LOO K I N G A. H. E. A. D.
I have been disappointed that recent appreciation of the street—with a fashion bent at least—has been through the lens of commoditization. The “street“ seems unable to be mentioned without the suffix -wear -wear -wear, and the gold rush to capitalize on imagined identities; on collectors enabled by network effects to trade more, faster.
But let’s set aside the clothes for a moment. They’ll be back, don’t worry.
[lops off the -wear]
Legends from the street loom large.
Throughout modernity (and post-modernity), particularly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the idea of the “street” was about lived experience. The sun, the breeze—and in cities—the soot, the grime, the clamor; the ringing construction clatter; the half-heard fragments of passing conversation, drew writers and thinkers from Virginia Woolf to Ice-T to consider what it means to be alive in public space, subjective experiences bumping, crossing in and around the lives of others. The sensorium of the street creates a world to slip in to and fight against; to meander about on a lazy afternoon; to hurry toward. I’ll never forget the particular turn of phrase often uttered by a friend’s Swedish grandmother, who, whenever she observed a car shrieking around the corner or a stranger running breathlessly past on the sidewalk, would remark with a glint in her eye, “She must be late to sing.”
When we step out, conversations, encounters, and kinetic activity pass frenetically, only to be rushed upon and replaced by the next unbidden, sometimes bizarre or heartwarming moment. After the retreat home, such encounters linger in recent memory; some stick with us for years. The “look” of the street is our collective remembrance of it. And our imagination of it.
The proverbial “street” was/is a cultural imaginary of urban strife, cosmopolitanism, social strata and the mixing of it all, brought to us through scene-setting, storytelling, and (lest we forget) actually being there. Pounding pavement. Wheeling about.
That bastion of street retail, Supreme, was a late product of being there in New York, nestled downtown and brought to existence in a logo culture that had matured with a counterculture generation ascendant in boardrooms, design firms, ad agencies, and headhunting organizations; “merchants of cool” spinning street credo into 30-second spots and hyped sneaker releases. That’s a retroactive way of looking at it. As James Jebbia told it, “I always really liked what was coming out of the skate world. It was less commercial—it had more edge and more f**k-you type stuff.” The message was principally the same, old heads and marketers alike shouting: you can’t buy the street, but you can own it.
On the street, one can feel a sense of commune and solitude at the same time. One could project and imagine through strangers. One could meet that stranger. One could wander. There may be a little danger involved. Or a little possibility.
—
Hardness arose as a rap aesthetic at about the same time much of the music became essentially suburban. While artists from Harlem and the Bronx were still producing good-time party jams, middle-class kids from Queens and Long Island began to form the contemporary image of the rapper as an articulate gangster with a chip on his shoulder, a young black man hard by choice.
— Jonathan Gold, LA Weekly, May 5, 1989
—
Writers in mid-nineteenth century Paris were entranced by this ritual dance playing out in public space. Charles Baudelaire, who, criticized in our times for problematic biases of gender and class, was attuned to this portent so prolifically that he took the passive hunt of discovery on the street and wore it as a badge; a defining way of life. In fashion history (itself being problematized—and better for it), the flâneur is perhaps less an individual than a collective witnessing of the street. Street life was a poetic, evocative experience that made life art, that art made beautiful through its characteristic color, line, imitation of light and the human form. And the clothes. It brought a certain fascination to the quotidian — unbridled wonder/imagination to the passive observer.
Wandering down the recently widened boulevards of Paris led many to wonder, what were the worlds beyond these clothed personages?
In Baudelaire’s time, the street was a menagerie of luxury and the energy of new consumption. Social standing was upheld, obscured, blurred, and futilely enforced through sartorial effort. The advance of technology—perhaps most profoundly the sewing machine—opened the type of dress formally reserved for the very wealthy to the moderately wealthy and a rising middle class. People dressed for the time of day to see and be seen. Silk was sumptuous as ever, and trimmings that echoed the unbridled surface ornamentation of neoclassical architecture adorned row upon row of skirt and hem. Roller-printed cotton and dye chemistry had made more color and pattern available to more people. The dandy was a cultural figure that, through imperiousness and impeccable aesthetic sense, transcended social order through sheer force of will: the ultimate individual.
…the demigod of boredom who looked at the world with an eye as glassy as his pince-nez, suffering because his disarranged cravat had a crease, like the ancient Sybarite who suffered because his rose was crushed. He is indifferent about the horse he rides, the woman he greets, and the man he encounters and at whom he gazes a while before recognizing him. He bears, written on his forehead—in English—this insolent inscription: What do you and I have in common?
— Paul de Saint-Victor, La Presse, August 21 1859. Quoted in Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 140.
Baudelaire would have been confronted by it all: on the street, esteemed carriages, brightly-colored silks trimmed with ruffles, ribbons, lace, parasols, hair piled high, tailored suits. Later, revivals of eighteenth-century styles, in which sumptuous textiles swept from the sides of a garment, gathering voluminously in the back to form what would be called “the bustle.” Silks laden with trimmings and surface ornament were overlaid on structures—corsets and, earlier in the century, circular layered petticoats that evolved into cage crinolines. These added an air of lightness to the garment—a hollowness beneath structural form that abetted ease of movement, lighter and more free. The new era was ever arriving. Comparisons have been made between the architecture of the era and women’s fashion. Steel would support it all: the cage crinoline, then the Grand Palais (1897–1900).
