TRENDSCENDING THE TREND PRISON
Healthily participating in fashion means living within the trend cycle, but reaching a state of "style nirvana". My thoughts on the trend cycle and why you will always have a void in your heart.
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the fashion trend cycle and my interactions with and around it. Collab after collab, drop after drop, trend after trend. Skinny jeans are out! Sambas are in! Arc’ is washed! Jorts are hot! Laced shirts are cooked! On a side note, I really wish I had time to enjoy laced shirts as an early adopter but the internet ran a train on it so ferociously that even Shein got to hit it within a few weeks. Stylistic trends are honestly a good thing and as Jonah Weiner at
so eloquently pointed out, escaping them is futile. “This is because clothes are, like other creative forms, a language that we use to communicate within the cultural “marketplace” — and you could call us “Jawncques Derrida” the way we guarantee you it’s impossible to escape language. You can speak beautifully, you can speak in the latest slang or in an archaic tongue, you can speak gibberish, but you can’t opt out of speaking. Even if you try a “vow of silence” (i.e. dress as blankly and normied-out as possible) you’re still communicating, because anti-trends are still, again, trends: You can’t not signify, and shifting trends change what your signifiers mean, whether you like it or not.” It’s just true, when you get up every day and throw on an outfit you are ultimately dressing for somebody. If people were truly dressing for no one at all then we would all look like Adam Sandler I guess, the one exception. That being said, I think it's worth asking if you need to constantly play into trends and if your desires to engage in the more consumer-driven aspects of the fashion industry are actually part of genuine aesthetic interest or that you’re just tricking yourself into buying something from the new Stussy/Palace/ALD/insert trending brand drop. Are we locked in a prison of trends for the same reason that we are locked in a prison of deterministic behavior; incapable of living life with free will? Most people do not experience happiness of mind, because they suffer under their desires. All they can do is try to satisfy their senses and in extreme cases that’s when they become mindless consumers, coomers, or d o o m e r s.
Jacques Lacan, aka the French Freud, aka the guy who thinks everything is about your mom, aka Slavoj Zizek’s go-to intellectual to quote for explaining why you’re empty inside, is famous for developing some very influential theories within contemporary psychoanalysis. We must begin with his concept of “The Mirror Stage”. In short, when we are babies, there is a moment of development where we start to recognize ourselves in the mirror and see our specular image (our reflection). What we see in our mirror is a whole and complete image of ourselves. The version of ourselves we idealize and spend the entirety of our lives chasing after in vain. This is the moment in our cognitive development when we start to form our egos. We are chasing after an unattainable state of ☮️ harmony 🕉️, mastery, and 💧eternal drip💧 first falsely promised by the mirror. In reality, we know ourselves to be fragmented and all over the place. Full of doubts, insecurities, problems, irregular bowel movements, etc… Therefore we identify with that ideal image of ourselves, and by means of this identification we have created our “ideal-I”, aka our ego.
The mirror stage plays an important role in Lacan’s most famous theory called the unattainable object of desire, formally referred to as the Objet Petit à. In the Objet Petit à framework, the unattainable object of desire is locked at the center of a cyclical relationship between your ego and society, which Lacan referred to as The Big Other. When we’re engaging with society either directly in social scenarios or while browsing social media, The Big Other reflects back to us that which we lack. The Big Other in one instance could be your crush who likes another boy/girl that has something you don’t (he’s a skater or she’s a BPD art hoe). In another scenario, it could be about not having the career and salary you fantasize about. It could be extremely abstract or it could be very straightforward and concrete. Essentially it is everything society reminds you of, that you don’t currently have. When it comes to navigating the fashion world, we can easily get lost in the sauce trying to traverse the mayhem of the trend matrix, where we find ourselves fantasizing about filling our stylistic void with perplexing pieces.
In the case of the meme above, we pursue the jorts to reach what Lacan called Jouissance. By buying the jorts, and taking part in the trend, we hope to satisfy whatever feeling we’re after in an effort to identify more closely with our Ideal-I. The cruel thing is that we’re always trying to complete the puzzle with something, it’s a perpetual chase for the missing piece. The void will always be a void.
