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Rob Engvall
The Period of the Consumer Breakdown
In her essay 'Consumer Breakdown' for CR MEN 9, writer Natasha Stagg explores the contradictions that textured the last decade
By Natasha Stagg
A sign of the times, Staten Island's 630-foot waterfront Ferris wheel was scheduled to go up in the early 2010s. Now, as the decade is coming to a close, production has been paused, like with so many other ideas we dreamed up 10 years ago. The New York Wheel, meant to draw tourists down from Manhattan, lacked private funding and support from the other boroughs. In 2018, it was officially cancelled (after investors had spent a reported $400 million).
The New York Wheel, like the London Eye, Roue de Paris, and Santa Monica's Pacific Wheel, was meant to be a skyline-diversifying attraction. In theory, it was going to connect an overlooked borough to the rest of New York City. From atop a ride that slow and high, one can really romanticize a city. But looking back on the 20-teens, what it once promised now seems impossible, an ambition reduced to its scrapped and unscrappable parts, with trash piling up in the former home of the world's largest landfill.
Rendering of the New York Wheel
New York Wheel
The failure of the Ferris wheel project, according to some people who are protective of Staten Island's autonomy, is metaphorical of their indifference toward Manhattan, an eye never opening toward the city. A friend there told me that the Wheel, like a music project he named after it, was finished before it started. And as with Long Island City's abandoned Amazon HQ project—shut down by protesters before it was set into motion—the reality of New York came into focus with this un-development: the city known for rapid change sometimes doesn't mind if certain things stay the same.
But "rapid change" also describes fashion, and on the other hand, New Yorkers still love fashion. Hudson Yards, the new home to French and Italian luxury shops on Manhattan's West Side and a cluster of totems that represent rapid change and also stagnant culture, officially opened in 2019. Despite all of the ridicule it has received from architectural critics and the 99%, Hudson Yards appears to be a highly trafficked tourist site already.
The Vessel atHudson Yards
Gary Hershorn
As much as we're told fashion is in crisis, more stores are opening all the time, like the concept stores here in the "largest mixed-use private real estate venture in American history," which the New York Times described as endlessly bleak. It's true that the new set of skyscrapers look disconcerting, but then again, this type of development is happening everywhere, especially here.
All these new malls fitted with residential and office spaces and surrounded by modern walkways that can transform a bike path into an Instagram destination subscribe to an unfamiliar dream of shitting where one eats and never leaving the stench of one's waste
and replenishment—a throwback that's exciting again now that social media has made our subjectivities so intertwined with shopping and selling.
New, city-like malls are popular all over the Eastern world already, offering complete lifestyles fully built within a corporate identity. It's like an updated Vegas Strip but without the casinos—like Instagram, but with the necessary nourishment of food and shelter. It's also like a mockery of human existence, a giant ant farm. Eat or shop—just call either by another word: consume.
Malls are a way of being inside culture while being protected from it, a space for vapidity to breed community, an oxymoron of sorts. The return of the mall has been predicted for decades, but it might only make sense starting now in America, with screen fatigue leading us away from our social media, but not all the way out of a consumer loop. Besides these complexes, an emblem of the 2010s might be the video screens that now litter New York City in place of wheat-pasted posters, rendering every available corner a potential successor to Times Square. We're living in the future, in the year that both Blade Runner and Akira were set, while falling in love with androids (like those found in the art of Jordan Wolfson and the work of a new crop of CGI influencers).
Speaking with a high school teacher, I am informed that the wokeness rumored to riddle the youth is, in her New York City classroom, met by a harsher nihilism, and even though everything has changed, things have basically stayed the same. I would love to ask the children of tomorrow what their thoughts are on today, to hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to live in a world in which everything is a marketing ploy. But interviewing Generation Z about this decade and their predictions for the next one feels a little bit like asking the patient for a prognosis: interesting as analytical evidence, but perhaps not much more.
And besides, what we've experienced aesthetically in this decade mostly comes from the analysis of information prepared by teens: the rise and fall of millennial pink, to be replaced by its color wheel opposite, z-foam green (I made that up); a proliferation of content appealing to our crippling, constant anxieties; corporate advertising's taking on the meme structure; and the relentless marketing of easier, app-accessible options for the at-home binger of absolutely everything. The culture, as it were, is now branded in layers like a regenerating epidermis, or more like a mirrored surface, reflecting in so many algorithmically produced ways the viewer beholding it—or at least their attention-spending habits.
