imomus | Fake de rue

Fake de rue

What a co-incidence! I had a vague yen this morning to write something about street fashion (I'd call this recurrent urge "floral"; it's based on the desire to put up some pretty pictures and see people as, essentially, flowers), fired up Neojaponisme, and found a Marxy post entitled Street Professionals.

Surprisingly, Marxy begins by commending a diss I made of The Sartorialist a while back. I'd described the New York fashion blog as a "bully butler", but Marxy says a more common complaint is that, while it poses as a street fashion blog, The Sartorialist is actually showing, a lot of the time, fashion professionals. (I've made this criticism myself.) The idea is that the top-down, elitist Western fashion system is simply giving itself spurious grassroots legitimacy by showing us snaps of its elite on the street, rather than at the catwalk marquee they're heading to or photographer's studio they were at ten minutes before.

I've often contrasted this Western elitist fashionista decadence with Japanese magazines' much greater emphasis on street photography, with particular reference to Shoichi Aoki's stable of street fashion mags (FRUiTS, Street, Tune). When -- quite by chance -- I was photographed for Street magazine myself, I commented: "That's the thing about Street; you don't wake up and remember you're going to be photographed for it that day. It just happens by chance, unexpectedly. Your path crosses the Street photographer (in this case New Yorker Fumi Nagasaka), she thinks you're interesting, the editor likes the shot, you're in. No advertising, no product placement, no stylist."

"The beautiful fantasy of street photography is that there is no fantasy", says Marxy, and goes on to debunk the illusion by saying that this notional "site of amateurs" actually often features fashion college students, stylists and product placement. He welcomes a new Japanese street fashion blog called Style from Tokyo because it lists the occupations of the people it shows, revealing many if not most of them to be fashion industry insiders -- shop staff, hair dressers, stylists and the like: "junior officers of the fashion army".

"The narrative framing of Japanese street photography leads us to believe they are 'everyday kids'," says Mr Marx. "This adds to the power of their fashion as true grassroots style and democratic creativity." But -- thanks to Rei Shito's revealing captions at Style from Tokyo -- we can now see that "amateurs are window-dressing for what is very much a professional game".

This charge repeats several points Marxy has been making over the years in his various blogs: that Japanese culture is top-down and conformist ("orthopraxic" rather than "orthodoxic"), that things marketed "based on a true story" usually aren't, that professionals determine amateur culture, and that Japanese creativity is, if not vastly overrated, at least widely misunderstood by the admiring, exoticizing, projecting West.

Now, how relevant this message is depends on how much correction your starry-eyed vision of Japan requires; it's a glass-half-empty, glass-half-full kind of thing. Yes, there's styling, sifting and product placement in some street fashion shoots. You only have to look at the frequency with which Osyama and Yama from Tokyo Bopper turn up in street fashion shoots to see that

a) most street fashion from Tokyo is shot within cat-swinging radius of Cat Street, and

b) clever retailers dress their staff up and send them out to get photographed as a kind of free advertising, and

c) all you need to do to find a street fashion photographer is go to the corner of Meiji Dori and Omote Sando.

So, sure, to some extent the "grassroots, democratic" element to street photography is an illusion. The question is, is it a beautiful or useful illusion? Should we use the partly-illusory nature of street fashion photography as a pretext to rush headlong back to the catwalk shows, the paid celebrity endorsements, the Vanity Fair society pages featuring unbearably arrogant designer X hobnobbing with worthless aristocrat Y, or discussing with fabric manufacturer Z what exact patterns will sell in what exact quantities in the autumn of 2010? I think the answer is that the grassroots metaphor is a beautiful and a useful illusion, and that we can love street fashion even when we know that it's not as amateur as it may at first appear.

