higher power had put me in Vernon to save Harris tweed. I bought ten or more than fifteen. I went on a bad run, where I exclusively bought Harris tweeds in cuts and patterns that were each the worst idea that had ever occurred to me; later, I was horrified at what I had done, and so I re-donated all of them. I kept ten. Ridiculous, of course, yet even my excess in the name of research made absolutely no dent. Not just tweed, but torrents of NWOT clothes, all from up-market labels and stores that don't even exist in this region, kept on coming.
From the point of sustainability this is madness. But everyone who keeps their wardrobe up to date is not mad. Elton, you are not my size so I have been using your name in vain and I blame you for nothing, not even Candle in the Wind. Seriously though, I would take a boa if you have any spares.
The imperative to maintain external appearances has seldom been stronger in a society in which style conquered substance twenty five years ago. Looking good isn’t just part of the job: in many jobs, as with the position of Prime Minister of Canada, it is the job. I don’t work in the corporate or financial sector and so my wardrobe never falls under a certain sort of scrutiny. I have to remind myself to dress down when I leave the house. But in financial districts of many, major cities I imagine that all sorts of eyeballs would read my wardrobe as last year’s or worse. I'd never get away with it.
It is not correct to blame the drivers of the BMW SUVs that line up to drop off barely worn suits that retail in excess of $3,000. These people are merely excellent players of the game that exists whether or not we acknowledge its existence-the imperative to play, the consequences of losing. Not looking the part, often denies you the chance ever to get to play the part. Until prevailing social attitudes shift to a broad social shaming of the ever shorter cycles of the fashion industry, until Hollywood stars en masse start showing up on the red carpet in thrifted clothing, it’s not fair to blame individuals for correctly identifying the importance of always appearing in the new, and the best of the new.[4] Clothing donors are not the problem.
Perhaps, the question of what to do with pre-owned Boss garments should be answered by the workers who made them initially. Is the garment hateful to them because of the life they’ve endured because of the factories that employ them? Or is their work a source of pride to them? Whether to abstain from Boss in all its forms I’ll leave as an open question. I can’t presume to speak for workers I don’t know, about conditions in factories I’ll never visit. I don’t want to assume boycotting second-hand Boss is a form of solidarity if it isn’t.
I know—because I can read—that it is branded Boss. The blazer, of course, knows no such thing. Into that cloth went gallons of water to produce the cotton for a cloth milled in one of the best textile mills in Italy; the labour of all of the workers in the plant in Slovenia, where it was made. As a cultural historian, what then? Fine, I tell myself, I’m not so hard up for blazers that I need to go flirting with tainted symbols. With Nazis and yuppies is no place to be. Let the blazer go to someone who needs it, for surely need trumps my frivolous attempt to build a wardrobe as a research project, right? Love it! But what if no one buys it?
I bought this blazer at a thrift store, which would have kept it on the racks for four weeks. Unsold after four weeks it gets bundled to either an African or Latin American country. Fantastic! Every unsold, unwanted Yuppie glad rag gets a second life. Everyone in Africa gets Boss—just gotta wait their turn is all, AMIRITE?
No, I am not. The sheer quantity of totally unwanted shoes and clothes is too much. They’re sold cheaply—far less expensive than anything could be made locally. It so destroys the local textile and clothing industry that many countries have now banned, or are in the process of banning, the import of any second-hand clothing. The life of the African cotton worker is this: harvest cotton for clothes that you cannot ever hope to hope to own new. Wait three or four years, though, and that cotton will come back to you in the form of a shirt or a blazer once some rich, sleazy Lenny is done with it. Who doesn’t want to wait to eat the leftover slop of the meal they’ve prepared with their own hands!