Glossier's Miami store, outfitted in its signature millennial pink
But perhaps no trend defines the 20-teens as well as the magic trick people can perform by holding two truths to be self-evident simultaneously. By this I mean conflicting opinions coming from one mind, and that mind earnestly believing each. We are living in a time when the term "transgender"—the roots of which rely on the concepts of a gender binary—is often lumped together with the term "nonbinary," the conceit of which suggests that a gender binary is irrelevant.
Linguistically, these ideas are in opposition, yet the popular belief is that one can "be" nonbinary and "support" transgender rights (which is, in practice, true). The paradox here is that the belief that gender is a spectrum, not a hard-lined division based on sex organs, would propose that adhering to a set of systematically oppressive stereotypes—which would include feminization tactics like cosmetic surgeries, high heels, and makeup—is counterproductive. We are also living in a time when many of us know from firsthand, secondhand, or thirdhand experience that these stereotyping tactics do feel productive in some cases, adding to a spectrum of identity rather than mimicking an outdated definition of it.
That these two truths can exist in one hive mind is unsettling, though. Clearly it's not only the people who require the sort of galaxy brain to understand the contradictions of gender-bashing and gender-reifying that are lumped into one acronym that end up experiencing a dysmorphic existence in terms of gender identity. And this paradox has led us, it seems, to an impasse that textures the decade.
Or maybe that was the chicken before the egg. Maybe the multiverse of opposing truths held by the younger generation was inspired by so many conflicting data sets proving the same point, so much well-meaning momentum leading to opposing conclusions, the hypocrisy of a grassroots political movement becoming a stage for consumerism, along with a United States cabinet known for bending the truth and then bending it back.
Picture the phrase "all genders bathroom" appearing beneath that symbol of a dress-wearing figure conjoined with a pants-wearing figure. Not only does the symbol point to its own fallacy (there are only two "genders" here, or maybe one, in the process of changing clothes), but it asks us to continue utilizing a system of design that paints women as dress-wearers and men as pants-wearers, a comically dated code in this context.
Martin Keene - PA ImagesGetty Images
Not only that, it virtue-signals inclusivity that was in many cases a given: if a public office has one bathroom, it is usually not assigned a gender. Stalled public bathrooms in bars and airports, on the other hand, have created, before the term was heavily in use, a "safe space" for women by assigning men their own rooms, or a "boys' club" for urinal users, depending on your perspective. The ones that have transitioned to genderlessness cause a mix of emotions: this is what we wanted, right? Yes and no, because both yes and no are possible to feel at once.
In other words, if bathrooms, the historically politicized spaces, were once more segregated than they were in the 20-teens, and if they are less so now, we can assume progress has been made, but simultaneously, it is easy to imagine a world wherein, if bathrooms had never been divided into genders, there would be a movement to suggest that they should be.
Contradictions in social lessons aren't specific to Generation Z, of course. When Generation Y were kids in the early '90s, we were told by a strangely whitewashed Michael Jackson that "it don't matter if you're black or white."
On top of the confusing messenger, the song's message complicated ideas of cultural preservation by mixing it with rhetoric for cultural erasure (the multicultural faces of the song's music video, some invented digitally, morphing into one another, illustrate a dated ideal today). In the '90s, race, in my own naïve understanding of it, was something to put on. The white race felt like a void of culture to be filled, and simultaneously the most opaquely prized identity by the media at large.
Back then, "appropriation," as a term, was linked to a nebulous idea of "culture" after it was more popularly used to describe a type of art. An appropriation artist's work shifts attention to the money aspect of the job: what is something worth, if it is simply the artist putting his name on something that isn't his?
Marc Jacobs was criticized for appropriating dreadlocks for his Spring/Summer 2017 runway show
Estrop
That the content of the work is stolen, transposed, or crassly commodified calls into question ideas of integrity. Cultural appropriation, on the other hand, a buzzy phrase in the past decade, subverts another kind of value, sometimes described as "credit" that is "due."
Within systems that have subjected minority groups to the very actions that suppress them, the concept that credit can be subverted or reverted is a tricky one, however simplified it has become in callouts. There are created capitals within oppressive systems—attention, awards, money, acclaim—and it is at once understandable and understandably foolish to petition for these things.
