The astroturfing of (fashion) culture
Did they *actually* pave paradise and put up a parking lot? [<< Joni Mitchell]
Squint your eyes, and sure…’fashion’ looks like a vibrant multi-dimensional universe of self expression, creativity, cores, aesthetics, and ideas, surprises. But open them properly and it becomes apparent, like when Cher Horowitz’ Monet comes into focus, that actually, things look kind of…homogenised, repetitive, derivative, unsurprising.
It looks healthy and green and lush. But up close is that grass…astroturf?
There’s a lot of talk about the widespread flattening of culture.
But no one’s doing it like fashion’s doing it.
Watching fashion brands sometimes feels like watching my 5 year-old and her friends playing football on Sunday mornings: wherever the ball goes, everyone thunders after it. Blindly chasing. The result is that nobody really gets the chance to play with it properly. Nobody ever scores a goal.
But I get why they do it.
A market that used to reward originality and risk now rewards conformity.
Name an important fashion designer.
Is it someone on this list? Coco Chanel, Alexander McQueen, Yves Saint Laurent, Margiela, Halston, Marc Jacobs, Mary Quant, Courreges, Karl, Perry Ellis, Christian Dior, Galliano, Vivienne Westwood, Jean Paul Gaultier, Gianni Versace, Katharine Hamnet, Giorgio Armani, Elsa Schiaparelli, Stella McCartney, Isaac Mizrahi, Dries Van Noten, Ann Demeulemeester.
Different people, different clothes. But everyone on that list (and many more that aren’t) have one thing in common: they all used/use their work - in their own ways - to examine/question/challenge societal norms and expectations, to provoke thought, to open minds and shift opinions. Everyone on this list is/was a creative person with hardcore craft skills, but what really set them apart was not their hands but their brains, their eye, their attitudes. They all shared an ability to really see and understand the culture, and then move it, change it, or at least pass comment on it.
These are names associated with originality and risk. Oddity, even. That’s what being an important designer used to mean. These designers (and many more) pissed people off, offended the establishment, frustrated the media, caused moral panic (the fabric waste in those Dior skirts!), alienated people. Sometimes repulsed them.
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Brains like that were of course always rare, but today it feels like designers with that sort of vision and exactitude are edge cases. Simone Rocha. Rick Owens. Jonathan Anderson. Phoebe Philo. Molly Goddard. Clemens Telfar. Shao Yang, maybe.
The consolidation of fashion into the mega supergroups, the rarity of the independent (gwan Simon Porte’s Jacquemus), the crushing pressure on the houses to produce more and more collections (and more and more smash-hit cash-cow accessories). The vested interests and shared logistics and intricate web of power. The sheer economics of it all, means that designers - even if they begin as risk-takers, find it hard to remain so if they want to be taken seriously seriously. If they want a seat at one of the big tables.
New enough, creative enough, interesting enough
At a more mortal level of fashion, there’s a pervasive culture of copy and paste. Likely fuelled by the ferocious velocity of the trend cycle, and of fast fashion’s production cycle. But also a lack of thrill and ingenuity. Likely caused by the money-folks’ attitude to risk, and also the sheer amount of data the typical fashion business now has access to about what sells.
The truth is we’ve never had access to more tools, opportunities, and ways to create - there are more garments created today than ever in history. There are more stores, more collections, more drops, more ways to shop, more ways to access fashion than ever before. And all of us reading this, we each likely own more clothes, shoes and accessories than several of our ancestors combined.
All that opportunity.
And yet the amount of repetition and derivativeness is, it seems, also higher than ever.
Standard deviations from the norm
The deficit in genuine newness is visible all over the place. We’re apparently seeing fewer significant new movements, paradigms and mega genres everywhere. Not just in fashion. What we’re getting is more and more recycling and regurgitating.
Annual lists of blockbuster movies, chart-topping video games, and bestselling books (and big awards winner-lists) contain more sequels, spin-offs, reboots and repeating franchises than ever before. If everything looks the same, it isn’t because Hollywood is stupid. It’s because it’s so smart.
Music is becoming more similar and less musically-diverse because that’s what rises to the top.
Everyone’s office looks the same (WeWork/Soho House lite), because that’s what the urban Millennials seem to want.
High streets and malls all look the same (Main Street = chain street) because that’s where the (perhaps only remaining) money is.
Check into a hotel aimed at people in their 20s-40s…which city are you in? Which country, then? Ok, which continent?