So why would The Big Other want to prevent our Jouissance? Jouissance is not just enjoyment, you could think of it in the same terms Marx talked about surplus value. Jouissance = surplus enjoyment, some kind of pleasure-in-pain, or what Freud called, the death drive. Like a hamster caught in a wheel chasing after the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, but stuck in the wheel of eternal desire…With this framework, it becomes much easier to understand why it may be beneficial for society or The Big Other to restrict our hedonistic pursuits. We can’t always get what we want, and in fact sometimes what people want can be bad for them and bad for society (i.e., drugs, infidelity, gambling, etc.). A society that constantly enables the pursuit of every desire will have a lot of problems, which is probably why American consumerism creates a lot of unhappiness. The plight of the human experience is characterized by our proclivity to satisfy all of our desires all the time, to reach our jouissance, and fill the void with all kinds of stupid shit. Whether it's a new elf bar, new clothes, food, sex, love, career advancements, etc… The desire is straight up created by just not having the thing you want; especially now, when our dopamine-rattled brains have been permanently altered in this age of social media and instant gratification. We want what we can’t have, even if that thing is bad for us or our wallets. It’s why the Buddhists think that desire is the root of all suffering.
In the imaginary stage of the Objet Petit à we construct a fantasy around all of the fire fit-pics we could be taking with our sweet new jorts. The fantasies we create around the things we’re after are often far more powerful than the objects themselves, and it’s what perpetuates the desire in the first place. It’s not the jorts that you want, it’s the fantasy of being on trend and looking fly around the ladies that you want. “Oh if only I had jorts I would be sooooo ahead of the trend curve (which you wouldn’t be) and my quest for 💧 eternal drip 💧 would be over.” But reaching eternal drip with a set amount of clothes is impossible, because for however long you decide to care about how you look and dress, is how long you will be locked in the trend matrix. While one could argue that “timeless” clothing can help you escape the prison of trends, you are ultimately dressing for an audience, and that audience is constantly changing in attitudes and tastes. Timeless clothing is a farce because all clothing and its perception are ultimately tied to a moment in time, which influences “every variable detail of that garment — volume, lapel width, color, material — will read as more or less pleasing & fresh at any given moment, depending on trends!!...” Case in point, the style of jorts that are poppin’ right now are pretty baggy and come down to just below your knee. In a few years, I would imagine that a smaller inseam and slimmer fit will come back into the mix as the premier style. Furthermore, jorts could very well go out of style again and another material will inevitably pop off. “As long as other people see you, you might read as “timelessly cool” or you might read as “stuck in time.” You might read as “breathtakingly advanced” … or “clownishly avant-garde” … or simply incoherent.” When it comes to the trend cycle, it’s still not sensible or even possible to escape it if you want to look cool.
“A related cliché is that the smartest thing is to lock in “timelessly cool” style. But both of these clichés will always break down, because they rest upon the same unsupportable contradiction: “Coolness” is not some stable condition that exists safely fixed in an abstract realm, but rather a historically contingent, endlessly negotiable social construct whose meaning depends, to an irreducible degree, on an interplay with ever-shifting cultural conventions and trends.”
Jonah Weiner,
In order to make sense of your participation in the relentless consumerism that we’re being bombarded by in the sneaker and fashion world, you have to establish a firm framework that allows you to actually participate, but participate in ways that feel genuine to your particular tastes and personality. We’re all growing tired of the endless collabs and infinite weekly drops, in which the chasm between art and commerce grows increasingly larger. The machine has to sustain itself. Ultimately, the economic engine that enables fashion is a double-edged sword that can swallow up people with less developed aesthetic tastes and self-control. Basically, if you’re an NPC you will just mindlessly follow trends and drift in the ever-changing cultural winds with no anchor to guide you. Like a sneakerhead skinner rat, stuck in a maze and only swayed by the fresh scent of the newest Travis Scott dunks.
It is possible to escape the feeling of being a slave to it all by re-asserting your commitment to the artistic and expressive side of fashion; because the business side of it would rather cater to the lowest, basest instincts in our nature. Hitting that beautiful sweet spot, where clueless normies and chronically online schizo style-psychos can appreciate your fit is where you should strive to be. If fashion never changed and styles never evolved, we’d all get a little bored! Being honest to yourself about what you find legitimately appealing, while still being cognizant of what’s relevant is a careful balance to maintain. Trends themselves are a good and healthy aspect of society’s changing creative ambitions and cultural attitudes. They’re not something to escape. They are something to be aware of as you navigate your own sartorial journey in the process of opening up your third eye 👁️ to reach what an enlightened jawn guru would call 🕉️ STYLE ♋ NIRVANA 🧘🏾.
Great insights! Reminds me of Augustine, who wrote on the first page of his book Confessions: "You have made us for yourself, oh, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." We seem by nature to have an infinite desire, that can only be fulfilled by something/someone infinite.
Good stuff. I like your substack!