This Wasn't Meant to be Neutral: "Fashion Journalism" Essay

(Note: This is an essay I wrote for a Fashion Journalism writing contest on the Write The World website. I could have said a lot more, and the ending is perhaps more positive than my usual stance. But there was both a time and word limit, and I didn't feel like revising it too much. In any case, here it is.)

In eighth grade I bought an Anti-Flag t-shirt and my first leather jacket. It was my year of transformation from frightened, invisible chameleon to angry, cynical punk. I gravitated towards the hardcore look--studded jackets, combat boots, band t-shirts with political slogans, dyed hair and eyeliner--because I was angry, aware, and identified with the punk ethos, as well as with  political ideologies like anarchism. It was an informed statement I was determined to make.

In ninth grade, I started high school and drifted towards kids who dressed like me. They didn’t listen to Anti-Flag, Bad Religion, or Against Me, though; they listened to Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco, Pierce the Veil. They called themselves punk (I disagreed), decked out in black Converse or flowered combat boots, Hot Topic or Urban Outfitters shirts and torn jeans, leather jackets and colorful hair. If they shopped at thrift stores, it was to be trendy, not to resist the influence of globalized brands with horrific labor records. I realized that the message my chosen aesthetic communicated was not what I was aiming for. I was seen as a commercial rebel, an angsty privileged kid hating the world. Somewhere along the way, the style I used to communicate radical political sentiments had become mainstreamed. Whatever threat my anti-authority punk stance could have represented had become neutralized. My being different didn’t matter once different was in vogue.

Why did this happen? Why was a style meant to express disillusion, anger, and a fight-the-system-that’s-genuinely-screwing-us mindset, a sociopolitical subculture that takes its roots from hardcore music and the struggles of disenchanted youth, co-opted by mainstream brands and sold back to us, tamed and profitable?

It wasn’t a mistake. Nor was it that preppy kids decided spontaneously that combat boots were the new cute thing. It was a deliberate theft designed to take the bite out of movements or subcultures. Hip-hop culture (and its accompanying aesthetics stolen from the inner city and sold to suburbia) is another example of a deep-rooted lifestyle on which  major brands have capitalized. This clever maneuver creates fashion trends while simultaneously neutering the threat, anger, and voice of the communities that first created them. It’s a type of cultural appropriation--taking something meaningful from people who created it and selling it to others who won’t appreciate the history and don’t share the experiences from which their “trend” takes its roots. Making punk or hip-hop trendy, stealing from the underground, erasing its defiance--this deliberately destroys what these cultures meant to stand for. The statement I wanted to make by being “punk” was a political one. I was reading about war and climate change and neoliberalism. I was angry and I wanted to display my disenchantment with my country. I was not looking to be trendy or cool. My statement was not the implicit one made by some of my peers on how “hip” they are, or on how much money they spent to look so “punk” or “alternative.”

Although we may be force-fed these styles stripped of meaning, we are also choosing to buy them. As Naomi Klein writes in an article for The Guardian, we have a “preference for symbols over substance.” The symbols are appropriated and mass-marketed while the substance gets forgotten. She continues: “[B]ecause of [their] high-cost demands” to the established social structure, the movements co-opted by mainstream branding campaigns--from those of Nike to Urban Outfitters to Obama--“had not only committed followers but serious enemies.” To make those movements harmless, the corporate elites smooth them down and sell their images to the mainstream.  

But I can take heart in the fact that if these aesthetics and cultures appeal to the mainstream, then there is a niche for them outside of the places where they took root. They are sold stripped of their message, yes, but if we from whom these cultures are appropriated continually remind those who are buying them what they were actually stand for, the effort to erase our movements’ roots may fail, and could instead gain steam. At least, we may reclaim the narration of our cultures, freeing them from the status of “trends” so that the original, radical creators can take them back.