Boss’s reputation within the fashion community seems to mirror that of Bose within the hi-fi one or Rolex with the watch-people. The product each makes and sells is fine. But for the money you can, and probably should, do better. A little bit of Internet research, and you’ll come across better options in all areas: quality of construction, method of production, design. But Boss fills a niche, and it fills it for the most part quite stylishly. Accounting for bi-annual haberdasher sales and such, each of my blazers would have sold for between $500 to $700 new. Boss has to compete at this price range. Boss menswear is the best, name-brand luxury younger professionals can afford before having reached their maximum earning potential.[2] It does what it does exceptionally well (Johnston 2017 GQ). It is a gateway to better designers. Anything cheaper and it would lose all its prestige. Anything higher would put Boss in competition with brands with far more cachet than it, and would take Boss out of the financial range of most of its target market. If Boss were to have produced these blazers in Switzerland—where, for instance, Ermenegildo Zegna produces its most finely constructed menswear—it could not (or would not?—I don’t know the profit margin for Boss blazers) make a reasonable profit at those prices. Switzerland's labour laws are no joke. It is not the quality of tailors for hire in Turkey, Slovenia or Romania that attracts Boss to those countries. Boss is able to keep its menswear on the low-end of luxury by keeping its labour costs low. Boss has to cut corners somewhere if it’s to survive. Of the three blazers I’ve thrifted and kept for myself one is made in Slovenia; one is made in Poland; and one (from the company’s quality fashion-forward youth-oriented line—“Hugo”) in Turkey. Good(ish) for Boss for keeping its labour in the EU. Horrible for putting its factories in parts of the E.U. where the E.U.'s worker protections aren't so hot; but probably if you’re thinking this, you’re not the target market Boss has in mind.
Whenever I return home from a successful thrift outing I ask myself the same question in the same incredulous way: “Who donates this stuff?”So far this is what I’ve come up with: what the rich throw away is astonishing. It’s either that or Elton John, one of the many international rock stars who, implausibly, own Okanagan McMansions overlooking the mostly impoverished towns below. [3]
It’s not that I’m not grateful. I am. Thank you, Elton! The new retail value of my thrifted wardrobe I estimate as a number so obscenely high I just deleted it. I got carried away. For awhile I felt certain that a higher power had put me in Vernon to save Harris tweed. I bought ten or more than fifteen. I went on a bad run, where I exclusively bought Harris tweeds in cuts and patterns that were each the worst idea that had ever occurred to me; later, I was horrified at what I had done, and so I re-donated all of them. I kept ten. Ridiculous, of course, yet even my excess in the name of research made absolutely no dent. Not just tweed, but torrents of NWOT clothes, all from up-market labels and stores that don't even exist in this region, kept on coming.
From the point of sustainability this is madness. But everyone who keeps their wardrobe up to date is not mad. Elton, you are not my size so I have been using your name in vain and I blame you for nothing, not even Candle in the Wind. Seriously though, I would take a boa if you have any spares.
The imperative to maintain external appearances has seldom been stronger in a society in which style conquered substance twenty five years ago. Looking good isn’t just part of the job: in many jobs, as with the position of Prime Minister of Canada, it is the job. I don’t work in the corporate or financial sector and so my wardrobe never falls under a certain sort of scrutiny. I have to remind myself to dress down when I leave the house. But in financial districts of many, major cities I imagine that all sorts of eyeballs would read my wardrobe as last year’s or worse. I'd never get away with it.
It is not correct to blame the drivers of the BMW SUVs that line up to drop off barely worn suits that retail in excess of $3,000. These people are merely excellent players of the game that exists whether or not we acknowledge its existence-the imperative to play, the consequences of losing. Not looking the part, often denies you the chance ever to get to play the part. Until prevailing social attitudes shift to a broad social shaming of the ever shorter cycles of the fashion industry, until Hollywood stars en masse start showing up on the red carpet in thrifted clothing, it’s not fair to blame individuals for correctly identifying the importance of always appearing in the new, and the best of the new.[4] Clothing donors are not the problem.
Perhaps, the question of what to do with pre-owned Boss garments should be answered by the workers who made them initially. Is the garment hateful to them because of the life they’ve endured because of the factories that employ them? Or is their work a source of pride to them? Whether to abstain from Boss in all its forms I’ll leave as an open question. I can’t presume to speak for workers I don’t know, about conditions in factories I’ll never visit. I don’t want to assume boycotting second-hand Boss is a form of solidarity if it isn’t.
