ECONOMIES OF STYLE FROM THE FLÂNEUR TO THE HIPSTER Flashcards
Modernity
a set of social and cultural changes; a historical moment
• Go back to Paris in the 1800s which had an impact there and the rest of the world
• Industrialization and urbanization → the rise of consumer culture as a result of those changes
o Think about France in the 1800s
• Mostly farmers, that type of agricultural system
• There are cities but mostly countryside and less middle-class people
• Technologies of vision happening (photography, film)
o Think about China now
• A lot of industrialization, factories
How might we connect fashion to the larger social, political, economic changes?
- i.e. think about Uggs trend (not so much high fashion; just what people are wearing)
- We need to think through changes that are associated with
What does a rise in consumerism look like?
• More culture of buying stuff
• Factories producing goods
• A surplus of goods
• Before this time, a store looked like a lot of clutter (more like a general store) before branding exploded
o Becomes a more functional space; architecture becomes a big deal (think of malls) to lure consumers
• From a mundane task to an activity of entertainment
Massive changes to the city meant that citizens had new kinds of spatial and mobile relationships with their surroundings
• Major change is the rise of the shopping arcade in European cities (Milan, Berlin, Paris) covered the streets with lots of small shops along each side
o Spaces were as much about the pleasures of looking – at ppl, architecture, and goods – as shopping
Flâneur
an urban dandy, a person who wanders the city streets taking in sights, a male
• looking at the offerings of commodity culture as a source of pleasure, even if you don’t buy anything
• is in the world of consumerism and detached from the city around him
• just checking stuff out / not really engaging with someone
• connected to the idea of looking as a source of pleasure
• the notion of the mobile gaze
• a dandy – a British term, reviled and loved, popped hip
Flâneuse
the counter-class of the flaneur
• Women did not have the same freedom to walk the streets as men did
• Women on the street were often subject to harassment and violence
• In very specific places, shopped in early department stores (not wandering off nearly as much as the flâneur)
The dandy
Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867) writes about dandies in his 1863 “The Painter of Modern Life” • Dandyism is aristocratic, cold, and founded on a personal originality to make the cult of the self • Fashion is a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial, and loathsome bric-a-brac • Very romantic view of him, embodied the idea of the classic male artist
An idea of fashion
- Fashion and clothing reproduce and challenge identity, visually and immediately
- What people wear constructs and indicates social and cultural status
- In a culture that is very visual, we make assumptions about people
- Fashion is central to visual culture and is vitally connected to larger social, political, and economic changes
Precarity
neoliberalism and neoliberalisation (the market should be free, less state intervention), austerity measure, massive shift about the idea of the economy, capitalism and how the nation state should work
• i.e. music, fashion, cars until the factories closed down in Detroit (post-industrail)
• more freelance, fewer fulltime jobs, more contracts, more part-time jobs
• opposite of stability
• refers to jobs and big chunk of society working under precarious jobs (Starbucks barista who get their schedules and have plan around it, vloggers/bloggers trying to make a business out of it, and the like)
Culture work
film stuff, arts and life, people who work in the culture industry
2005 Richard Florida The Rise of the Creative Class
• argues that cities with a “creative class” are more successful economically
• technology workers, artists, and queer people
• you have to make sure your city has talent, tolerance, and technology
• he was hired by Detroit and El Paso to fix their cities
o but the fruits have yet to be borne out, it’s not a magic formula
o seems to be true in cities like San Francisco
• lot of homeless ppl
• expensive living costs
The idea that “creativity” is the post-industrial future!!!
gentrification
process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the middle-class and affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poor residents
- i.e. Brooklyn
- kind of fixing up
- i.e. think about Queen West or Queer West
o helps people who are already doing okay from an economic perspective
o disparity between the rich and the poor
o might make stuff worse for certain people in the community
• graph that depicts the one-percent (rich getting richer) and the middle class isn’t doing as well as it used too
Angela McRobbie
• British who did a lot of work about subcultures and young creative workers
• Since the 90s, young people are really being asked to be entrepreneurial
o This pressure is because the full-time jobs don’t exist anymore
o Forced into precarious work (coffee shops, etc)
o You’re selling yourself on a daily basis
• We are one of the first generations to be told that you have to sell yourself
• That’s a pressure associated with larger economic trends
• She calls it the “hipsterization” of the economy
o The pressure is on young people to make their own jobs