My current favourite street fashion blog is a completely fabricated and illusory one: MiLK magazine's Look de Rue. When it comes to expressing their individuality through clothes, children are quite possibly the least creative, least empowered consumer group known to man. How the hell can you use clothes to "say who you are" when you've just been born, have a different shape of body from month to month, don't make your own purchasing decisions, aren't considered legally or financially responsible in any way, and basically trail alongside your parents wearing whatever they pull over your head? Childhood is certainly a problematical area for cherished Western notions of individuality.

Yet the adorable thing about Look de Rue is that the captions present the kids as tiny, fully-formed individuals, masters of their own destiny. "We hadn't thought about suggesting tying your summer scarf this way," raves the magazine a propos the little girl above, and goes on to compliment her for "the audacious mixture of rabbit motifs, dots and bows, wisely united by dominant violet shades. Summer hasn't been a time for her to set aside her fashion attitude, quite the contrary!"

Now, you could say that this patronising tone -- the tone the fashion industry takes towards us all, complimenting us on the good sense we show in following its dictates, telling us we act the way they suggest "because we know we're worth it" -- actually implies the little girl's complete non-agency. Not only do we know that the outfit was bought and put together by the child's parents, the audacity being lauded is the courage to fail to put aside a fashion attitude: this little girl is being praised, in other words, for staying tuned for the latest updates from the chief monkey in Paris. What is "fashion attitude" (as distinct from "style"), after all, but this constant, semi-passive receptivity, this flexibility, this pliability, this limited competence to chose from a limited, legitimised range of colours, shapes and forms?

But what's so adorable about seeing an unfree agent praised, precisely, for this unfreeness -- and, by the same token, what's so unpleasant about pure expressions of individuality -- is that the clothing of a child represents something successfully communal: the relationship between a group of people who love each other. What you see in the clothing of a child is not the little tyke's will and sense of self, but an adult's love for the half-formed little creature.

What do we know about love? That it's blind, that it projects like crazy, that it's easily deceived. It may be that the cult of Japanese street fashion is based on the same charm we see in Look de Rue: that palpable sense of love, projection and deception. There are three love relationships keeping Japanese street fashion vibrant and relevant: the indulgent love of aging Japan for its shrinking, fleeting, narcissistic youth, the love of the fashion industry for the street, and the orientalist love of the West for Japan. Clothing as an expression of close communal relationships of love and protection -- rather than, say, authenticity, freedom and individuality -- is something Marxy is no doubt keenly aware of: he recently became a parent himself.

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Glad to see the old Marxy-bashing tradition at Click Opera is alive and well, if somewhat attenuated...

You've got a key on your computer marked "Marxy-bashing", haven't you? But did you read this? No, because it was "attenuated" and nuanced. So you just reached for that dusty key.

W. David MARX (http://neojaponisme.com/2008/09/01/street-professionals/) Says:
September 1, 2008 at 10:40 pm

Momus’ pretty calm and thoughtful musing on the theme here:

http://imomus.livejournal.com/397090.html

Don’t whine about Marxy-bashing. I know Marxy-bashing, and this, sir, is no Marxy-bashing. More like Marxy-outing…

Momus, you lazy thing, you've been using that Click Opera automatic post generator again, haven't you?

West bad, Japan good = check
Individualism bad, collectivism good = check
Goofy "street" fashion shots = check
Pic of Momus trying to look all "street" fashion = check
Marxy is wrong = check

Click Opera automatic anon comment generator = check.

Entirely predictable Momus quip in response to anon comment = check

Three or four degrees of meta rather than substantive debate on issues raised = check.

banana skins = lacking

Hi this is off topic but I am trying to find a click opera post from a few months ago on ugly or wrong design, could you possibly point me in its direction? taa

http://imomus.livejournal.com/318968.html (http://imomus.livejournal.com/318968.html) ?

Fashion is still too close to fascism for me.

There's a documentary about the Berkeley Free Speech Movement In it one of the Anti-War leaders starts recommending everyone get an orange hard hat for the next rally. Asked where people could find these accoutrements, he smiles and mumbles, "The Army Surplus Store"

That's the perfect image for my point about cynicism becoming quickly counterproductive. When you disdain the counterculture because they can be marketed to by the corporations, you're generally just a heartbeat away from the cynicism required to work at the corporations. You start wearing a suit "to fight the suits".

