pivot

Those who work in fashion or a fashion/media-adjacent role often whimper about the next layer of skin they are going to wear. You know, once all this fashion recognition is over and done with, once the money has been made, once the byline or masthead meets the expectations your parents made for them, or worse, the ones they made for themselves.

Often, male, female, non-binary, gay, straight – whoever discuss the pivot they want to make towards something that ‘matters’.

“I want to train to be a therapist,” says a close friend who I worked side-by-side with inside a (caged) Condé Nast fashion cupboard for a big-selling glossy.

“I think I am going to fuck it all and become a tree surgeon” says the high-powered creative producer who works with fashion and sport’s biggest brands.

“What I really want to be is a nurse” says my signed make up artist ex-housemate, who has recently moved to Brooklyn and still paints the faces of major models for magazine covers and huge fashion campaigns, lensed by the cooler, edgier people that matter. That is, according to the powers that be (namely, Dazed 100).

Fashion and media is such a tiny bubble, a never-ending, shaky ladder that takes ages to crawl up and is literally crumbling beneath you. There is no way to take a friend or a trusted colleague up with you, unless you can see some room to climb said ladder in tandem. With media spends minimizing and budget cuts happening on a weekly basis, only the devoted (see: overworked) survive. It also feels just right to the higher-ups if you keep everyone at the level you think they do just fine at. That way, the weight is evenly distributed and the ladder won’t snap.

Intelligent people, thoughtful people who aren’t social climbers know better than to stick to the hamster wheel, living paycheck to paycheck while making work their life, working twelve hours days in a kind of arbitrary assistant-junior-editor role for six odd years… if they don’t have fifteen years to waste (or Daddy’s money), it would only be natural for them to want to save lives or do something meaningful.

Either that, or marry rich.

Protected: Pre-Pandemic Papi

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I wish you’d take better care of yourself. You need to be watching movies that are going to cheer you up. Like Austin Powers. Or that one with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. You’re like Winona Ryder from Girl, Interrupted all of a sudden. But you look more like Angelina Jolie. She’s blond in that.” -Reva

She took it as a source of pride that she had a superior knowledge of pop culture during this period. She knew all the latest celebrity gossip, followed the newest fashion trends. I didn’t give a shit about that stuff. -Reva, in Ottessa Moshfegh’s book My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

edith wharton on her friendship with henry james

“Perhaps it was our common sense of fun that first brought about our understanding. The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like intersecting searchlights.”

Does Teenage Love Still Exist?

I make fun of myself often, telling my friends I’m like Pavlov’s ‘ramp tramp‘. I am classically conditioned that when I hear the sound of a skateboard wheel hitting the pavement, I immediately salivate – it’s as though I am intrinsically inclined to jerk my head and be on high alert for the big reveal – who is it riding this board? Is he cute? Will he speak to me? Am I going to have to pay for his brunch?

I blame my obsession with man-boys on being sandwiched in between two brothers – my older brother six years my senior, was always a skateboarder or a BMX rider – ‘extreme sports’, by their very definition, were the pinnacle of masculinity to me. My younger brother, also a skater, was always editing skate videos to songs by The Cramps and Tribe Called Quest. My pre-teens were spent jumping on the trampoline in our backyard so I can get just enough of a peep above the fence to perv on my brothers’ herd of teenaged male friends in Cuban chain necklaces, studded ear piercings, wife beaters (what is the now-PC version of this coin of phrase? LMK), skate decks with misogynist imagery or hilarious onamatapoeic sayings, or words like “SHAKE JUNT” or “CHICKEN WINGS!” sprawled across the bottom. A personal favourite was a cartoon mock-up of a 2007 bald, angry Britney. Swoon.

Yet, in my mid-twenties, I still somehow gravitate towards this stylized way of being when it comes to my personal or romantic preferences. I myself was one to wear my messy trainers even in the chicest of Condé Nast offices, and to this day I fawn after a man in London skateboarding in his tweed suit, briefcase in hand – a very rare occurence, but an occurence, nonetheless. It seems like I couldn’t find the boy I wanted, so, somehow, I tried to become him. I went to music festivals and sat on the pavement drinking Red Stripe. In my adult life, working in fashion always gave me a chance to find references, build and image, and create something people wanted. Something that I found desirable.

I always pictured my first love/relationship/dalliance being with an emotional skater who wanted nothing but to spend all of his time with me listening to old vinyls when he wasn’t at the skate park. Who knows – maybe he had a passion for black and white photography in his spare time, a girl could dream. My musical tastes in middle school and highschool, now, seem like a subconscious attempt to search for my tribe at an Animal Collective concert, or find The One at that free Sonic Youth gig in Williamsburg.