Elsa Schiaparelli Tears dress
Fashion, another type of credit, used to be much less precious about value than art, seeing as the display was always commercial at its core. Everything we wear is an appropriation, from Elsa Schiaparelli's authorized Salvador Dalí collaborations to the fast fashion created by knockoff business models. The very act of designing a garment today is acquiescing to this standard. A truly unique garment, without any reference, is impossible.
"THREE YOUNG SURREALIST WOMEN HOLDING IN THEIR ARMS THE SKIN OF AN ORCHESTRA" BY SALVADOR DALÍ
Fashion was invented to expose the differences between ethnic groups and classes. It historically separated tribes, marked family lineages, rewarded royal blood, and stratified the wealthy. Now, it is a tool used to accelerate consumerism by putting pressure on a calendar, segmenting and sub-segmenting time periods into shopping cycles. It is a language that one has to relearn every few months. Much like meme culture or celebrity gossip, it invents ways to evaluate a person's wit and interests.
John Galliano for Christian Dior Fall/Winter 1997
PIERRE VERDYGetty Images
In fact, the term "cultural appropriation" can be used to describe fashion. Everything we wear must come from somewhere, and the idea that some items of clothing are culture-free, that they are the blank catalyst for an inoffensive new custom, is similar in its whitewashed outlook to the categorization of the majority (the fluctuating idea of white people) and its others. Is a T-shirt more basic than a sari? Does it matter who is making it? Basic Western collars are derived from the traditional dresses of Eastern cultures: the mandarin collar came from the Manchu, the halter top from a Vietnamese yếm.
Here's another of the decade's strange double-truths: that one can imply cultured-ness without culturally appropriating. This was meant to right a wrong, since designers have consistently borrowed and tokenized creativity from the underprivileged, and it hurts to see something symbolic of an underrepresented class mimicked in order to profit someone else.
Imagine if every cut of a cloth's origin story was traced and only the people that could prove an affiliation with each were allowed to design or wear them—the United States would morph into a living Disney's It's a Small World ride or the opening act of a Miss Universe pageant. Or, imagine if everyone wore a militaristic uniform issued by a world government. Fashion today is less about proving status than it is about signaling involvement in conversations concerning values, seduction, education, or sophistication. Not so much has changed, really. "Cultural appropriation" was adopted as a buzz term in the 20-teens in order to protect us all from the misalignment of trends and to skew the public eye toward a true source of cool, no matter how arbitrary.
Perhaps it should hurt, too, though, to see something symbolic of an overrepresented class recreated in perpetuity. (When cultural appropriation is called out, what percentage of those who feel betrayed by it simultaneously appreciate a little attention, for once?)
The 20-teens are, maybe most of all, about finding ways around appropriation by rejecting all sensitive cultural indicators via sponsored personal branding. Commercialism has birthed its own subcultures that are decentered, detached, and immune to guilt. Marketing is an aesthetic, too, and it can be worn in creative ways.
Gucci Fall/Winter 2018
Pietro D'apranoGetty Images
The Wheel wasn't built, but plenty of branded experiences existed in this decade, all of them conflated romance with consumerism, killing the two birds of tourism and marketing with one stone.
If a so-called Instagrammable environment—say, a selfie room created for a sponsored experience by an agency hired by a big corporation in one of these new malls—is attracting lines of people hungry for interaction and exposure, and its valuelessness becomes exponentially valuable in the attention economy, is it not a feat of art and architecture?
It is at least an answer to the anxiety over cultural appropriation and ownership. The necessary brandlessness of a photo-op and the necessary branding of a step-and-repeat are no longer competing, the signifiers working in tandem to create a loop of destabilized responsibility. The view from a Ferris wheel is not as prized as a well-lit photo booth, the branding of which is a bonus, a plot point in one's personal branding narrative.
The combination of the self, the selfie, and the selfie space is a mirror turned in on itself, advertising an advertisement to an audience of active influencers. The art here is the absence of culture—and it goes viral, mutually benefiting both parties. It is appropriation culture (I made that up)—the space for personal branding to take place, and a void waiting to be filled.
CR MEN Issue 9 is now available on newsstands alongside CR Fashion Book Issue 15. To order a copy click here, and sign up for our newsletter for exclusive stories from the new issues.
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