You accept Marxy's point that street fashion shots are at least partly illusory. But then you jump to say that the alternative is to go back to catwalks, society photography etc. You miss another possibility: to actually photograph street fashion, rather than just the people who congegrate on the corner of Meiji Dori and Omote Sando in order to be photographed.

I don't "jump to say that the alternative is to go back to catwalks". I put that, with a question mark, as an alternative for disillusioned street fashion consumers. Of course, for street fashion producers, as you say, there are many other possibilities, like being less lazy and less sly. But how many of us are street fashion producers? I'm not, are you?

My piece isn't about how producers can make things better -- they generally can -- but about how consumers should react on hearing that everything in the garden is not 100% rosy. And a wider theme behind it might be "the uses of cynicism". I take Adam Curtis' line (spelled out in Century of the Self, for instance, and the idea that R.D. Laing's cynicism about the family played into the Game Theory paranoia being propagated by Cold Warriors at the Rand Institute) that cynicism doesn't necessarily help. It isn't really the way to escape whatever web of deceit it points at. Cynicism's medium tends to become its message: whatever you're cynical about, it's the cynicism that tends to win out in the end -- and that endless corrosion of trust and respect becomes a malign circle quite quickly.

You're being too cynical about cynicism, Momus. I don't see any great evidence that being cynical about one thing leads to cynicism about everything.

I don't see any great evidence that being cynical about one thing leads to cynicism about everything.

Well, it seemed to work for Adbusters magazine (http://imomus.livejournal.com/390994.html). One minute they're being cynical about big business, the next they're being cynical about the hip counterculture on the grounds that these guys can be marketed to.

Do you see how that works? Money circulates, doesn't it? Everyone uses it. So if money's bad, and everyone uses money, everyone's bad, right? Revulsion against impurity becomes, quite quickly, revulsion against humanity. It spreads, and the little motor at the centre of it is our old friend the syllogism with the undistributed middle (http://www.geocities.com/xenu_rules/formal-undistributed-middle-term.html).

It's the fate of all successful countercultures to get subsumed into the mainstream, I see no harm in pointing that out. You're stretching it rather to place cynicism about today's hipster culture side by side with revulsion against humanity - that in itself says something about the limited way you frame "humanity"! By the way, what did you make of K Punk's critique of your critique?

http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010588.html

He's a bit more Romantic than me -- he thinks you have to be sick, ill, ugly, dirty and marginal to be authentic, and he thinks being authentic is important. But I rather understated the annoyingness of hipster entitlement, so I guess it's useful to overstate it again.

I wish he'd addressed the cynicism / marketing thing, though -- the paradox of Adbusters' disdain for those complicit with marketing turning, itself, into complicitness with marketing. It's the classic Gen X / Gen Y trap -- a slippery slope to fruitless circles of meta-recrimination.

that's an idea that's been on my mind for long and i think is badly needed in japan more than anywhere else - not only photograph 'real street fashion' but any fashion (or not-fashion) from the point where it escapes the fascism of the magazine-shop-street circle but as a long term project it would be very hard to 1. fund 2. sustain beyond some one-off art-like project 3. simply get it because 'beauty in dissaray' is already an essential part of the fascism of the (japanese) fashion image

Isn't that what Google Street View is? It's the ultimate Mass Observation (http://imomus.livejournal.com/63308.html) project.

not at all i'm still thinking style sensitivity selection and i guess auteur-ism. street view is pure porno

Yes, Scott's blog is colored by the fact that he's a fashion industry insider. But if you actually know something about the craft and construction of clothes, there's only so much 'vernacular' style out there that will hold your interest, since so much of the average person's clothes are indifferently made and fit poorly.

