"I'm gonna pop some tags/ only got 2020 in my pocket"
"What's wrong with thrift stores?" my daughter asked yesterday morning.
At first, I couldn't understand why she was asking the question. She's grown up in a house where Craigslist is our number-one source for furniture, where the consignment of her outgrown clothes has funded the endless pairs of Bloch tights and ballet slippers her dancing requires, where we're currently converting a pink plastic dollhouse we found on a curb with a "FREE" sign into a haunted mansion.
It turned out that the attitude we've normalized in this house -- "it's new to us, that's the exciting part" -- is one that never prepared her for the possibility not all people would be excited about not buying new: "I read about a kid who was afraid people would tease him about buying jeans from a thrift store and I wondered what was wrong with that. Why would people tease him?"
How could I start in explaining how clothing can be a stand-in for establishing and reinforcing cultural and class norms? What helped a little: One of my daughter's favorite reads right now is DK Publishing's The Fashion Book, which has a two-page spread on grunge and then another spread showing the Marc Jacobs grunge collection for Perry Ellis. So we started with the origins of the grunge musical subculture, looked at the differences between the DIY grunge and the designer iteration, and finished with talking about how sometimes, some people are judgy about other people's buying choices for reasons that don't seem logical or fair, such as where somebody buys something.
I avoided making any Pretty in Pink references -- not only because what Andie chooses to do to her mother's dress is a crime against fashion, but because the teen insults about poverty and thrifting are nearly incomprehensible to a kid who's growing up in a time and place where "reduce, reuse, recycle" is as ingrained as "Look both ways before crossing the street" was for my Gen X cohort.
But thinking about Pretty in Pink reminded me of how glossy, moneyed homogeneity was positioned as real power dressing; the ambivalence with which the movie treats thrift-store dressing and upcycling makes it clear that self expression is dangerous for powerless people, and that only society's losers think other people's castoffs are valuable. It's instructive that the one iconoclastic adult in the movie, Iona, lives in a state of suspended adolescence and discontent until she gives herself a suburban-matron makeover. Then she finally gets her happy ending. Director John Hughes could empathize with underdogs, but he never quite shook the insistence that real fulfillment came not from mastering the discreet codes of the bourgeoisie.
The greatly enjoyable 2012 documentary In Vogue: The Editor's Eye includes a scene where magnificently old-school stylist/editor Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele sits on her chaise, reviews old photo spreads of the magazine, and says emphatically, "I hate grunge!" This antipathy among fashion-y types was slightly baffling -- in the documentary, Cerf de Dudzeele is the same woman who congratulates herself for having the daring to defy boundaries by having a woman in evening dress carry a giant day bag for an editorial shoot. Surely grunge, with its gleeful defiance of dictates that had governed pattern-mixing, balancing silhouettes, traditional gender presentation and layering, was fashion in the sense of self-expression through aesthetics?
It took me another viewing to realize the antipathy toward grunge was not because it was unglamorous but because it disempowered the mainstream fashion apparatus by saying none of the rules applied, not the ones about aesthetics, nor the ones about money and privilege. There's no way Pretty in Pink would have been made in the 1990s because everyone it was aimed at would have been baffled by the thrift-store antipathy. The coding around clothing and money had changed. So much so, in fact, that 2013, a Hedi Slimane grunge-homage collection for Saint Laurent was hailed by critics as "commercially lucrative."
Cintra Wilson's Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style (published in 2015) floats the premise that we still have ample subcultures with clear style rules, but that we no longer have one prevailing "fashion" as set by the people who used to make their livings telling us to think pink.
My favorite moment in all that sequence in Funny Face is immediately after the number ends, when the editor who's made every American woman dress in pink says she wouldn't be caught dead in that color. It reminds me very much of Tonne Goodman, erstwhile Vogue fashion editor, who stuck to her own self-defined uniform.
Of all the ways in which one's choices in clothing can demonstrate power, the power to opt out of choosing at all at all is one of the most subtle and potent. "Elegance is refusal," a very powerful woman in fashion is alleged to have said. Coco Chanel was talking about accessorizing, but she could have been talking about refusing to play by the rules. Some people flex their power -- or pretend to it -- by adopting a personal uniform. There's a big difference between choosing to wear a uniform and having no choice in what uniform one must wear.
As I told my daughter yesterday morning, there's a difference between "this is one of my options" and "this is the best of my options." What is true for retail seems true for the real world retail shapes and reflects too.
FURTHER READING
"Vintage Shopping Isn't What It Used to Be" (The Cut, September 6, 2015) -- "I both envy and pity young people now, that they don’t have to go to five places to find a secondhand Philip K. Dick novel or oversize cardigan. On eBay right now there are 598 listings for denim wrap-skirts."
"How A Booming Resale Business Could Lead The Future of Sustainable Fashion" (Refinery29, September 30, 2019) -- "When ThredUp launched in 2009, its biggest hurdle was convincing shoppers to buy pre-worn clothing in the first place, since it still carried a stigma."
"Style Is An Algorithm" (Vox, April 17, 2018) -- "That we are in the midst of a shift in taste might help explain our larger mood of instability and paranoia (or is it just me?). We can’t figure out what might be sustainable to identify with, to orient our taste on."
Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm and Grunge Is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music by Greg Prato are a great double feature for reading about the entire grunge music movement and the way it shaped the Seattle area.
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On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).