How people’s personalities and interests are no longer informing their personal style:
I miss the time in the not so distant past when you could look at someone’s outfit and infer at least one thing about them somewhat accurately. Of course it has never been an exact science, but I always loved how one’s interests, predilections and even profession were expressed through their own personal style. It was an efficient and tidy way to gather information. You saw a young woman wearing GORE-TEX Salomon hiking boots, you could figure she probably knew her way around a butane stove and had a collection of carabiners that got more use than a Portland-based barista whose bike lock keys dangle from her Dickie’s belt loop everyday. Dude is wearing highly distressed workwear? You could assume he knows a lathe better than his nightly pornhub search word history or can at least identify six power tools. Now, nothing makes sense. You’re grabbing your morning coffee at a local cafe and you think the guy standing in front of you is a 57-year-old man wearing vaguely tactical fishing gear, where moments later he’s responding to the name “Tanner” as he grabs his 20-oz oat milk iced matcha. The whole time he’s twenty-nine, about to hop in his uber on the way to his office job developing KPIs to track the progress of branding initiatives. High Snobiety showed up on his fyp last week hyping multi-pocket mesh vests. It’s casual Friday. What the fuck.
You’ll meet some self-proclaimed multi-hyphenate at the function talking about private equity and GOOP™️-approved vaginal steamers dressed like Zinedine Zidane but with ballet pointe shoes. Can you even do a jeté?! And the speed in which so many people adopt micro trends rivals the plasma launching out of a fucking quasar. Might as well be getting fashion advice from the left wing of a peregrine falcon. One week they’re desperately trying to achieve the allure of wealthy East Coasters in highly flammable, polyester half-zips that can never rid the smell akin to ozone in the aftermath of the Chernobyl Disaster. The next, they are dressed like they are about to embark on the precarious, post-divorce solo adventure some white dads take to prove their strength after a trip to REI. “Personal” style more capricious than a Gemini’s mutable dating habits and sees more shifting activity than the Parkfield section of the San Andreas Fault. It makes you wonder if they even vibe with what they are wearing. Bros trying to sport backwards 90s Kangol flat caps because they saw a pic of JFK Jr. in an IG “manifestation” photo dump with as little confidence as a substitute teacher with a visible flaw on her first day at an NYC public high school. Moving like the first day of “field work” at a PUA boot camp, where they gotta spit regurgitated game at any breathing woman without the influence of libations. No one told them you don’t wear aura, you exude it. And style is not something forged through indiscriminate mimicry.
There used to be definitive sub-cultures that spawned from musical movements with some kind of politics or ideology paramount to defining them. Goth, Punk, Club kid etc. Now I’m seeing TikToks captioned “You Can Be Punk And Conservative BTW” because personal style and aesthetics are now being introduced through an algorithm filled with short-form content for viewers who couldn’t read a full haiku without introducing a blade to their carotid. Visuals, sounds, ensembles are just plopped on your social media feed so the way in which people’s personal style historically was constructed based on prolonged periods or even years of accumulated interests via multiple forms of media, research and education, face to face interaction/social circles, and live inspiration is slowly becoming a thing of the past. People don’t even dress like their careers anymore. You point to five random men on the street dressed like west coast lesbians who brew their own kombucha and teach a weekend pottery class in 1998 and tell me that none of them work in the wellness industry and I’m just like yeah, sure, whatever…nothing fucking matters anymore.
Everyone’s trying to claim goth or alt because they bought a black polyurethane “moto” jacket from Princess Polly that smells like their situationship’s radioactive jizz, who subsists on Red Bull and convenience store taquitos. They saw one baddie mention Deftones and apparently that’s all the research they needed to perform in “understanding” and then self-describing as “goth.” Somehow shuddering to the tunes of Echo & The Bunnymen or The Sisters of Mercy. Too many people look the same, and give off the same vibe because they are all watching the same TikToks and scrolling past the same mood boards and instead of incorporating outside inspirations into their own inherent, existing style—if that even exists—they just copy and paste. At this point, I only want to see Moroccan uncs in babouches and the Bible Belt grannies dressed their best for Sunday Service. I’ve had ENOUGH.
People who blast bluetooth speakers or play loud music from their phone without headphones on public transportation:
There is a very specific type of self-centeredness required to play music out loud on public transportation. Not to be confused with confidence. Confidence is being so secure in your abilities that you cut your own bangs the day before a scheduled passport photo. No, this is something far more sinister. There has to be something so deeply malevolent in your mind to get on a crowded vehicle and blast a SoundCloud remix of Drake’s “Fake Love” through this train you have now turned into a moving tabernacle of annoyance as muffled sound waves carry through the overworked speaker the size of a McMuffin. It’s never what you wouldn’t mind hearing either. It’s never the mellifluous chorus of Sade’s “Lovers Rock” is it? Motherfucker can’t press play on a lil’ James Blake “Retrograde” or Stax classics huh. It’s always a song you’ve already heard too many fucking times but some kind of unofficial remix that’s playing at a decibel that could trigger an avalanche at Matterhorn. How am I hearing your bullshit through my quality headphones? My Steve Lacy getting washed over by a deluge of auto-tune and pedestrian lyrics by a motherfucker who sounds like he’s rapping through a vortex of microwaves and was produced in a goofy nigga lab.