Your blog is colored by the fact you're a veteran musician and aspiring conceptual artist. Being an habitué of a certain demimonde breeds a strain of elitism--it comes with being well-versed in a discipline or profession.

That said, my closet is full of bespoke suits and shirts, and I often feel alienated by the photographs I see on Sartorialist. I will say his shots of the eccentrics, "characters" and sundry non-fashion people doing their own thing can be wonderful, and that's what I visit that blog to see.

There is some black fellow that he photographs from time to time named Maury or something like that. Just because this fellow works in a high end male fashion store doesn't mean that I wouldn't find his outfits worthy of looking at.

There are so few people wearing suits and ties these days that I never get the feeling that I'm having some package of style imposed upon me from some massive corporation above. This is kind of a niche appeal.

Just because this fellow works in a high end male fashion store doesn't mean that I wouldn't find his outfits worthy of looking at.

Oh, the clothes are exquisite--that's not the issue at all. It's the feeling that you have your nose pressed against a windowpane that's a drag.

Then again, fashion and style have never really been democratic. Excellence in any pursuit never is. If you're not displaying money, you're displaying taste.

There are so few people wearing suits and ties these days that I never get the feeling that I'm having some package of style imposed upon me from some massive corporation above. This is kind of a niche appeal.

Yeah, that whole "guy in a suit" bogeyman effigy is kind of a dated boho cliché. I get sneers from people in tee shirts and jeans all the time, which are in the vast majority on any street. Deliver us from the ostentatiously unostentatious!

Of course, the other trouble with covering non-fashion street style is that most clothes,if not indifferently made, are indifferently worn. The rare beasts are just too rare. I doubt that the current cultural climate that equates slovenliness with authenticity can sustain a non-fashion fashion blog.

well, isn't today's fashion a post-non-fashion fashion anyway (i mean post margiela, grunge purple magazine - and the way they've perpeated right through to the top. what is it ? indifferently worn but correctly framed??) . in japan, which was much the subject here, on the other hand it's near impossible to conceive the idea of non-fashion.

I'd like to see people hack traffic and other surveillance cameras to secretly create portraits of the homeless, and then display them for free via DIY media, and then, people should dress each other the opposite of this with stolen and self-made clothes, but in a loving way.

You magnificent madman!

Oh, wait, you're a cynic, aren't you?

By the way, Rei Shito says about her street fashion blog:

"Sometimes,i'm asked 'what is your criterion when you choose people you shoot?'
I can't explain about it,
cause i only choose them by just my own feeling.
i hope each of them will find what is good or be valuable for themselves."

In the end, I think that says it all. She goes on her hunches, rather than caring whether the people she photographs are inside or outside the fashion industry, or whether street snaps are in conflict with the fashion industry or complicit with it, or whether it's being "hypocritical" by legitimising its elitism against the backdrop of the street. Such critical-slash-cynical thinking ("cynical thinking posing against the backdrop of critical thinking", we could call it) is far from her mind. But she's kind enough to allow us to go there if we really want to.

I think her "heart-not-head", "hunch-not-logic", "eye-not-brain" thing is ultimately very... well, very Japanese.

You're a sucker for the faux-naive pose, aren't you?

Well, I think children are ahead of us, and not just in the obvious demographic sense. If empathy is the basic unit of social intelligence, anyone who can appeal to our empathetic side is a social winner. And you can see how faux-naivete might be a means to that end.

But it occurs to me that the end of my essay chimes with Takashi Murakami's idea that Japan is the West's Little Boy -- that the West has been an indulgent and protective parent to Japan, and that our love for its whacky inventions and goofy street fashion is part of that overall picture.

And at that point I'm a bit torn. Should Japan grow up (including re-arming), or is this childishness very clever, wise and advanced?

I used to dress like a drag queen ska band, and middle-aged tourists would often stop me on the street, asking if I'd pose with them for souvenir snapshots. I always obliged, mugging like hell, but never asked for prints. I was a fool.
I would like to see a street fashion magazine composed entirely of people's here-we-are-with-local-nutjob photographs.

