The Dream Factory
Adam Curtis’s new series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head, has gotten me thinking about “this moment” in abstract cultural terms again. It’s a good job no dinner parties are happening, so I have nobody to bore about this.
His ‘emotional history of the modern world’ aims to distil how we got here, and why we all feel so unsure about everything all the time. I would argue that the 2008 crash and COVID pandemic have prompted a similar fragmentation in the fashion industry and the subcultural activities that fuel it: established systems have been challenged and upended by the influence of street style and, now, the internet culture.
Western society in 2021 simultaneously produces and consumes its aspirations as well as its’ fears. We no longer are audience to the culture, for we have become enmeshed with its production.
The 20th Century saw us marketed a very clearly defined dream: The American one. It is no surprise that Hollywood was nicknamed the Dream Factory. Having emerged victorious from WWII they cemented their status as an economic powerhouse. The USA dominated our cultural forms. America may have lacked the colonial influence of the Brits, but the Americans exerted a ‘soft power’ instead - “coca-colanisation.”
They preached literal democracy (although this may have often been synonymous with their economic interests), but also the democracy of images. The production of popular cultural forms that weren’t restricted to the elite for enjoyment sold dreams to the lower-income segments of society, convincing them that their aspirations were just within reach - if they worked hard enough and were virtuous enough to deserve them.
This protected the ruling classes from criticism. Just as the church used religious art to inspire a sort of paralysing awe in the peasantry, the ‘Dream Factory’ played up to our most fundamental desires (to be rich, admired and loved) to transfix us to our televisions or theatre screens. Advertising executive Mark O’Dea said that the best advertising copy was able to “release people from the limitations of their everyday lives.” Marketers were not just peddling simplistic escapism, they wanted to artificially inflate the illusion of choice and social mobility through carefully selected imagery and text.
In fashion, this created a mainstream visual culture that favoured glamour, exoticism and Americana. This went unchallenged (at least in the upper echelons of the industry) until Heroin Chic shocked readers of glossy fashion bibles in the 1990s by plunging readers into a world of ugliness and depravity they had been more used to seeing on evening news segments or anti-narcotics PSAs.
Style Into Revolt
A series of crises (economic and political) in the 1970s - with 1975 marking the end of the “Glorious Thirty” years of unprecedented economic growth - saw a shift in the way that fashion was manifesting. A more fragmented society initiated by the disintegration of traditional hierarchies came with a new wave of youth subcultures that sought to challenge the language of dreams and instead drag us, kicking and screaming, to acknowledge inequalities and injustices in our supposedly civilised worlds.
For Punk, this meant ‘raging against the machine’ that kept the same people in positions of power, decade after decade, and proposing alternative ways of organising communities and accessing commodities. For the Club Kids of the late 80s, it was about empowering the historically disenfranchised and hidden LGBT+ communities (as well as having a Damn Good Time while they were at it).
Punk consciously co-opted the currency of shock and the Club Kids embraced a method-acting approach to their going-out gear, in which the process of sourcing and creation was as important as the final product. Heroin Chic was arguably the last shocking movement in fashion imagery to challenge established conventions about how clothing should be presented.
In an era when people are no longer easily shocked, and everyone can take on the role of ‘pro-sumer’ (producer + consumer), what is the guiding narrative of our fashion imagery?
How Do We Play A Game With No Rules?
It was easier before, wasn’t it? Traditional fashion media told us the rules of the Fashion Game and emphasised that we were to play by them. They don’t call Vogue the Fashion Bible because we were supposed to take in its’ contents with a substantial grain of sartorial salt.
Now, we are expected to cherry-pick the rules of our own game from a variety of sources, and cobble together something that is supposed to be a manifestation of our most authentic selves: whether that is set in strict subcultural identities or more nebulous aesthetics that might change daily, depending on our mood. We no longer dress according to our inherited lifestyles but invent a lifestyle for ourselves through our dress.
And now we are at ‘Internet 4.0’ - subcultures vastly decentralised and replaced by micro-cultures that span continents, all ages, races and media forms. The bastardization of the word ‘aesthetic’ by Gen Z is the perfect example of how meaningless subcultural theory now is. A dress is ‘aesthetic.’ by being fleetingly desirable. There is no ‘aesthetic’ to opt into or enact a culture around.
Yes, there are tribes we can spot on platforms like TikTok: cottagecore, dark academia, VSCO girls, clowncore… the list is endless… but with little cohesion beyond a loose ‘look and feel’ (ie. no physical locales to meet up in, no uniform musical taste, no unifying political ideology or worldview) their power and influence is as fleeting as the content they beam out to us.
These micro-cultures swell to the fore, are introduced to the wider world through op-eds that either celebrate or politicise them and then seem to die down and be subsumed back into the swirling mass of online content with little ramification or legacy of which to speak. This also makes it difficult to study or understand them in any meaningful sense.
Some of these “microcultures” espouse the dreamlike imagery of storybooks and magazines past. Cottagecore takes us to a simpler but intoxicatingly romanticised time: shimmering lakes, windswept meadows and artfully crumpled cotton gingham picnic baskets transport us to a world where daily life revolves around the most basic considerations… Food, fresh air and family.
Understanding Online Microcultures
I don’t know what else to say about this yet, but I wanted to get some initial thoughts down on (virtual) paper. I am examining some of the fashion and beauty trends that have been popularised through TikTok in particular and will look at writing a series of blog posts on these to try and understand our strange world a little more. These trends are never just about fashion/beauty, and the awkward overlaps between politics, modernity, nostalgia, mental illness, sexuality, gender, our dreams and our search for happiness is as endlessly fascinating as it is frustrating.
I’ll sign off with this quote because I think it encapsulates that we should be cynical of pop culture, but also celebrate it as distilling - as Curtis would put it - the ‘feeling of now’ more effectively than anything else can.
“If it is the crime of pop culture that it has taken our dreams… and sold them back to us, it is also the achievement of pop culture that it has brought us more varied dreams than we could otherwise ever have known.”
- Richard Malbty, 1989