When you elect me, I promise to make tennis helmets mandatory, especially for pickle ball. I like Tennis the band fine. Both of these records were recorded on a boat, total CSN move, except so much better because you are not stuck at sea for months with Stephen Stills talking about why he is the all-time greatest at guitar and a leering David Crosby high as the mast the whole entire time. Graham Nash, I would sail on a boat with you anywhere, please get in touch-I can be your coxswain.
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Johan's Other Band, Acid House Kings. Johan, you do not excel at naming bands. That guy in the turtleneck is Johan's brother, Niklas. Maybe Niklas is bad at naming bands. Someone is, let's not kid ourselves. Tennis outfits on your first record. Home run, my Swedish friends, hole-in-one swish all the way Johan, I see your Fred Perry.
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The Jeaning of Colin
In “The Jeaning of America” Fiske (1989/2010) considers jeans as appropriated working class culture now sported by tycoons and tyrants to signal their connection to everyday people, the same “everyday people” for whom life is now mostly a shit show thanks to the decisions made by them. Think “W” down at his ranch, clearing brush.
Fiske’s analysis is generally excellent. But in his privileging of excorporation[6] as a valuable way of executing a de Certeauian act of tactical resistance, he slips into the language of subcultural theory.[7] This causes him to conclude that individual wearers of corporate capitalist commodities will somehow constitute a significant resistance. This is not the case now. It was once, but three generations ago, and not for very long. Not only is the attempt to fashion resistance through material things not a threat to anyone, rebellion through buying is actively encouraged. The more acts of rebellion through things the more profit producers stand to make. The illusion that individuals are always free to rebel is necessary in a society in which the fiction of liberty and democracy is foundational to the smooth operating of society. It seems odd for the academy to contribute to this fiction—that clothing and things may amount to either an effective resistance or a fully realized life.
The subterfuge to which Fiske points is no longer needed: the rich no longer need pretend to be working class. The rich are once again openly rich. Trump wears Brioni—in a cut and colourway that hasn’t been popular since Patrick Bateman was coating urinal pucks in chocolate. The rich are no longer afraid. They’ve stopped wearing costumes. Fiske wrote of an era where the rich tried to look poor. Now, the poor try to look rich. Style is back in fashion in a way it hasn’t been since The Cold War, at least—but probably, since the 1920s.
[1]Because of Naomi Klein. I attended the Montreal launch for Klein and Avi Lewis’s Argentina feature documentary, The Take (2004). Klein and Lewis were both in attendance, and were on their way to an after-party on The Main. I planned on going. Until I opened the door to the club and got assaulted by activist AMBIENT music. It was utterly repellent to a shy man seeking to get his Friday night on (yes, I am referring to myself in the third person—that’s how bad it was). I should mention that I lack a good deal of personal courage in any kind of situation that calls for both earnest mingling and marimba.
[2] I spent a solid year learning the ropes (yarns?) of used men’s fashion at the Styleforum’s most popular thread:“The official thrift/discount store bragging thread - Part II (Return to the Thunderdome)” (SpooPoker, 2015). I followed the recommended procedure, reading the thread from the beginning and keeping my mouth shut. It was pretty much bang on, most of what the regulars posted. If you have a system and keep checking, Eton shirts, Kiton ties, Zegna suits and suede Crockett & Jones brogues are going to wash ashore.
[3] I was teaching a pop music class at UBC-Okanagan when admin e-mailed to say a member of the British rock band Free (who also owns property in the Okanagan) was available for a guest lecture. It didn't work out, which at the time mostly relieved me because my knowledge of 1970s hard rock was rather poor. The loss was mine. Paul Rodgers is alright; plus his resemblance to Russell Brand is uncanny.
[4] Winona Ryder is exempt from all criticism. "Most of my wardrobe is vintage and I've worn dresses to the Oscars that I got for $10. At Sean Penn's last Haiti gala I wore this vintage dress that I'd worn to a film premiere in 2005. I know that's kind of a no-no in the fashion world, but why wear something just once if you love it?" (Willis, 2014).