—
Voluminous gathering formed at the rear of this British dress, c.1880s, “arches into what is a cross between a polonaise and a flying buttress.” —Richard Martin and Harold Koda, from the exhibition The Ceaseless Century, September 9–November 29, 1998.
—
Comings and goings from the first department stores, les grands magasins in Paris, made the goods and the mindset of fashion available more profoundly to the populace. Mass transit enabled visitors from all quarters and outside the capital. Writers such as Dickens, who took a slightly more polemical tone on the societal change, wrote that Paris was “the inn for Europe.” (Dickens, “Dress in Paris,” 1863.)
Social differences became ever more minute, ever more consumable, ever more conscious for the onlooker and the meaning held therein.
—
“Most rapping used to promote the rapper’s indomitability, his invincibility: “I create; I am.” When Public Enemy has Chuck D in a prison cell, it is only so that he can break out; when an L.L. Cool J rhyme includes a policeman, he is only there for L.L. to outwit. A rapper, whose implicit statement is always “You want to be like me,” is a role model whether he sets out to be one or not. If nobody wanted to be like him, nobody would buy the record.”
— Jonathan Gold, LA Weekly, May 5, 1989
—
In the twentieth century, there are enough archetypes of street culture dubbed over and over again into a kind of flip book catalog-style that, for some, have become such forced tropes as to ring hollow. Skateboarding, hip hop, counterculture, and outdoor gear have all taken their place in what, for some, has become little more than a blasé ad-roll. With plenty of merch, and some risk/reward for the speculator, these streets went corporate and multinational. And yet, people find participation in these sartorial codes immensely gratifying, affirming of their own values, of the lives they want to and will lead. When I walk down to Cadman Plaza and see a gathering of thirty or so yung sk8boarders ollie-ing off the curbs of a dry fountain, peeking out over bent knees in baggy work pants on the steps of the Brooklyn government seat, I know the street still inspires.
On some days, walking through DUMBO, the street can feel as if it’s being used cruelly, relegated to mere backdrop, a place that exists only to be frozen within the scrolling viewport of someone’s iPhone. Some talented would-be flâneurs can traverse the street while gazing mesmerizingly into the glass rectangle, neck arched downward, stepping forward with only the use of peripheral vision. Yet these days, when we strive to stay six feet apart (the dance gets interesting on a New York sidewalk), I still see strangers sneaking a glance of curiosity, or locking eyes with a stranger (or a stranger’s puppy) over the top seam-edge of a mask. Allure remains.
In Samuel R. Delany’s fiction, the street is laden with this insignia, traversing geospatial confines to intergalactic proportions (see: Time Considered as A Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, Triton, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand).
On the street, there were covert signals that, though unnoticeable to the casual passersby, could be recognized by those who were looking. They meant, “You are safe!” Or “Come with me.” I imagine that these still exist out there for those that want to see. In nineteenth-century Paris, there was abundant and evolving fascination with the nuances of tying a cravat. Philippe Perrot noted the preponderance of “half-practical, half-humorous ‘physiologies’” (Perrot, 117) brought forth to enumerate the tying of one’s cravat:
“Amidst the general leveling that threatens society, amidst the fusion of ranks and conditions, amidst the universal flood of petty, inferior pretensions directed at superior grand pretensions, we thought to render a signal service to the upper classes, to hold out so to speak, a veritable life buoy by proffering an Art of Wearing One’s Cravat.”
— Baron de l’Empesé, L’Art de metre sa cravate, 1827. Quoted in Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 119.
Broad sentiments of cosmopolitanism still apply.
Worlds collide
Today, cosmopolitanism comes heavy with context and the burden of history; the realities of cultural tourism, demography, municipal policies designed to attract creative classes that displace (former, poorer) communities, and increased policing that comes with the landing of consumer arrivistes.
The street has come to include cyberspace visions, from Snow Crash to Neuromancer — the tumult and exchange of open-air street markets imagined in virtual space, projected in the mind, overlaid with networked signals more intuited than known, processing faster than human cognitive perception. The roaming of Deus Ex characters around a fictional Prague in 2029. Plugged in.
The rise of self-publishing and social media gave way to “street style” in the latter 2000s, and its precipitous rise in popularity led some to feel that style on the street is best if orchestrated and planned out beforehand. If a digital picture falls in the forest…
—
Fame and fashion tyrannized the demimondaines most of all. For them, no respite: “migraines are unmentioned, neuralgia ignored. One had to be seen or die.”
— Amédée Achard, Paris-Guide (1863). Quoted in Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, 173.
—
We’ve largely moved past these visions of the street, though they are still bought and marketed heavily. There is another idea of the street, no less phantasmagoric or idealized, no less emanating from lived experience, poetic evocation and hardship than that of punks and emcees. In the US, this grand boulevard is the one we call Main Street.