Needless to say, it clearly never happened. I spent my early twenties looking for security. The first (and only) real relationship I was ever in was with an introverted professional who lived in a nice area, wore nice suits, and worked at a law firm. It was a teenage kind of love, that all-encompassing, I-can’t-live-without-you, let’s text all day, OMG I LOVE YOU! kind of love that gave me butterflies when he called, where you can’t help but turn red when he was brought up in conversation, and finally, of course, a fleeting love we should experience at least once, if we’re lucky. I found myself straying away from what became a healthy companionship because I craved that silly, messy, fun, young, teenage love.

For two years now I feel like dating has become less of an experience for me and more of a social experiement. These nighttime interviews involving wine (but mostly tequila shots) have done nothing but bring out the investigative journalist in me – I find myself now collecting experiences, stories, friendships, and personalities I’ve uncovered in the dating realm to add to my personal experience and my dossier of entertaining pub fodder I would share with friends.

These dates I go on – somewhere upwards of thirty to be exact, if I’m counting, have rarely involved a connection and more often than not left me yearning for that butterflies-in-your-stomach, ‘let’s make out in the rain’ kind of feeling I never truly got to match with the detailed narrative I’ve been mapping out in my head for so many years.

The sparse connections that I have made were really just men who ticked the boxes of the boys I had always fawned after. I find myself in a dating scene limbo, too afraid to move forward as I never feel the butterflies, so what is the point of making another attempt to meet? I take these dates and use them as opportunities to build long-lasting, platonic friendships with the man at hand, perhaps replacing the older brother that wouldn’t let me in his room when he and his friends were changing skate trucks, or my adult-version of the intimidating group of boys I’d ogle at the check out desk at Vans Off The Wall when I was thirteen, buying slip ons with my babysitting money.

When my friends call and ask about my dating updates, or request guy advice, I find that I can’t give any when it comes to living out a perfectly adult, respectable, equal relationship. To me, at this space in time, men fall into two categories.

A friend I have for life, where we tag eachother in memes and talk about music or
Someone who doesn’t exist yet – that all-encompassing, let’s get married and have babies imaginary guy on a skateboard, who only sees me.

That mature, companionship thing? No idea. As I sit cross-legged on my bed avoiding deadlines and human interaction, with my phone on airplane mode… I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. Friends are getting engaged, married, having babies, finding romance and stability while I refresh my dating apps. Dating is exhausting.

Instagram Style Tribes

2005. Wife beaters, anchor tattoos, British Rock ruling radios overseas, and the launch of a summer look that will forever be known as “festival style”. Amy Winehouse was the Queen of Camden and Pete Doherty and Kate Moss were up to nothing but trouble, being seen in their high-low get-ups of designer frocks, loose silk scarves, vintage army coats and lots of mud. The look was just messy enough to seem effortless. Is he walking home the morning after from a wild bender, or is he just that cool slightly dishevelled fella in the coffee shop?

Since the beginning of time we as humans have been divided into tribes. Your body tribal paint or jewellery, and later on your uniform of choice, defined where you sat in society. You lived in what you wore. You were what you dressed like, be that a painter, a hippy, or a skater. The 2005 equivalent of tribal uniform for the counter-cultures was dressing like a member of The Strokes, or the Libertines, inspired by their gig you saw at the weekend. No one could dress like their rock star idols unless they bought magazines or saw them live. There was no Instagram, no style blogs to tell you that a Black Flag T-shirt looks cool when you in fact have no idea they were once a band. When did our appearances stop reflecting our musical and artistic cultural interests?

Fast-forward ten years and all the good vintage shops are now empty, or just a graveyard of awful Christmas jumpers. It’s 2015 and hip-hop, R&B, and auto-tune now rule the radio. The style tribes we once so properly defined have since been blurred by the likes of rap artists collaborating with rock musicians. A pioneer in this movement is none other than Pharrell Williams, of Neptunes fame. Pharrell earned the nickname “Skateboard P” in high school, and the name stuck. Whilst forming N*E*R*D with childhood friend Chad Hugo, the group was arguably the first of its kind to take keyboard, percussion, and guitar sounds and combine rap beats, colloquial street terms, and R&B influenced choruses.

What makes Pharrell so likeable? I’m sure N*E*R*D means a lot of things to a lot of people. Skateboard P’s defining style both musically and sartorially (Adidas Tracksuits, That Hat (insert link) Clockwork Orange T-shirts) has unleashed heaps of copycats and “Hype Beasts” (a term for anyone who cites Kanye for Style inspiration, but we’ll get to that later). Tyler the Creator, rapper, artist and openly massive N*E*R*D fan cites Pharell as his idol and famously cried while watching him perform his rock/rap hit, “Rock star” (http://uk.complex.com/music/2014/11/tyler-creator-cries-watching-nerd-rock-star). Tyler the Creator’s own collective, Odd Future all skateboard, wear Vans, long striped tube socks, and listen to Beach House, despite only releasing rap music. A giant clash of cultures seems to have occurred along the way, combining all elements of your idol’s looks and implementing them you’re your style. This is a far cry from my early childhood memories of my cousin attending a local public high school where the “rockers” and the “rappers’” often found themselves in big fistfights. This brings me to my next point: The Internet.