[5] Before academia I worked on the ill-fated mid 1990s attempt by Greyhound Canada to launch a domestic airline. The tagline for Greyhound Air was “We’re Marking New Territory!” The ad campaign featured a Greyhound dog urinating on the front wheel of a Boeing 727. It seemed like a bad idea, even at the time (ghXYZ, 2015). Blame Palmer Jarvis. The mystique which the Palmer Jarvis advertising executives were able to cultivate at Greyhound head office would have made Roger Sterling proud. The agency travelled with an entourage: it brought lanky copy-writers in turtlenecks and tanned men in tight jean and black blazer combos into our boardroom for the first time. Palmer Jarvis exuded an air of exotic well-being; when they vacated the building all of us were depressed: we knew we were nine-to-five nobodies and wished we could wear turtlenecks, too, wait could we?-there wasn't really a rule against it but without a jacket holy shit that is a lot of one colour; but put a jacket over a turtleneck for a shift in accounting and no-unless you are a creative talent of a major advertising agency this look will not work. In the late 70s, maybe, if you're in an Eric Rohmer film, for sure. But we worked at a bus station beside a car dealership, and that sort of desolation did not suffer ironic fashion choices gladly. My short story "The Driver"-the first fiction I published-discusses the architectural travesty Calgary suffered when it lost its previous Greyhound building downtown. I set a second (unpublished) story (which I prefer to the first, sadly I alone) in the new building Greyhound built in the 1980s, where I worked for seven years: I think the denouement occurs during a Stampede breakfast on the rooftop parkade of the Greyhound head office. I guess they'll be knocking that building down soon, too.
[6] The process by which the individual must attempt to make meaning of the self, and its place in society, through material things.
[7] Michel de Certeau privileged the ability of the individual to remain free in everyday life through the use of tactics to, nimbly, avoid the controlling strategies of the ruling class. Wearing certain clothes and lounging in the pool hall are, in this view, small acts of everyday resistance which collectively are difficult to effectively police. “The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them” (de Certeau, 1984/1988 ,p.xix).
In “The Jeaning of America” Fiske (1989/2010) considers jeans as appropriated working class culture now sported by tycoons and tyrants to signal their connection to everyday people, the same “everyday people” for whom life is now mostly a shit show thanks to the decisions made by them. Think “W” down at his ranch, clearing brush.
- “These meanings […] were attempts to deny class differences: the physical toughness connoted by jeans allowed these middle-class students to align themselves with a highly selective set of meanings of physical labor (its dignity and its productivity, but certainly not its subordination and exploitedness). Jeans were able to wear class specific meanings of the American work ethic” (Fiske, 1989/2010, p. 3).
Fiske’s analysis is generally excellent. But in his privileging of excorporation[6] as a valuable way of executing a de Certeauian act of tactical resistance, he slips into the language of subcultural theory.[7] This causes him to conclude that individual wearers of corporate capitalist commodities will somehow constitute a significant resistance. This is not the case now. It was once, but three generations ago, and not for very long. Not only is the attempt to fashion resistance through material things not a threat to anyone, rebellion through buying is actively encouraged. The more acts of rebellion through things the more profit producers stand to make. The illusion that individuals are always free to rebel is necessary in a society in which the fiction of liberty and democracy is foundational to the smooth operating of society. It seems odd for the academy to contribute to this fiction—that clothing and things may amount to either an effective resistance or a fully realized life.
The subterfuge to which Fiske points is no longer needed: the rich no longer need pretend to be working class. The rich are once again openly rich. Trump wears Brioni—in a cut and colourway that hasn’t been popular since Patrick Bateman was coating urinal pucks in chocolate. The rich are no longer afraid. They’ve stopped wearing costumes. Fiske wrote of an era where the rich tried to look poor. Now, the poor try to look rich. Style is back in fashion in a way it hasn’t been since The Cold War, at least—but probably, since the 1920s.
[1]Because of Naomi Klein. I attended the Montreal launch for Klein and Avi Lewis’s Argentina feature documentary, The Take (2004). Klein and Lewis were both in attendance, and were on their way to an after-party on The Main. I planned on going. Until I opened the door to the club and got assaulted by activist AMBIENT music. It was utterly repellent to a shy man seeking to get his Friday night on (yes, I am referring to myself in the third person—that’s how bad it was). I should mention that I lack a good deal of personal courage in any kind of situation that calls for both earnest mingling and marimba.