-inonymous

People photographed for dressing well turn out to be involved in . . . Fashion!

GOOOD! I'm sure many people prefer to believe that street fashion photography only shows images of completely oblivious civilians because that makes it easier for them to imagine that the actual fashion-folk, such as those photographed, are incompetent elitists and that the roots do it better... which is a real illusion ...Many of these clothes show some ingenuity, something which isn't actually secluded to completely external mavericks, and in addition those wearing them are STILL a part of this streetscape, whether also part of a perceived elite or not.

Aesthetically I don't think most street stuff is "wrong" enough for me to really be inspired by it, but that's what real streets are for. This, however, is always just one photographer or one magazine-editor and there's no reason why their edited street can't be liked/disliked in the same way as it would no matter who they were snapping.

Thought this might interest (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/business/worldbusiness/01vogue.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin)

I'm really enjoying this blog and its critical points which at every word narrows the exploration of 3D-imagery into a graviton field of illusion. Your magazine image is pretty impressive. How many copies do you own?

Just one!

All flashy-magazine-illusions aside, my general impression of Japanese youth is that, on the whole, they are impeccably stylish. The best way to judge a culture's true fashion sense, though, is to look at how straight males dress themselves. It's not enough to have stylish women and gay men: that's just status quo. It's when the general population of straight guys begins to value style that evaluations can start to be made. Once the uniforms have come off, I think Japan's young male demographic is hard to beat in terms of everyday dress. In fact, until recently, it was quite easy to distinguish Japanese folk from other Asians on the street simply by observing the dress code. When I think of Japanese youth fashion, particularly among males, the word that comes to mind most often is "effortless." Contrast this to street fashion in, say, NYC where street style is inseparable from the hipster aesthetic, which comes across as rather contrived and scripted. So much for Western individuality. But if we just accept that street fashion everywhere is some hybrid of the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy, the real question becomes, who is making better use of the tools at their disposal? Fashion is art, and like any other form of art, it doesn't matter who the patron/gallery owner/critic is; what matters is that it's being made at all.

I always thought Tokyo Graffiti was a good street fashion mag because it focuses on strange questions and surveys as well.

Although the blatant product placement in Tokyo Graffiti is out of control.

http://www.kidswear-magazine.com/ - They sold this magazine at American Apparel when I was working there.

Kids do have a certain amount of input into their outfits. I know that Joe used to like to wear a bow tie and braces when he was wee. I liked short hair, big hats, big earrings and big patterns... pretty sure my dad thought I was a lesbian at 9.

I put together an outfit the other day that was a rip-off of an something Alice (Joe's younger sister) was wearing in a photo I saw of her aged about 4. Red plaid scarf, black jumper, denim shorts and black plimsolls.

How's Torry?

Kidswear: I used to write for it! Well, they published one short story, anyway. Here are some pictures from their Indian issue last year.

What was the story?

Torry is ok, haven't had much time to explore yet. It's impossible to get buses at any sort of set time and there's always drunk old men swearing about something. It doesn't feel intimidating the way that Dennistoun did though.

The Torry library is having a book sale just now and I nearly bought Joe a stack of 10 kids story tapes for £1. But the librarian spent a good half hour helping the kid in front of me search the Aberdeen archives for a book on Jewish traditional clothing without so much as a nod to acknowledge me waiting. Maybe she's been reading your blog!

What was the story?

It was about some creativity researchers who are dwarves, right, and they go to Japan to mingle with Japanese kids in playgrounds to find out the secret of Japanese creativity. But some crows swoop down and fly off with them. I'm not joking.

Just back from a really excellent Joe concert on Weserstrasse! His moustache is getting bigger!

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Fake de rue

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From the horse's mouth!

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reverse snobbery

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at that point I'm a bit torn./ about cynicism

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