Month: March 2014

Fiona Duncan assesses a new fashion trend called “normcore,” which captures “self-aware, stylized blandness”:

By late 2013, it wasn’t uncommon to spot the Downtown chicks you’d expect to have closets full of Acne and Isabel Marant wearing nondescript half-zip pullovers and anonymous denim. Magazines, too, had picked up the look. T noted the “enduring appeal of the Patagonia fleece” as displayed on Patrik Ervell and Marc Jacobs’s runways. Edie Campbell slid into Birkenstocks (or the Céline version thereof) in Vogue Paris. Adidas trackies layered under Louis Vuitton cashmere in Self Service. A bucket hat and Nike slippers framed an Alexander McQueen coveralls in Twin. Smaller, younger magazines like London’s Hot and Cool and New York’s Sex and Garmento, were interested in even more genuinely average ensembles, skipping high-low blends for the purity of head-to-toe normcore.

Jeremy Lewis, the founder/editor of Garmento and a freelance stylist and fashion writer, calls normcore “one facet of a growing anti-fashion sentiment.” His personal style is (in the words of Andre Walker, a designer Lewis featured in the magazine’s last issue) “exhaustingly plain”—this winter, that’s meant a North Face fleece, khakis, and New Balances. Lewis says his “look of nothing” is about absolving oneself from fashion, “lest it mark you as a mindless sheep.”

Tori Telfer calls the trend both “refreshingly non-ironic” and “incredibly pretentious”:

People have been dressing à la normcore for years — they’re called parents, at least in popular clichés.

They dress like this because they genuinely don’t have time to think about fashion, not because they’ve decided not to care. And of course, fashion is an art form with a rich history, et cetera; implying that fashion is for anti-intellectuals is a pretty ignorant stance to take.

The true irony of normcore, like everything adopted by hipster-ish society, is that once you start to talk about it, it loses its authenticity. Steve Jobs was the apex of genuine normcore — he wore the same thing every day because it was convenient, which freed him up to change the world. But as soon as normcore is labeled, hashtagged, and analyzed, its idealism fails.

Jon Moy, meanwhile, is so annoyed by the trend that he turns to all-caps:

The only thing worse than making the argument that this is some sort of rally against the commodification and label-happy world of high fashion, is saying how you think “normal people” are more stylish than “fashion people”. Let me clear that up for you—STYLISH PEOPLE ARE STYLISH NO MATTER THEIR BACKGROUND. An editorial that features random people caught on Google Maps? Cool. Because if there’s one thing people love, it’s patronizing observations like “OMG normal people are so interesting.” NO THEY AREN’T. NO ONE WANTS TO BE REMINDED OF HOW THEIR LIVES HAVE GOTTEN AWAY FROM THEM AND HOW THEIR JOBS AND FAMILY RESPONSIBILITIES DON’T AFFORD THEM THE TEMPORAL AND MONETARY LUXURY TO OVERTHINK THEIR OUTFITS.

The truest and realest conclusion of Normcore? That we really are all the same no matter what we wear.

When Andrew O’Hagan agreed to ghostwrite Julian Assange’s autobiography in early 2011, he entered into a bizarre relationship with the WikiLeaks founder that did not result in the book either expected. O’Hagan, breaking his silence as a ghostwriter, paints a devastating, though not unsympathetic, picture of a man unsteadily at the helm of a new journalistic era. From the lengthy essay:

[H]e runs on a high-octane belief in his own rectitude and wisdom, only to find later that other people had their own views – of what is sound journalism or agreeable sex – and the idea that he might be complicit in his own mess baffles him. Fact is, he was not in control of himself and most of what his former colleagues said about him just might be true. He is thin-skinned, conspiratorial, untruthful, narcissistic, and he thinks he owns the material he conduits. It may turn out that Julian is not Daniel Ellsberg or John Wilkes, but Charles Foster Kane, abusive and monstrous in his pursuit of the truth that interests him, and a man who, it turns out, was motivated all the while not by high principles but by a deep sentimental wound.

