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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    The New Mediocre



    WELCOME to the “new mediocre.” It’s not quite the New Look, or the New Deal, but it is the new normal.

    At least according to Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, who coined the term a few weeks ago.

    She was referring to the global economy, of course, which she thought could use a jolt lest it “muddle along with subpar growth,” but her words, uttered during a relatively small-scale speech at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, have had an impact far beyond the school’s borders and the world of economists (though said economists were very het up about it), reaching into the Twitterverse.

    Macroeconomic theory rarely seems to have much to do with the minutiae of everyday life, but in this case Ms. Lagarde’s phrase has a surprisingly resonant application. Suddenly, that free-floating malaise and lack of inspiration everyone keeps complaining about has a name.

    Consider, for example, fashion (admittedly, I am a fashion person so I would consider it, but stick with me).

    The reason for that feeling of déjà vu I had as I sat through fashion show after fashion show during the last ready-to-wear season and saw yet more “reinventions” and “homages” to 1960s rock chick dresses and 1970s flared trousers, 1980s power jackets and 1920s flapper frocks, and wondered, “How do I explain this lack of new ideas among so many extremely talented designers?” The new mediocre.

    The inexplicable fact that Normcore, which effectively means dressing in bland and generic clothes, has somehow managed to be elevated to the status of phenomenon rather than joke or just-stuff-that’s-in-your-closet (which, let’s be honest, it is)? The new mediocre.

    The answer to the endless debate we in the industry have over why big fashion groups would rather buy an old brand name than back a fresh one? The new mediocre.
    Given that the underlying principle of fashion is to identify that ephemeral state of culture and society known as the zeitgeist and reflect it back at the world in sartorial form, this would suggest that what has been happening in fashion, and the explanation for it, actually reflects a broader reality. And indeed, once you start thinking along new mediocre lines, you see it everywhere.

    Reading about the Republican economic agenda, for example, which Prof. Matthew J. Slaughter of Dartmouth labeled “a compendium of modest expectations,” I thought, “Oh, there’s the new mediocre at work.” When my husband complained about President Obama’s compromised agenda, I shrugged and said, “It’s just the new mediocre.”

    Talking to a banker friend who was bemoaning the trend toward investors’ losing faith in the idea of genius hedge funds that can outperform the market and moving their money into index funds, hence “settling for average returns,” I nodded knowingly and said, “Oh, that’s the new mediocre.”

    The fall in Twitter’s stock price as investors began to worry about “lackluster” revenue and user growth? Blame the new mediocre! The fact that Rob Ford, Toronto’s disgraced ex-mayor, still managed to win a City Council seat? The new mediocre (it exists in Canada, too).

    That feeling of browsing your Kindle, or standing in your local Barnes & Noble, faced with yet more young adult trilogies about dystopias and tough-girl heroines, or soft-porn-for-grown-ups trilogies (or just trilogies, period), and thinking, “What is there to read?” The new mediocre.

    That harrumph when you peruse the movie listings and find yourself choosing between comic-book-hero action films and old-guy action films — unless you want to go way, way across town to the one surviving and obscure art-house cinema that values conversation over abs? The new mediocre.

    In fact, the only time I refuse to accept the new mediocre as an explanation of a real-life situation is in the context of my children’s excuse for so-so homework. But then, there is nothing new about parental hypocrisy.

    Granted, the above is a broad generalization, and there are pockets of brilliance and hope amid the gloom (“House of Cards” and “True Detective,” for example, or the proliferation of small independent presses). But that doesn’t obviate the general trend: Such examples are the exceptions that prove the rule. They stick out because, in the world of the new mediocre, they are so rare.

    Still, while being able to identify and explain something might be very satisfying (if, in this case, a little depressing), it does not make it any more palatable. Though it does raise the question: How did we get here?

    Arguably, all of this cultural and political mediocrity is related to Ms. Lagarde’s economic mediocrity; as conventional wisdom goes, when the economy is slow, both businesses — creative and otherwise — and individuals tend to play it cautious, opting for incremental change to known quantities or for milquetoast recreations of what succeeded before, as opposed to radical change.

    This is particularly true in the current global environment, where some countries are experiencing signs of a positive upswing, while others languish on the downward slope. When it’s all bad, there’s no choice but to take risks to jolt people into awareness (or purchasing: You have to give ’em something they definitely could not have bought before). But in this state of uncertainty about where markets are going, there’s security in the familiarity of a fur-lined Birkenstock. No matter how ridiculous it might be.

    We get locked in a vicious cycle of same-old-safe-old. You see it in the endless fetishization of the sneaker, the vampire-meets-girl retreads and the obsessive fixation on yet another maybe-possible Clinton/Bush standoff. That’s a political drama at least we think we know.