Everyone’s feet look the same: Sambas. Tabis. New Balance. Salomon. Ballet flats. Birkenstock (and none of them are inventions of our current era).
Everyone’s craft beer looks the same.
Everyone’s Airbnb looks the same.
Everyone’s faces have the same…no make-up-make-up glow.
All the apartment buildings look the same.
And accent-aside, everyone speaks with the same, like, ticks and vocal fryyy. Everyone’s sentences (even the 5-year-old’s) begin with that 2020s ‘So…’.
Fast fashion x social media = style astroturf
Fast fashion has indelibly altered the fashion landscape by prioritising speed, affordability and in-the-moment relevance over quality and originality…and ethics. Sure, it democratises (read: homogenises) access [but at what cost?]. But it also democratises (homogenises) the thinking, too: when everyone, everywhere has access to the same styles at the same time, then of course everyone, everywhere begins to dress alike.
"Fast fashion…results in everyone wearing very, very similar clothes."
- Valerie Steele, fashion historian
And social media has also indelibly altered the fashion landscape by turbocharging mimetic desire. Of course, we can’t deny our human desire for belonging and community. But when hundreds of thousands of people are seeing the same inspo that you’re seeing, roughly at the same time that you’re seeing it, then ideas are adopted en masse and individuality diminishes. That ain’t belonging and community.
"Everyone wants to wear what their favourite influencers are wearing.
So social media flattens fashion into single, consumable looks."
- Vanessa Friedman
Aesthetic globalisation and the mass generic
We’re fed an endless and relentless supply of the derivative and the banal. Our feeds and our shops are full of cultural (and literal) landfill. Is it any wonder that the typical garment fails to register and, as
stated, is only worn 7 times before being discarded.We’re living in a moment where the easiest way to describe so many things is as the XXX of YYY (the Airbnb of camping, the Uber of dog walking; the COS of make-up).
It’s not all down to the algo
It’s also down to mimetic desire (the invisible hand guiding all of consumer culture) and the steady march of globalisation (what did we expect?). All that globalisation made it easier for any idea, trend, core, aesthetic, moment, mode of speech, piece of slang, anything to spread worldwide near-instantaneously. As the fashion system has become ever more global, what’s popular in one part of the world can now very quickly become so everywhere else. So we get steamroller-like global trends. Like athleisure. Or wide-leg jeans. Or minimalism. No shade!
There’s been a lot of chat about how coffee shops all look the same in our algorithm-mediated life.
But coffee shops all looked the same long before the algo! In the 90s Italian-heritage mom and pop cafes scattered across so many cities, especially London, all looked the same, mimicking cafes in the Old Country. In the 2000s second wave coffee shops all looked the same too, in the Central Perk mould of oversized cups and massive cookies on Chesterfield sofas and battered board games, turn-of-century Urban Outfitters touch-of-hand energy and actual cash money.
That all got stripped back into the urban hipster third-wave coffee shop of the 2010s, which morphed of course into what we now have on every corner, everywhere (esp in the ground floor units of the bland new-build apartment blocks): the scandi-ish- coded, wellness-ish very-Instagrammable light-filled spots with the clean sans serif branding, the plants, the marine ply peg boards with the ‘3.5’ price points. You know the places - those cro-nutty, alt-milky, iced-bevy, friction-free, fast-wifi-enabled emporia of aspirational chill. Not so much third spaces as international air spaces. Cute little vacuum voids. Of anywhereness. Everywhereness.
Please tell me you remember that
piece on Ungrammable Hang Zones (places “where you’re not remotely tempted to indulge in the modern tic of whipping out yr phone and documenting yr visit for the timeline”). It’s worth a resurfacing if only for the bit about “deadeningly prefab” modern cafes as “content fulfilment hubs without soul or substance”:“The low-humanity kind of eatery where you point yr phone at a QR code and do contactless payment before eating a room-temp grain bowl under a pink neon sign that says “Living My Best Life”… the kind of dystopian place…people can enter into — dazed and automaton-like — and maybe take a BLEAK selfie in front of the neon sign.” -
, 2022
Fashion of nowhere, fashion of everywhere.
