More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Despite these clear structural origins of fashion cycles, many blame them on capitalist conspiracies, in which malicious companies engage in a planned obsolescence of taste to make us keep buying things.
The sociologist Stanley Lieberson found clear fashion patterns in the popularity of first names—choices that require no money, with no commercial entities attempting to influence parents’ choices.
Mass media and mass manufacturers, however, do speed up fashion cycles by ensuring we become aware of trends beyond what we can directly observe and by removing the obstacles to participation.
Marxists complain that capitalism creates “false needs,” as capitalists chase “exchange value” over earnest “use value.” The flaw in this analysis is that a primary use for goods is marking social distinction.
The fashion process has also democratized culture over time. When companies sell kitsch versions of art and elite goods as the same entity, mass audiences come to believe their adoption makes them equally sophisticated. This creates a widespread confidence in the aesthetic value of kitsch.
This solidarity has even shamed critics into a more serious consideration of mass culture as art, and this capitulation further bolstered pride among the majorities.
Perhaps more counterintuitively, the worst parts of mass culture are important for motivating invention. Overexposed and cliché conventions justify the stylistic rebellions that eventually lead to cultural refresh.
The culture industry certainly promotes the idea of a meritocratic market: good things rise, bad ones fall. But so many consumers adopt based on status value rather than any intrinsic qualities. Majorities seem to be satisficing when it comes to their consumer choices—settling on things they find satisfactory but not ideal.
Fashion reveals that tastes will always be very flexible, because conventions are arbitrary, and status can easily make them change.
If conventions gain eminence in survival, time must work to bolster cultural value. This principle becomes clearer once we recognize that most classic styles, such as the button-down collar shirt, first emerged in standard fashion cycles.
Similar to how status value derives from its symbolic associations with high-status individuals and groups, historical value is derived from positive symbolic associations with the past.
History is constructed, and the authority to construct is not equally distributed. Our collective memories are shallow, and we rely on a particular set of high-status historians, archivists, journalists, politicians, and religious leaders to lay out the most important moments of the past by means of compelling narratives.
What is the appeal of historical value? First, there is a survivorship bias: anything that remains with us today is assumed to have greater intrinsic value. Humans are more likely to preserve high-quality luxury goods than cheap kitsch.
We also extend this principle to everyday behaviors. An arbitrary practice must be worth continuing if generation after generation has decided to choose it over alternatives.
Historical value is a hedge against social risk: long-standing conventions are more well-known, adhered to, and likely to be followed in the future. Rational humans, especially conservative ones toward the middle of the status hierarchy, will choose older forms over newer ones when signaling, and this keeps older conventions in circulation.
Historical value enables classics to always be in good taste and rise above fashion, making them logical choices for risk-averse, middle-status individuals.
A canon is necessary, scholars believed, because future generations can never consume all works from the past. Of the tens of thousands of novels written in the nineteenth century, we only still read about two hundred.
To create a canon, academics and critics curate explicit lists or keep certain works in circulation through repeated mention and reference. Art surveys maintain the canon by selecting certain artists and works to tell the narrative of art.
Canons are not decided in democratic forums. The builders, writes literary critic Harold Bloom, are “dominant social groups, institutions of education, traditions of criticism.”
The best candidates, in Bloom’s view, possess “a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.”
The canon may also contain a few relics—works that may not appeal to contemporary audiences on an aesthetic level yet mark an important moment in the historical narrative.
Popularity can keep works in the collective dialogue, but critical appraisal is more important for long-term survival. This moves the canon toward elite tastes and away from kitsch.
Over time, the canon so directs our focus toward certain artworks of previous eras that it is easy to forget that alternatives ever existed.
For whatever memories do endure of an era, they will be subject to a competitive whittling as time goes on.
Styles overassociated with lower-middle-class majority consumers, no matter how important, rarely become classics. Double-knit polyester leisure suits dominated the lived experience of the 1970s but today live on only as a famed fashion misstep.
Taste matters in canon building because critics and editors form their reputations when choosing works. They don’t want to be on the record for embracing things with anticachet.
In the last few decades there has been a vigorous debate about the ethics of the canon—in particular, whether it overrepresents dead white men.
The debate is far from pedantic: canonical works embody the values of a society, identifying certain conventions as permanently valuable while letting others wither away.
Those with status decide what is history, and what takes on historical value gets a status value boost, which then in turn justifies the high status of the elite groups.
Modern thinkers have proposed many escapes from the bonds of the past, attempting to replace all customs and traditions with fairer, more rational behaviors. Dada and futurism demanded total liberation from the canon.
But history stays alive, because even the fiercer modernists need it as a cautionary tale. Antitraditionalism can promise an auspicious future only by pointing to the vile past.
But historical value lives on, because it serves as a stable anchor in a turbulent globalized marketplace. As more and more new products are offered, many consumers will seek refuge in customs, traditions, classics, and canon.
At the same time, there appears to be ever greater potential for a “people’s history,” where popular demand keeps certain kitsch in circulation despite critical disfavor.
Without high-status support, however, popular artworks and behaviors typically go down with their fans.
During the unrest, the graduate student and singer George Leonard realized he could help unify the divided student body through a revival of past musical styles.
Jimi Hendrix was an early fan, and Sha Na Na ended up as his opening act at Woodstock.
Leonard and his brother ended up not just instigating a doo-wop revival but may have even invented what we know as “the fifties.”
Where customs, traditions, classics, and canonized works involve a continuity of historical survival, retro describes a historical revival—a sudden reevaluation of transient artifacts and conventions.
“The retro sensibility,” writes Reynolds, “tends neither to idealise nor sentimentalise the past, but seeks to be amused and charmed by it.”
Retro established an additional way for the past to take on new value in the present: nostalgia masquerading as innovation for use in the fashion cycle.
Fashion cycles conclude with once coveted innovations ceded to laggards, and our brains interpret the resulting anticachet as “ugliness.”
After contaminated trends are fully abandoned, they may be forgotten. And as negative symbolic associations fade, the trends are primed for a comeback.
The most iconic examples of retro, however, don’t revive old styles as an empty vessel: they play with them as an intentional “antiaphrodisiac.” As we’ve seen before, ugliness builds fences.
Youth raise their cultural fences on a budget—digging through bargain bins, thrift shops, garage sales, and Goodwill stores for ugly old things that will horrify adults. Youth love old kitsch because they’ll never be confused for the original adopters.
Retro provided an excellent source of innovations because the development costs are so low. Inventing from scratch is difficult and time-consuming.
On a personal level we also feel excited to see a forgotten part of our heritage unearthed and reclaimed—old emotions pulled out of our brains in a gush of gleeful nostalgia.
The use of sampling in early hip-hop promised something even more romantic: the possibility of turning the musical phrases in crates of “worthless” LPs into the elements of exciting new songs.
“The wiser historians and critics know,” writes art scholar Renato Poggioli, “that unoriginal work, the mediocre or manqué, reveals the spirit of its own times in a sharp and direct way precisely because it remains a document and not a monument.”
The timing of retro cycles relates to the number of years required for a population to fully abandon a certain trend during its initial diffusion.
Retro trends can never be as dangerous as the original. A true radical innovation triggers a fear of the unknown; its retro revival is ugly in a very familiar way.
