The most important thing to know is that American Apparel is the new Abercrombie & Fitch. Which is to say, all of a sudden even the popular kids are dressing like hipsters. I'm not just saying this because I recently started spending most of my time in the vicinity of 12th and Broadway. I see the change just as much in mass culture, particularly in certain music videos for songs by artists who could not be more mainstream: Katy Perry, Usher, and Taio Cruz. About five years ago hipsterdom started riding a dialectical whiplash headed straight for the dead center of the mainstream. The period of 2004-2005 was the breaking point, the era of "Float On" and the Postal Service and Franz Ferdinand and the soundtrack to Garden State. The last six months or so were the Age of Gaga, which is now on hold until she releases her new album. With Gaga momentarily back-burnered, the air that has rushed in to fill her void is all hipster-inflected. Alternative is truly the new normal.
That poor girl who fell out of a 25th-floor window her first night (or thereabouts) at the Parsons School of Design was, judging from the few pictures I've seen of her, a patron of American Apparel or some analogous brand. The police found a small camera next to her body, and speculated that she may have climbed outside the window to take a picture--presumably, a picture to post on her "online diary." Hipsterdom has spread via the Internet.
The "Teenage Dream" video was shot to look like a Facebook photo album come to life. This shows us beyond a doubt that this abrupt change is because people now spend more time on Facebook than they do looking at professional photography. Mark Zuckerberg had no idea what an all-devouring monster he was unleashing on the world.
I think Am Appy is best understood as an offspring of this phenomenon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g (not that this is a new idea or anything, it's just expressed fairly well)
ReplyDeletere: the 'monster' of Facebook: Oh come on. Social networking would have happened anyway, it just would have been on Myspace instead or something.
ReplyDeletere: the Facebook style: I think it's fascinating to consider the narrative that the direction of entertainment nowadays as moving towards things that appear 'genuine' or informal, as we can visualize through the fact that successful internet memes (Star Wars Kid, Chocolate Rain, lolcats, David After Dentist) are so weirdly 'small' and non-dramatic; it's not the violently overdone shit that you find on America's Funniest Home Videos, it's something different and imo more human. The difference between personal and commercial is lessening, from both directions.
Everything would have happened anyway--I guess I'm just offering a contribution to the mythologization of Mark Zuckerberg.
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