Back when I used to go shopping the whole time in actual shops, like The Big Topshop in London’s Oxford Circus (RIP), I remember often really hating things. I’d love things, always. Too many things. But I’d also be regularly offended by stuff. Like, really thinking oh…who buys this shite? And I was way less set in my ways back then, much more experimental (really, I had no idea who I was, y’all!). But even with that more open mind, things just felt more polarising then. The options were more extreme. The Overton Window was wider, maybe? I could walk from Topshop to Kookai, or All Saints, or Miss Selfridge, A+F, The Gap (where I worked), and again see, on the whole, a bunch of different kinds of things. A mix of ideas. The stores were nowhere near as same-y as they (or their equivalents) are today. It was only the very bottom of the stack (Primark) that kind of aggregated a bit of everything, lacking its own point of view or signature moves. The real fashion brands had *things they did*, unmistakable things. Some of those things I hated, but even that was good! At least we wouldn’t all be wearing the same thing at the cluurb. I don’t know about you but nowadays when I scroll, things rarely feel truly horrendous. Most things are ok. Fine. Semi-pleasing. Inoffensive. Mid. I full-body-yes less often these days. But I guess I also mouth-vom less, too.
Also, sigh, the same thing applies to the UX and design of all the ecom sites and in-app experiences. Esp the templated DTCs’ ones. I hear brand leaders speaking so often of optimising and streamlining and removing friction. Like that’s ineffably positive. I get it commercially. But culturally, I do weep a bit.
Anyway the ever on-it
said it better in her send this week:“There was a point in time when every mass retail brand traded in their kooky identities for H&M cleanliness...Gap, Mango, Zara, H&M, Madewell, Abercrombie — they all look the same, speak the same, work with the same celebrities and influencers, and make the same summer dresses and button up shirts.”
Spot the difference.
Also spot the difference here with this blanding i mean branding:
This is what the astroturfing of fashion culture looks like, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Ai and machine learning = rocket fuel in an era of modification, not originality
AI-generated design, and algo-informed product development is already happening all over the fashion system. And it needs to be treated with caution.
“There’s a lot of pressure these days to design by algorithm. We know too much about buying habits and likes, and the result is an insidious bias toward giving people what they have already indicated they want. It may be safe, and easier to sell, but it’s antithetical to the whole point of fashion, which should be about giving people what they never knew they wanted — what they couldn’t imagine they wanted — until they saw it.” - Vanessa Friedman speaking in a 2018 NY Times piece
It’s also antithetical to the whole point of art, too. Like art critic Ben Davis said last year in his book Art in the After-Culture:
“The promise of AI is to speed up this [versioning, modifying, but not actually originating] process dramatically…If you want a new song that sounds like the Beatles or a new painting that looks like a Basquiat, these are trivial problems to solve”.
But then, cutting to the chase (and also, to the quick):
“It’s a bit silly to say that AI ‘will never make real culture’ when all the resources of the capitalist ‘culture industry’ are focused exactly on the creative operation that AI does best: analysing what is already known to be popular, then slightly varying its pattern - sometimes very, very slightly - to create a marketable new version of the same”.
There is a loud - and v relevant to fashion - conversation going on about data ruining sport: we know so much about how a sport happens that we optimise and strategise and actually suck the life and drama and nuance and magic right out of the game.
And as we’ve seen, the more data we have on what’s popular in music, movie formats, narrative structures of novels, the less complex, more derivative, less experimental they get. We get more of what it appears that we like, and less opportunity to figure out what we actually do like.
Is that why everyone’s just put away the same leggings-and-sock combo in favour of the same sundress-and-baseball cap combo?
In closing then…could this be the moral of the story?
As technology gets better and better at imitating us, there will - has to be, no? - a premium on a person’s ability to be extremely human, and have extremely original, novel thoughts.
“For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: don’t let them banalize you.”
- Brian Christian, The Most Human Human
Anyway, reasons to be cheerful:
Chaos packaging - coffee in first aid kit packaging, juice in a car-oil can, tampons in an ice cream bucket.
JWA and all who sail in him. Catch 2025 resort show this Sunday here.
Thrifting, online and off.
The steady rise of patina as a status signal
Coffee shops that dgaf about the things you think they should. And no, you can’t get a takeaway cup. Here’s mine.
That French expression ‘plus ca change’: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Chic.
Thanks for reading/see you next time :)
Happy father’s day this weekend to the fathers. Or maybe just the Brit dads?
Beth
YES!! Wow, this is excellent and right in line with what I've been thinking about lately in terms of fashion, social media & sameness. Great post!
On point as always! It always bugs me when people wax lyrical about the supposed democratization of global fashion like…no, we’re locked in. I just want to buy trousers that aren’t cargo pants or grey slacks y’all, why is this so hard?! 🫠