[2] I spent a solid year learning the ropes (yarns?) of used men’s fashion at the Styleforum’s most popular thread:“The official thrift/discount store bragging thread - Part II (Return to the Thunderdome)” (SpooPoker, 2015). I followed the recommended procedure, reading the thread from the beginning and keeping my mouth shut. It was pretty much bang on, most of what the regulars posted. If you have a system and keep checking, Eton shirts, Kiton ties, Zegna suits and suede Crockett & Jones brogues are going to wash ashore.
[3] I was teaching a pop music class at UBC-Okanagan when admin e-mailed to say a member of the British rock band Free (who also owns property in the Okanagan) was available for a guest lecture. It didn't work out, which at the time mostly relieved me because my knowledge of 1970s hard rock was rather poor. The loss was mine. Paul Rodgers is alright; plus his resemblance to Russell Brand is uncanny.
[4] Winona Ryder is exempt from all criticism. "Most of my wardrobe is vintage and I've worn dresses to the Oscars that I got for $10. At Sean Penn's last Haiti gala I wore this vintage dress that I'd worn to a film premiere in 2005. I know that's kind of a no-no in the fashion world, but why wear something just once if you love it?" (Willis, 2014).
[5] Before academia I worked on the ill-fated mid 1990s attempt by Greyhound Canada to launch a domestic airline. The tagline for Greyhound Air was “We’re Marking New Territory!” The ad campaign featured a Greyhound dog urinating on the front wheel of a Boeing 727. It seemed like a bad idea, even at the time (ghXYZ, 2015). Blame Palmer Jarvis. The mystique which the Palmer Jarvis advertising executives were able to cultivate at Greyhound head office would have made Roger Sterling proud. The agency travelled with an entourage: it brought lanky copy-writers in turtlenecks and tanned men in tight jean and black blazer combos into our boardroom for the first time. Palmer Jarvis exuded an air of exotic well-being; when they vacated the building all of us were depressed: we knew we were nine-to-five nobodies and wished we could wear turtlenecks, too, wait could we?-there wasn't really a rule against it but without a jacket holy shit that is a lot of one colour; but put a jacket over a turtleneck for a shift in accounting and no-unless you are a creative talent of a major advertising agency this look will not work. In the late 70s, maybe, if you're in an Eric Rohmer film, for sure. But we worked at a bus station beside a car dealership, and that sort of desolation did not suffer ironic fashion choices gladly. My short story "The Driver"-the first fiction I published-discusses the architectural travesty Calgary suffered when it lost its previous Greyhound building downtown. I set a second (unpublished) story (which I prefer to the first, sadly I alone) in the new building Greyhound built in the 1980s, where I worked for seven years: I think the denouement occurs during a Stampede breakfast on the rooftop parkade of the Greyhound head office. I guess they'll be knocking that building down soon, too.
[6] The process by which the individual must attempt to make meaning of the self, and its place in society, through material things.
[7] Michel de Certeau privileged the ability of the individual to remain free in everyday life through the use of tactics to, nimbly, avoid the controlling strategies of the ruling class. Wearing certain clothes and lounging in the pool hall are, in this view, small acts of everyday resistance which collectively are difficult to effectively police. “The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them” (de Certeau, 1984/1988 ,p.xix).
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"Jay Gatsby, extravagant in so many other ways, was frugal about his feet: it was a strange sort of voodoo, the way Jay would wear a single pair of two tone loafers until they died, and then holy maloley he's at it again," (Fitzgerald, 1802, p. 24).
Just a bunch of regular Joes--why, they're no different than you and me!--kicking back in our working man blues.
(Matt Damon is flexing rogue, but that's ok!-He's still wearing jeans).
(Matt Damon is flexing rogue, but that's ok!-He's still wearing jeans).
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As Ryder explained to Live from the Red Carpet's interview host Joan Rivers, "I paid ten dollars for this dress and I'm still cooler than all of you. All of you. Combined all of you. I'm sorry, Keanu, but it's true. Kevin Costner, stop it."
