The times, they are a-changin'

In the Vanity Fair piece "You Say You Want a Devolution?", Kurt Anderson argues that fashion and design--art, music, movies, television, clothes, cars, etc.--looks much the same as it did 20 years ago. This fashion freeze is our collective response, Anderson offers, to the unparalleled rapidity of change in other areas such as economics and technology.

It's an interesting thesis. Well argued and written, too. But to totally buy into his idea, you have to share Anderson's vision: Anderson sees fashion as a collective bundle of popular trends, and the evolution of these trends looks something like a line on a graph surging upward as trends continue evolving. Over the last 20 years, though, that line has leveled off, according to his view.

This picture needs complicating, so I suggest an alternative model.

First, sticking with our graph: I think fashion includes at least a few lines, not just one, that have historically surged upward. And rather than leveling off, I see these lines splintering over last 20 years--even more so the last ten--as social groups subdivide into ever smaller subcultures of like-minded people.

While most of these lines keep trending upward over time, in my splintered model there could indeed exist some mainstream line hovering between and below these subcultures--a mainline that appears to level off and soldier on. But rather than see this grouping as having stagnated, it could be they just dropped their fidelity to fashion altogether. In this sense, their line simply stops. For them--the designers and the consumers--fashion has moved from the aesthetic realm to the political. (Note that fashion continues to demarcate affiliations.)

What the mainstream wears and what they listen to means less (or at least means something different) to them now than it did 20 years ago. So, for example, if you wore a new pair of Nike sneakers in 1993, you were saying something: Nike was synonymous with Michael Jordan and basketball supremacy, and the label was expensive so a new pair of kicks was a sign of status. If you're wearing a new pair of Nike shoes today, it's probably because your old ones wore out. More likely you wear New Balance because you've chosen comfort and practicality--the politics of personal choice--over glamour and status--the fidelity to fashion.

Anderson too briefly discusses changes in how we consume fashion. He's right here, of course, but doesn't take it far enough. He says,

The only thing that has changed fundamentally and dramatically about stylish objects (computerized gadgets aside) during the last 20 years is the same thing that’s changed fundamentally and dramatically about movies and books and music—how they’re produced and distributed, not how they look and feel and sound, not what they are.

Yes, technologically production, distribution, and consumption has changed. But these facets have changed in meaning, too. How and what we make and consume is now a political matter: Toyota Prius or Hummer? File sharing and torrents or iTunes? Walmart, Whole Foods, or local?

-Other Notes:

• Anderson noted the tendency towards nostalgia one minute and then pointed to the outright freeze on design the next. This muddled his point. But his words ring clearly when he hypothesizes about the institutional and market forces at work.

• Certainly not all but many successful artists (designers, trend setters) from all fields in every age have kept an eye on the past. Designers and architects who worked in the Georgian period of the 18th century drew from the Classical Age just as their descendants in the age of Art Deco did in the 1930s.

• In the 1990's we referenced the 1970's. Right now (2011) the 1980's seem popular; the post-hippie feel of the Grunge era has been replaced by the post-New Wave kids of today.

• There is nothing totally new under the sun.