They are not offering the romanticism of 80s New York City imagery, where it’s a hot summer day and they walk shirtless down the block past a row of brownstones with community members sitting on the stoop, carrying a SONY boombox bumpin’ “The Breaks” as neighborhood children spray each other with a water hose. Motherfuckers are just trying to go home from a long day at work that pays them less than it should, and here comes bro trying to “curate a vibe.” Save that shit manning the playlists working retail at a streetwear consignment shop or some shit, that isn’t forced into the corporate mainstream ecosystem of Imagine Dragons and Camilla Cabello or post up at a sports bar that has a jukebox and usurp the selections because the direct deposit hit and you’re just getting started with four neat reposados. Nobody asked you to be the Steve Aoki of the pedestrian experience. No one in the subway car, the bus or the high-traffic Walgreens prayed to God for a dude named Jaden to roll through with his JBL blasting some fucking weird, dissonant TikTok remix of “TOPIA TWINS.” And they have the gall to attempt to quietly glance around like they are being inconspicuous about their desire for someone to acknowledge their music taste. No one looks at the dudes who look like they spend 45 minutes every night wielding an epoxy resin katana in the bathroom mirror to the tunes of “Mr. Worldwide,” streaming music loudly in public from a speaker clipped to their backpack and thinks “wow what an intriguing cultural mind whose taste embodies the current zeitgeist…he should DJ my $80,000 wedding.” You’re not a vibe bro.
The endless barrage of the inter-ethnic/interracial straight couple as content:
Sometimes I think about what it would be like if humanity actually stood a chance in significant longevity at this point in civilization and how future humans would react to viewing 21st century “artifacts” and displays of life in the age of social media, content creators, and influencers. Imagine being a future human watching footage of inter-ethnic straight couple content from long lost platforms called TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. “Watch My British GF Go 48 Hours Without Tea,” “Watch My Italian BF React To Me Pronouncing Espresso.” Oh, did you pronounce espresso “EX-SPRESSO?” Oh did he say “tesoro no, it’s ES-SPRESSO? ES-SPRESSO! There’s no X?” Oh did he really get upset? Did he really? Should we call the Vatican? Should we resurrect Dante Alighieri and inform him? Should we report him to The Hague for crimes against humanity?
When you see this inter-ethnic relationship content, aside from the fact that it goes well beyond mere lighthearted and wholesome displays of cultural differences and exchange, but the person in the couple who is is usually American makes the fact that their partner is foreign their entire fucking identity, the “content” in question is so low stakes and has been so exhausted. The videos get framed like we are about to observe two UN delegates successfully forge peace between long dissenting nations and it’s just Molly from Eugene, Oregon showing her boyfriend (Andrea from Bologna) gesticulating vigorously near a pot of boiling water because she put olive oil in it so the rigatoni doesn’t stick together . Oh wow, and here I thought maybe y’all were presenting the eager viewer with solving the mystery behind the authorship of the Voynich manuscript or finally solving the Reimann Hypothesis. Oil in the boiling water, you might as well have thrown a Molotov cocktail at Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes as it hangs in the Uffizi Gallery. It’s rarely anything interesting enough to be funny, insightful or cute because it’s always something very well known. Oh, your Korean husband eats rice a lot? So does pretty much every non-European culture on Earth. Bet that bangs if you have the personality of wood, and not the kind fashioned into a puppet with Geppetto pulling the strings. I’d rather watch the mating rituals of flamingos or live footage of a city council meeting in Modesto discussing municipal zoning modifications.
It’s acting as if dating someone of another ethnicity or race has allowed them to achieve some kind of apotheosis and they are doing the rest of the world a service to inform us of these cultural differences that they have observed and deemed noteworthy like we don’t already know. “My Turkish wife takes off her shoes right when she walks inside our home” oh yeah? Did you have a seat under the fig tree of enlightenment Siddhartha? A huge portion of the world does that shit. You met a dude named Cédric in the 11th arrondissement on a three-day birthday trip to Paris under the influence of four mojitos who eventually became your boyfriend. Y’all aren’t single-handedly effacing borders and global tensions by reuniting Planet Earth with Pangea. Relax. As if the oversaturation of couples content on social media wasn’t exasperating enough, with the staged pranks poorly presented as “authentic,” the unenthusiastic expressions of boyfriends and spouses who clearly hate their partners and painfully contrived demonstrations of spontaneity, affection or discord. This shit adds another irritating layer to the genre. It’s not as if I can’t find the fascination, the appreciation or the sometimes humor in cultural differences. I have dated people from other countries frequently. I could never imagine using those differences as the nucleus for years of content creation, my god. If I ever post a video captioning it with “American Woman Dates Moldovan (hehe they’re almost just like us!)” or some shit, euthanize me expeditiously.
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