Instagram allows us to create our very-own curated world. All of our favourite artists, musicians, magazines, and fashion blogs can be tracked, traced, and followed right on our smartphones. If you want a look for something to wear this Friday, you can follow someone like @Thefixformen for influence. Rather than scavenging all of the style pages and magazines, Instagram has made editing your favourite looks and shops easy. Jay-Z, The Sex Pistols, and a Nick Knight studio shoot can all inspire your style choices in a matter of seconds.

Long gone are the days when you must hop on the train to travel to a faraway hole in the wall to find that cool niche designer. Now all you have to do is tap that perfectly-filtered square once to see all style credits – and lucky you – you are redirected (if you wish) straight to a click-and buy screen to the designer’s or shops website. This culture has even created the rise of “Style Stars” (People famous for dressing cool, but not doing much else).

Being able to curate who you follow on Instagram is an easy way to compile the blogs you look to for inspiration. Without having to make any form of human contact or be a part of any style tribe, you can choose what style tribe you want to be apart of – and share it with the world. With the right look, angle, outfit, and a shout out to which labels you’re rocking, with luck, the label PR’s may give you a shout-out, creating the beautiful social media cycle we’ve all come to know and love.

When A$AP Rocky dropped his first mix tape, Live, Love, A$AP in 2011, he repeatedly name-dropped different avant-garde labels such as Maison Martin Margiela, Raf Simons, and Rick Owens. Back then they were considered cult-labels worn only by the style-conscious. A$AP invited his fans into his carefully curated world. In his first music video, one of his mob members even sported electric-green hair; bringing high-fashion punk looks to Harlem street culture and the mainstream. Rocky is now a famous style star in his own right, a fixture on the front-row at Fashion weeks, and was once muse to street wear labels such as Hood By Air and Pyrex. Some runway designers have even embraced this crossover of cultures, combining dapper tailoring, street wears, and even rave wear, such as Acne Studios Menswear 2015 show.

In what seems like a backlash, some rebellious designers are trying to clearly differentiate former trends, such as Hedi Slimane, known to some as the God of the rock and roll androgynous comeback, which he succeeded in doing with Dior Homme from 2000-2007. His years as creative director of Dior were inspired by all major rock decades from the sixties and seventies, to the grungy 90s – cue tight pantsuits, Chelsea boots, silky scarves, lots of ripped holes and flannel.

Now having taken the helms of Creative Director at Saint Laurent, Slimane has resurrected his rock and roll signature in his menswear collections, in something that seems to be staged as an anti-social media campaign, using mostly legendary rock stars as the face of his adverts (Think Courtney Love, Patti Smith, and Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon). Yet it’s the major style blogs who are reposting these images, whether they relate to his runway looks or not.

What all of these style stars have in common is the ability to move social media. Kanye West famously wore a women’s Celine shirt in 2011, causing a massive social-media frenzy along the blogger set. Everyone on the blogosphere had his opinion, but he was already becoming a fashion icon in the making. The iconic print has since been seen on the bottom of skateboards in blogger collaborations for years now. And I’m sure we all remember his BBC Radio interview with Zane Lowe…Leather jogging pants, anyone?

Older generations would argue that the idea of artists collaborating with skateboard or street wear brands, selling for hundreds of dollars completely goes against what the counter cultures were all about-going against the grain and creating your own tribe where you feel you belong. With our immediate click and buy culture, we can now pretend to belong wherever we like.

In terms of the fashion cycle, we all know how it works – street-style trends become popular, designers get inspired and the look trickles down to the high street – yet now, it seems some of those steps are now being skipped along the way. Instagram and fashion blogs have allowed us to pick and choose which trends we want to follow, creating our own digital-fashion tribes. We no longer look to music movements as our style guides, but aesthetically pleasing online content that helps shape our closet. We can thank Instagram for helping make regular Joes look great. There are no longer silent tribal nods on the street to someone within your tribe who is identifiable by the clothing they are wearing, or the bands they listen to. We can now double-tap endless pages in a cyber-salute. This may upset the innovators, but there’s a lot to be thankful for. The Internet has helped shaped careers, online shops, and given a platform for many unknown, talented brands. A quick snap and post while you’re at the bus stop one morning, and your opportunities are endless. All this at your fingertips, and you didn’t even have to pull the all-night bender. Fake it till you make it, man.