My Favorite Things: The Omnivorous Taste Edition
Prompt No. 52: Drawing from the high, middle, and low brow is progressive, pass it on!
Many of us are hunkering down for a deliberately exhausting and unstable period in American history – socially, economically, and politically. Our own history urges us to prepare for conspicuous consumption as a palliative distraction. We can also expect manufactured popularity of conservative dress and presentation as algorithms hum to the right. While President Trump’s core supporters will continue gravitating toward victimhood in the form of bad taste (i.e. Suzanne Lambert’s cutting critique of conservative makeup and Roseanne Barr’s foray into rap), a quieter faction will lay ahistorical claim to common style genres. We will see yet another “resurgence” of prep, specifically J.Crew as America’s go-to sartorial propagandist, and “quiet luxury” rebranded once more as some sort of democratized claptrap, but we will come back to that in the coming weeks…
For now, a warning: we need to start seeing style and presentation as hierarchical systems; systems we all function within unequally. Clothing choice is our most broadly-held discriminative tool; as observable as race, yet unexplored enough to devastate discretely. If presentation is rooted in taste, and that taste cultivated by class, we cannot discuss any of this (*gestures wildly around the site*) through the “safer” channels of race and gender alone. We have to be brave enough to talk about the callous nature of status, as well.
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