Andy Morris, reacting to the essay, finds “one peculiar detail that sums up his subject’s profound strangeness”:

It isn’t Wikileaks lack of security acumen, the beyond parody working titles of Assange’s book (including Ban This Book: From Swedish Whores to Pentagon Bores) or his tendency to wear a Tesco tracksuit beneath his suit. Instead it is that Assange – the head of Wikileaks, scourge of international governments and self-declared third best hacker on the planet – eats with his hands.

“People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands,” explains O’Hagan. “He turned from being very open and engaged to being removed and sort of disgusted.” Later in the piece O’Hagan is more blunt: “Julian scorns all attempts at social graces. He eats like a pig.”

This habit is telling for many reasons. It reveals Assange to be a man who clearly has absolutely no regard for what people think of him. A man who doesn’t care if there is a perceived “right way” of behaving or any other mitigating factors that have to be considered beyond your own pleasure. It reveals him to be a man who people rarely say “No” to. It shows him to be somewhat separate, even alien.

Paddy Johnson recommends a companion piece:

While very little of the biographical information that was supposed to be published in the autobiography made it into O’Hagan’s piece, some of that information can be found in the e-flux interview between curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and Assange. One gets a better sense of Assange’s personality as a hacker, (at least three paragraphs are dedicated to his teenage years hacking), and his values as informed by early web culture. O’Hagan’s interpretation of these values—Assange’s lauding of young hackers, for example, is seen as an inability to work with others as equals—only adds to the interview. Often, Assange represents himself exactly as O’Hagan describes him.

The two pieces are good companions. Readers get a clearer sense of the scope of Wikileaks projects and their relationship to the media. When described by Assange, we see that relationship is often shockingly sophomoric. When described by O’Hagan, we understand what’s informing Assange’s particular brand of vision, and why it can be so dangerous.

Joshua Rothman tries to explain the “fraught and mysterious thing” known as academic writing, drawing distinctions between that field and journalism:

[J]ournalism … is moving in a populist direction. There are more writers than ever before, writing for more outlets, including on their own blogs, Web sites, and Twitter streams. The pressure on established journalists is to generate traffic. New and clever forms of content are springing up all the time—GIFs, videos, “interactives,” and so on. Dissenters may publish op-eds encouraging journalists to abandon their “culture of populism” and write fewer listicles, but changes in the culture of journalism are, at best, only a part of the story. Just as important, if not more so, are economic and technological developments having to do with subscription models, revenue streams, apps, and devices.

In academia, by contrast, all the forces are pushing things the other way, toward insularity. As in journalism, good jobs are scarce—but, unlike in journalism, professors are their own audience. This means that, since the liberal-arts job market peaked, in the mid-seventies, the audience for academic work has been shrinking.

Increasingly, to build a successful academic career you must serially impress very small groups of people (departmental colleagues, journal and book editors, tenure committees). Often, an academic writer is trying to fill a niche. Now, the niches are getting smaller. Academics may write for large audiences on their blogs or as journalists. But when it comes to their academic writing, and to the research that underpins it—to the main activities, in other words, of academic life—they have no choice but to aim for very small targets. Writing a first book, you may have in mind particular professors on a tenure committee; miss that mark and you may not have a job. Academics know which audiences—and, sometimes, which audience members—matter.

On a similar note, Josh Marshall describes realizing, as a grad student, that academia wasn’t for him:

Once when I was trying to figure out what I was doing I headed up to [professor and historian Gordon S.] Wood’s office to discuss it with him. Wood was generous and kind and always encouraging to me but rather distant as an advisor. At one point in our conversation, he laid it on the line. “You need to decide whether you’ll be satisfied with writing for an audience of two or maybe three hundred people.”

Clearly, the correct answer to this was “yes.” And as Wood said it, then and now I have the sense he thought posing it in this way would get me back on track with a focus on the scholarly community we were a part of. But hearing it so starkly, in my mind my response was something more like, “Holy Crap, no way! That’s definitely nowhere near enough people. And worse yet, I know some of those people. And I definitely don’t want to write for them.” …

All the incentives of academic life drive against having the time, the need and in many cases the ability to communicate with a larger public. In some cases, that’s as it should be. In others, it’s about the straitened nature of academic life, specialization driven by bad job prospects, an over-abundance of Phds, and a deep, deep conventionality driven by risk aversion rooted in all of the above.