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Semiotics is Past It
A former professor of mine once filled my empty beer glass with the dregs of a pitcher of ale and the dregs of a pitcher of stout. “Bricolage,” he smirked. He thought all the Stuart Hall and Culture Studies stuff with which I was then enamoured was, generally, pretty basic. “It’s the same thing over and over again,” he said, “Every time.” A society of widespread sartorial bricolagery is the only society I’ve known. So much of Hebdige’s Subculture of Style does not apply to all but a few urban pockets in Canada, and even those ones, not really. Pastiche wardrobes are pretty much all that I’ve ever seen. A grey flannel suit society, all those shots of black raincoats and umbrellas in rainy London, that era was long gone by the early 1980s.
One could choose to make a big deal about my decision to pair Ben Sherman with Hugo Boss. Ben Sherman was an English-Jewish tailor. Ben Sherman gained its popularity when adopted as a key part of the skinhead wardrobe. It’s also the pairing of a business wardrobe with a subcultural one, the two great enemies. But in a society without sartorial standards, where the symbolism of what is worn is of no particular salience, clothing considered semiotically will inevitably leave to semiosis infinita, perhaps even semiosis ad absurdum.
You can buy Boss, Ben Sherman and Sevens at the same store (at Hudson’s Bay, for instance). Whatever any of that stuff used to mean, at the present they’re just brands for sale in the same shop targeting the same semi-stylish, middle-class MOR sort of dude. Bricolage exists now as our universal condition. Studying individual manifestations of this no longer serves the purpose it once did. The field of fashion is no longer a critical site of struggle on the cultural level.[2] Even if the cultural evaluation of style will always remain valuable, the extent of academics and their students still treating it as a necessary precursor to The Revolution! ™ represents a fatal misallocation of resources needed elsewhere, places which an analysis of the economics of style inevitably lead. When Cultural Studies began almost all of the (British) clothes it analyzed were not made by semi- or un-skilled workers operating machines in third world factories. Harris Tweed was still going strong. High street tailors were not in jeopardy. Traditional menswear chains like Dunn’s were doing brisk business. Method of production did not always enter into the analysis: it didn't seem to need to.
The inverse has been true for (at minimum) the past fifteen years: almost all clothes worn (by North Americans) have been made by semi- or un-skilled workers operating machines in third world factories. The clothing industry on this continent is wrecked. The consequences have been catastrophic: the study of obsolete subcultural symbols in the midst of so much suffering may not always be perceived kindly. Subcultures didn’t stop or slow the rise of neo-liberalism. When you need to explain what subcultures were, in order to talk about why they didn’t work, you’re not off to the most auspicious start.
The clothing industry, more than the clothes themselves, now represents all the tensions of a contemporary world in which the masses of the first world wear the fruits of slave labour made by the masses of the third world, and only the truly rich—those who have shaped the world so—can afford to buy new, luxury clothes made by skilled artisans in humane conditions. How we got here is important to consider: beginning with Gen-X, all subsequent generations have felt, or soon will feel, disgust over the political, trade and manufacturing decisions of the baby-boomers. As Scott Gilmore (2017) writes about the 'boomers, “They are surely the most destructive generation in history. Their cult of consumerism has left our climate in tatters.” Bad enough that these intellectually stunted, artificial evergreen adolescents ensured, almost universally, a worse way of life for three generations to follow them (at minimum). On their watch, jeans, once the singularly most definitive symbol of American subcultural cool, a product so fucking well-made from high quality cotton in American factories that it was both insanely comfortable on the inside, and ridiculously stiff on the outside, have been transformed into the singularly most definitive symbol of the brutality of modern factory slave labour.[1]
People die making mom jeans and dad jeans, and mall jeans. Levis got away with it for a little while—thinking that the producer of THE iconic piece of America could get away with shifting all of its productions overseas—but talk about not reading the zeitgeist at all.