    And it is all exacerbated, certainly in creativity’s commercial case, by the concurrent belief that consumer interest can be piqued simply by a never-ending cascade of new stuff, thus making it even harder for anybody to have enough time to think up actually new new stuff, and forcing them — designers, authors, producers, what have you — into having to rejigger old stuff to make it look like new stuff.

    Got that?

    The problem is that the more familiar a product is, the less exciting it is, which makes it less likely to do well, which makes it really not a safe bet at all. More than 30 years after the Me Decade, we are in the middle of the Meh Decade (as my grandmother might say).

    Or so it seems. Given that eras tend not to get their permanent label until a few years after they have officially ended, there may be some time for this to change. And in that context, perhaps there is something to be said for another truism of fashion, which states that what comes in must go out. It’s the style equivalent of Newton’s third law of motion. If accurate, this would dictate that, at some point, the new mediocre will become the old mediocre.

    Certainly, that is Ms. Lagarde’s hope, though she did not put it that way exactly. What she said instead was that the global economy “can aim for a better path where bold policies would accelerate growth, increase employment and achieve a ‘new momentum.’ ”

    O.K., it’s a little vague and rhetorical, but still: the new momentum?

    I can work with that.

    Vanessa Friedman is the chief fashion critic and fashion director for The New York Times.
    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
  • Shucks
    Senior Member
    • Aug 2010
    • 3104

    #2

    Comment

    • Icarium
      Senior Member
      • Oct 2010
      • 380

      #3
      This has probably been covered in another thread, but is normcore really a thing? It feels like a narrative that comes solely from New York writers.

      I have this hilarious narrative in my head that New Yorkers called attention to this "trend" and Gap bet on it and failed because it wasn't a real trend.

      http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/gap-ha...-way-too-norma (buzzfeed, I know, but)

      More likely it was just a failure on Gap's part to execute, but yeah I dunno. It's hard for me to tell because while I've heard a lot about it, its mostly driven by New York publications and I don't really see it manifesting around me, but then again it's pretty rare I notice any fashion trends manifesting in SF.

      Comment

      • Faust
        kitsch killer
        • Sep 2006
        • 37852

        #4
        That came and went, a self-fulfilled prophecy on the part of clueless media chasing a story. That's why she referred to it in past tense.
        Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

        StyleZeitgeist Magazine

        Comment

        • Faust
          kitsch killer
          • Sep 2006
          • 37852

          #5
          More thoughts on the "new mediocre" and mass tastes. Please discuss.

          http://www.sz-mag.com/news/2014/11/blame-the-audience/

          This weekend The New York Times published an Op-Ed article by Vanessa Freedman, the paper’s fashion director, in which she bemoaned the contemporary culture phenomenon called the “new mediocre.” She gave instance after instance, beginning with fashion and extending it to other areas, of mediocrity as the new normal. This, she said, is the marker of the zeitgeist. As far as fashion goes, she wrote, “The reason for that feeling of déjà vu I had as I sat through fashion show after fashion show during the last ready-to-wear season and saw yet more ‘reinventions’ and ‘homages’ to 1960s rock chick dresses and 1970s flared trousers, 1980s power jackets and 1920s flapper frocks, and wondered, ‘How do I explain this lack of new ideas among so many extremely talented designers?’ The new mediocre.”

          I nodded along, until I realized that there is nothing new in the new mediocre. What Freedman was bemoaning was essentially the prevalence of mass taste, which existed ever since the masses learned how to read in the mid-19th Century. Contrary to what the intellectuals of the day thought, their ability to read did not automatically translate into penchant for Tolstoy novels. Ooops.

          In vein, I waited for Freedman, as I have done for so many other commentators on the zeitgeist, to put the blame where it truly belongs – on the shoulders of mass taste. Of course, being a writer for a major publication, she did no such thing. Instead, she blamed it on the uncertainty of economy that supposedly drives people to make safe choices, which in turn drives creators to produce mediocrity. Well, then, allow me.

          What truly drives mediocrity in fashion and other cultural disciplines is bad taste of the majority. And, since we live in consumer society, we increasingly manifest our tastes through purchasing decisions, which results in a lot of mediocrity being produced to satisfy the demands of mass taste.

          But, there is nothing new about this. Mass taste has always been mediocre, and you don’t have to be Theodore Adorno to know this. What has changed in the past decade and a half is fashion itself. In the 80s and the 90s, fashion was the purview of, let’s call them the weird and the wonderful – a self-selected mix of creative professionals, musicians, club kids, editors, and so on. This all began to change at the beginning of this century, and it was not only because fashion conglomerates figured out that luxury can be peddled to the masses. The masses wanted it. (continue here)
          Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

          StyleZeitgeist Magazine

          Comment

          • Shucks
            Senior Member
            • Aug 2010
            • 3104

            #6
            this should be MANDATORY n00b/lurker reading.