This is a street not characterized by the dust and grime of inner city grist, but by the intimate, spatial airiness envisioned in low buildings, open sky, broad fields, and the ability to see a horizon in the distance. It’s a hearkening, however idealized, to a sense of common bonds, humble work, and community — simplicity found in the small(er) scale. Some hashtag murmurs have pulled attention toward #cottagecore, a style adopted by young people that—although perhaps more inspired by fictional faeries and “cottages” of the type that line the coast in Carmel-by-the-Sea—reference the countryside and homesteading, visible in worn prairie dresses, hair braiding, and wildflowers.
For others, this street representation is a battle cry from the outer bounds of economic and cultural marginalization, similar to hip hop and punk, yet strikingly different: take the stereotypical look of “white trash,” own it, enlarge it, and create an explosive vision made for and by social media, enabled by the ease of DIY, internet-enabled screen printing. Both paths may lead to enterprising Etsy stores, yet the cultural thread is there. Guerilla gardening, fiber swapping, and public fridge sharing have all demonstrated this “local” approach. In clothing, the stories get more complicated. I think of the parroted attire of rural Wisconsin in Jon Stewart’s film Irresistible. Main Street has an idealized look in 2021, and it hovers around the comforts and anxieties surrounding American frontiers: education, civil engagement, staking the land.
—
…what we want to do is take a word where people come with a particular certainty and then redefine it many times throughout the show, so you don’t come with one overarching definition, but you start to look at different aspects of a word, and hopefully come out more confused.
— Judith Clark, 2016, on the Barbican exhibition “The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined”
—
In 2021, fashion has become more distributed, more international, more obviously perilous to our ecosystems. Today we live by the molecule, the idea of twentieth-century plastics still a preferred pillar of infrastructure: fabrics and materials fused at the molecular level, molded into “microfiber” thread by high-tech spinneret or heat-fused into bouncy, lightweight soles. Clothes have become more transient in their display—dancing across glass screens at refresh rates of 60–120 times per second—and more obviously non-disposable in their consumption.
Tomorrow we may live by the continued genetic alteration of living organisms and biomimicry. Mycelium leather, algal foam, orange fiber abound.
The street is how we live moving in and about the structures built by us for capital, by capital. What we wear out there may be to shield, attract, repel, or to signal all kinds of right and wrong across the spectrum. Fashion has always meant to cultivate a new world, latent with possibilities.
So in these days of stifling interiority and limited movement, let’s pay homage to the erstwhile street. It’s still out there, and it’s not the same. While we shuffle toward the door to pick up our corrugated cardboard, folded and sealed into cubic shapes of stunning variety, while we adjust the environment to suit a rectangular Zoom port view, let’s t h i n k.
Coming in from a long day out with the smell of the open air, the sun — the atmosphere — clinging to the clothes and the skin. The calm that follows. The pull to get back out there tomorrow.
Some street life for yaaaaaa
The thrilling opening sequence to Minding the Gap
Virginia Woolf, “Oxford Street,” 1931–32
R E A D
Dead White Man's Clothes // ATMOS Liz Ricketts, J. Branson Skinner, Charlie Engman
The Maintenance and Preservation of Life // VESTOJ Christina Moon
Can High Fashion Change? // WSJ Robin Givhan
The Radical Quilting of Rosie Lee Tompkins // NYT Roberta Smith
How Enslaved People Helped Shape Fashion History // GUERNICA Jonathan M. Square
The Secret Economics of A VIP Party // ECONOMIST 1843 Ashley Mears
How Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing // PROPUBLICA Alec MacGillis
Does This Shirt Make Me Look Too Woke? // BRICKS Jacob Seferian
Is swag genetic?? // BLACKBIRD SPYPLANE Jonah Weiner, Erin Wylie
NEWS
MLK DAY.
The way of nonviolence.
HARRIS
Kamala Harris will be a fashion force. For (kind) conversation: what does “approachable” really mean, and why is it viewed as important? Why particularly for her?
PARTY VOTES
In the mix of bipartisan things the US government does (outside of historic impeachment proceedings):
Sen.’s Diane Feinstein (CA) and Susan Collins (MA) passed a bipartisan bill to establish a national women’s history museum as part of the Smithsonian. Bill viewable here. Now for the museum of gender rebellion. We’ll get there…
AZ FACTORY (RICHEMONT)
Alber Elbaz’s debut is January 26, online.
S O N G S
From 1993.
Performed brilliantly by our friend Nessa.
H A C K Y O U R M I N D
Shoutout to the PBS-‘splainer style narration of Jacob Ward in this entertaining and thoughtful three-part series on human psychology. Shares the thought-provoking work of Laurie Santos, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller, and more. Your parents’ parents are going to love this… (Wait, I’M the product?!)
FASHION AGGRO
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BIZGNASH
This is the preview issue, and the only one that will be available to all. Paid subscribers will get an additional bonus at the end of 2021.