It's still gut-wrenching to a few of us. Beginning in 2007, Levi's started losing a lot of customers to a company that made most of its jeans in an East Los Angeles factory under California labor codes, and for whom this was worth the extra cost (Goruck, 2011). Sevens were one of the first companies to remind us that denim could be as sturdy and as beautiful as you wanted it to be. It could be comfortable and stylish at the same time. All of it could be done ethically. Sevens sourced Italian denim from Candiani, a mill with among the most highly paid and highly skilled workers in the world, and which produces some of the best, and most innovative, denim in the world. Their jeans cost a shit-ton of money, for people used to The Gap. But their jeans were better, all the way around: accordingly, they do not actually cost any more money should you plan, as you should, to wear them for many years. Jeans were never intended to be disposable fashion. They are made to be worn, and to last a long time. Buy fewer and superior jeans; wear them longer.
If your price range doesn't allow you to spend over $200 for a pair of jeans, if budgeting brings you no joy, it's still all good. I'd even say you are in luck because the quantity and quality of vintage and thrift store jeans available in Western Canada is ridiculously high. We are swimming in superior surplus. The number of people that come into my town wearing actual work jeans, because they are actually working outside on their farms and ranches, is high. The supply of nicely cut jeans from one of the big three American makers—Levis’, Lee, Wranglers—is steady, and spans four decades. Beautiful GWGs, cut the same way as many Japanese heritage brands, cannot give themselves away.
[1] Levi’s deserves no awards for its relationship with unionism (Silverstein, 1994).
[2] Which is not to suggest either that fashion should ever go unstudied, or that there might not come a time when rebellion through clothing once again manifests itself broadly enough to destabilize society-at-large, as with mid- to late-20th century subcultural fashion.
A former professor of mine once filled my empty beer glass with the dregs of a pitcher of ale and the dregs of a pitcher of stout. “Bricolage,” he smirked. He thought all the Stuart Hall and Culture Studies stuff with which I was then enamoured was, generally, pretty basic. “It’s the same thing over and over again,” he said, “Every time.” A society of widespread sartorial bricolagery is the only society I’ve known. So much of Hebdige’s Subculture of Style does not apply to all but a few urban pockets in Canada, and even those ones, not really. Pastiche wardrobes are pretty much all that I’ve ever seen. A grey flannel suit society, all those shots of black raincoats and umbrellas in rainy London, that era was long gone by the early 1980s.
One could choose to make a big deal about my decision to pair Ben Sherman with Hugo Boss. Ben Sherman was an English-Jewish tailor. Ben Sherman gained its popularity when adopted as a key part of the skinhead wardrobe. It’s also the pairing of a business wardrobe with a subcultural one, the two great enemies. But in a society without sartorial standards, where the symbolism of what is worn is of no particular salience, clothing considered semiotically will inevitably leave to semiosis infinita, perhaps even semiosis ad absurdum.
You can buy Boss, Ben Sherman and Sevens at the same store (at Hudson’s Bay, for instance). Whatever any of that stuff used to mean, at the present they’re just brands for sale in the same shop targeting the same semi-stylish, middle-class MOR sort of dude. Bricolage exists now as our universal condition. Studying individual manifestations of this no longer serves the purpose it once did. The field of fashion is no longer a critical site of struggle on the cultural level.[2] Even if the cultural evaluation of style will always remain valuable, the extent of academics and their students still treating it as a necessary precursor to The Revolution! ™ represents a fatal misallocation of resources needed elsewhere, places which an analysis of the economics of style inevitably lead. When Cultural Studies began almost all of the (British) clothes it analyzed were not made by semi- or un-skilled workers operating machines in third world factories. Harris Tweed was still going strong. High street tailors were not in jeopardy. Traditional menswear chains like Dunn’s were doing brisk business. Method of production did not always enter into the analysis: it didn't seem to need to.
The inverse has been true for (at minimum) the past fifteen years: almost all clothes worn (by North Americans) have been made by semi- or un-skilled workers operating machines in third world factories. The clothing industry on this continent is wrecked. The consequences have been catastrophic: the study of obsolete subcultural symbols in the midst of so much suffering may not always be perceived kindly. Subcultures didn’t stop or slow the rise of neo-liberalism. When you need to explain what subcultures were, in order to talk about why they didn’t work, you’re not off to the most auspicious start.