            Comment

            • trentk
              Senior Member
              • Oct 2010
              • 709

              #7
              Hierarchical advancement exists in "subjective" domains like literature, fashion, and music, however, it is much more subtle than it is in objective domains like (hard to medium, not soft) science, or even boxing. If people in the cultural sphere are not (semi-regularly, or atleast more often than occasionally) challenging themselves to advance themselves in an objective domain, it doesn't surprise me at all that they can forget entirely what the difference between high and low art is and a HBA party can take place @ MoMa. (That said, I don't have any problem with the musicians who performed at the HBA event - arca, tim dewitt (dutch e germ), and (sometimes) ashland mines (total freedom) are brilliant - I just think that HBA's fashion design is terrible).
              Last edited by trentk; 11-03-2014, 11:46 AM.
              "He described this initial impetus as like discovering that they both were looking at the same intriguing specific tropical fish, with attempts to understand it leading to a huge ferocious formalism he characterizes as a shark that leapt out of the tank."

              Comment

              • dji
                Senior Member
                • Feb 2008
                • 3020

                #8
                thanks E, great article. this paragraph really hit the nail on the head:
                So, what do the masses want? They want something that makes them feel fashionable and simultaneously makes them fit in. The marker of mass taste is the mortifying fear of standing out. To anyone genuinely interested in fashion this is a paradox. To fashion conglomerates this is a mandate to produce mediocrity.

                Comment

                • PurpleJesuss
                  Senior Member
                  • May 2014
                  • 188

                  #9
                  did not lead to interest in Alexander McQueen (except for his scull scarves).


                  Great read Faust.

                  Comment

                  • Rick-A-Doodle
                    Senior Member
                    • Oct 2014
                    • 108

                    #10
                    I agree with everything except for the point about Saint Laurent, especially seeing the new buys a lot of websites are posting. If you're wearing 24cm Bootcuts with a sheer paisley blouse and cuban heels, you'll definitely stick out. So many lines have their blasé pieces that account for a majority of their business and then use that to finance their wilder pieces.

                    Comment

                    • Faust
                      kitsch killer
                      • Sep 2006
                      • 37852

                      #11
                      I don't know, from what I've seen in person this season (men's) not only looked but felt like Topshop. Maybe the women's is better but I doubt it.
                      Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

                      StyleZeitgeist Magazine

                      Comment

                      • SuE
                        Senior Member
                        • Jan 2013
                        • 173

                        #12
                        Originally posted by Rick-A-Doodle View Post
                        I agree with everything except for the point about Saint Laurent, especially seeing the new buys a lot of websites are posting. If you're wearing 24cm Bootcuts with a sheer paisley blouse and cuban heels, you'll definitely stick out. So many lines have their blasé pieces that account for a majority of their business and then use that to finance their wilder pieces.
                        Actually it's vice versa, the wilder pieces lure the customers generate hype/lure the customers into the store where they just purchase the blasé pieces
                        One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art ― Oscar Wilde

                        Comment

                        • zen dog
                          Senior Member
                          • Jan 2014
                          • 212

                          #13
                          ^ And SuE it is my understanding that the overall image of a large fashion house (which is based a great deal on the runway/magazine ads) actually helps sell its perfumes- a financial base for many of them.

                          Shucks, I applaud your effort to get the anarchy idea out. I've thought about different scenarios and can't see anything good coming out of such upheaval.

                          The two I could think of were the Russian revolution in the early 20th century had great ideas that spanned society and the arts and the punk movement in the late 1970's in England (not US) was born out of economic hopelessness. The Occupy or Occupy Wall Street movement didn't gather enough steam and if it did I think we would have been revisiting the Pacific Northwest grunge movement

                          Isn't fashion more reflective of the times than leading them? If not, whom would you consider not just prescient but leading change? The most I could give fashion is that is moving along with a movement. I'll add Bauhaus to the above two but not coming from upheaval.

                          I'd like to hear if you had any thoughts/hopes with your post.

                          Comment

                          • Rick-A-Doodle
                            Senior Member
                            • Oct 2014
                            • 108

                            #14
                            Originally posted by Faust View Post
                            I don't know, from what I've seen in person this season (men's) not only looked but felt like Topshop. Maybe the women's is better but I doubt it.
                            Oh, it definitely feels like topshop. The leathers are nice but not $6k nice. Everything else is 500% mark up.
                            And SuE, I can see what you mean but I think we're talking about the same thing. The basic shit like graphic tees and 15.5cm jeans make the company money, not the Dalmatian fur coats. But the runway looks present that 'rocker' aesthetic, but the people that buy full looks don't pay the bills.

                            I hate to just throw designers under the bus for catering to Mass Taste, but they have to make money. And in the end it's the consumer that picks and chooses the safest pieces to wear together, but can still tote themselves as being fashionable.

                            Comment

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