The clothing industry, more than the clothes themselves, now represents all the tensions of a contemporary world in which the masses of the first world wear the fruits of slave labour made by the masses of the third world, and only the truly rich—those who have shaped the world so—can afford to buy new, luxury clothes made by skilled artisans in humane conditions. How we got here is important to consider: beginning with Gen-X, all subsequent generations have felt, or soon will feel, disgust over the political, trade and manufacturing decisions of the baby-boomers. As Scott Gilmore (2017) writes about the 'boomers, “They are surely the most destructive generation in history. Their cult of consumerism has left our climate in tatters.” Bad enough that these intellectually stunted, artificial evergreen adolescents ensured, almost universally, a worse way of life for three generations to follow them (at minimum). On their watch, jeans, once the singularly most definitive symbol of American subcultural cool, a product so fucking well-made from high quality cotton in American factories that it was both insanely comfortable on the inside, and ridiculously stiff on the outside, have been transformed into the singularly most definitive symbol of the brutality of modern factory slave labour.[1]
People die making mom jeans and dad jeans, and mall jeans. Levis got away with it for a little while—thinking that the producer of THE iconic piece of America could get away with shifting all of its productions overseas—but talk about not reading the zeitgeist at all.
- Philip A. Marineau, who left PepsiCo in 1999 to lead the family-owned Levi Strauss Co. as president and chief executive, said he saw little symbolism in the company's American production shutdown. "Consumers are used to buying products from all over the world,” Marineau said on the telephone from company headquarters in San Francisco. “The issue is not where they're made. For most people that's not gut-wrenching anymore’" (New York Times, 2003).
It's still gut-wrenching to a few of us. Beginning in 2007, Levi's started losing a lot of customers to a company that made most of its jeans in an East Los Angeles factory under California labor codes, and for whom this was worth the extra cost (Goruck, 2011). Sevens were one of the first companies to remind us that denim could be as sturdy and as beautiful as you wanted it to be. It could be comfortable and stylish at the same time. All of it could be done ethically. Sevens sourced Italian denim from Candiani, a mill with among the most highly paid and highly skilled workers in the world, and which produces some of the best, and most innovative, denim in the world. Their jeans cost a shit-ton of money, for people used to The Gap. But their jeans were better, all the way around: accordingly, they do not actually cost any more money should you plan, as you should, to wear them for many years. Jeans were never intended to be disposable fashion. They are made to be worn, and to last a long time. Buy fewer and superior jeans; wear them longer.
If your price range doesn't allow you to spend over $200 for a pair of jeans, if budgeting brings you no joy, it's still all good. I'd even say you are in luck because the quantity and quality of vintage and thrift store jeans available in Western Canada is ridiculously high. We are swimming in superior surplus. The number of people that come into my town wearing actual work jeans, because they are actually working outside on their farms and ranches, is high. The supply of nicely cut jeans from one of the big three American makers—Levis’, Lee, Wranglers—is steady, and spans four decades. Beautiful GWGs, cut the same way as many Japanese heritage brands, cannot give themselves away.
[1] Levi’s deserves no awards for its relationship with unionism (Silverstein, 1994).
[2] Which is not to suggest either that fashion should ever go unstudied, or that there might not come a time when rebellion through clothing once again manifests itself broadly enough to destabilize society-at-large, as with mid- to late-20th century subcultural fashion.
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Monogrammed Initials Are N.O.
“AG," if I may, unless you’ve passed (condolences), or unless you woke up Rubenesque overnight (some sort of Nutty Professor scenario)-and even then, really-what's the deal with getting rid of a blazer you've gone to the trouble of monogramming? The monograms are a bad call. Seriously about the monograms: they should be no one's thing.[5] I never forget that I’m ballered-up thanks to the largesse of old Andy Gonad. Get your vanity in check, Albumin Goo! All you’ve done is reduce the enjoyment that any subsequent owner gets from the garment. It's inconsiderate. A lot of shoppers won't touch this kind of taint. Poor form, Always Groining, my old friend-not at all cricket. Ass Gadget, why must you look inside your jacket to remember your own name? Dance Craze: The Jens Yoga Pants |