Your Style Philosophy

[Faust]

If video games... was a typo! One of my more profound....

And, Michael, I am more old fart than inbetweener. I'm probably closer to your dad's age than yours.

And I guess the point I'm making is that if the interesting kids these days put their energy, social and emotional, into gaming over music, will they draw their fashion influences from the games and not from bands the way we did? It was way deeper than just passing trends. Dressing as a Smith's Fan was basically like coming out. Can the replacement pursuit have such an influence, or is gaming so fragmented that it really doesn't drive dress codes?

On your point about conformity, like many SZ types, I wear what the fuck I like.

Except when I'm building business relationships. Then I want my look to be anonymous.


There is a second idea you have provoked. There used be one hell of a difference between growing up in the big city, a smaller regional city, or the sticks. Just in terms of cultural access. Clearly that is irrelevant now, but has it driven conformity or fragmentation?

And the third idea - those bands we imitated were real people dressing themselves, not visuals programmed by a bunch of geeks from existing archetypes. The geeks wearing the same blue jeans and hoodies all the while. See the disconnect?

[Faust]

Just wanted to explain how easy it is for people to fall into that philosophy because they desire to fit in, this could easily have transferred to adult life for many people? How do people of sz find this in the workplace or among friends

I, for one, sabotaged my job until the boss realized I wasn't doing shit and fired me. Then I swore I'll never get an office job again, partly so I can wear whatever the fuck I like, as Pumpfish so eloquently put it. So far, so good.

[Michael_Robartes]

'And I guess the point I'm making is that if the interesting kids these days put their energy, social and emotional, into gaming over music, will they draw their fashion influences from the games and not from bands the way we did? It was way deeper than just passing trends. Dressing as a Smith's Fan was basically like coming out. Can the replacement pursuit have such an influence, or is gaming so fragmented that it really doesn't drive dress codes?'


I believe you've missed my points ever so slightly, perhaps due to my presentation. But also you've misunderstood gaming or at least my understanding of gaming/how children are "more likely to become interesting"(a bit awkward phrase)
Gaming consumes your time and brain. It means you don't need much else, and you can easily bypass the whole teenage experimenting (with music, fashion, rules and drugs girls etc the whole damn teenager thing!) so I highly doubt 'interesting' kids would spend their time in the world of Warcraft and if they did I'm sure they're great in conversation (bearing they head isn't so buried in fantasies) but don't give a damn about fashion or music other that which is immediately in front of them.

Another point, which I'm unsure on because of my interpretation of fragmentation, but you couldn't just drop being a punk one day and switch to a new romantic. You can switch the disk from dandy James Bond to desert marines to final fantasy. Perhaps my understanding of this point is poor to awkward.

On you second question.
It has driven a bizarre kind of conformity. On the whole I find young people are able to wear some particularly horrible, obnoxious or absurd or just downright attention seeking clothing given its from the right contemporary brand. 'Cool' is easily attainable by having plain clothes again from the right brands. I've even heard kids use the phrase 'brand-check me' as a right of passage to being well dressed/cool/fashionable. I think to summarise there is just one kind of good look per time for young people now and so those who dress so are 'cool' to a much wider young audience compared to when you were younger. So unlike Bowie being cool to the New Romantics? Ian Curtis to the post punks etc now it's just ASAP rocky is that fucking guy duh. Therefore it's a form of conformity because in general everyone follows the same style philosophy.
Note I'm just talking about my observations of young people's style philosophy in London.

[Michael_Robartes]

Video games have more or less supplanted music as the thing that young people care about most.

We were punks, goths, teds, skins, skas, cure heads, new romantics, grunge. But we met, face to face, in clubs and at gigs. Shared and developed our aesthetics in the company of each other.

With the rise of gaming culture, I can see that the visual imagery in the games is very strong but how does this translate into dress, if at all?



If video games

On the contrary, this is the best thing a noob could do. Dig more.

You appear to be a prominent zeitgeister so please perhaps send me a message of long lost threads full of interesting stuff

[Fuuma]

And the third idea - those bands we imitated were real people dressing themselves, not visuals programmed by a bunch of geeks from existing archetypes. The geeks wearing the same blue jeans and hoodies all the while. See the disconnect?

No, they were as virtual as the video game characters of nowadays. Not that celebrities disappeared under the supposed primacy of video-games so this conversation is a little weird. I mean young adults these days cannot be said to lack in images and representations of style, from magazines to tumblr to their friend's streetstyle on fb to millions of movie stars, rock stars, rap stars, reality stars (the most unreal of them all).

[Faust]

What I mean is you had John Lennon or Iggy Pop or Axl Rose or Kurt Cobain. etc. as opposed to ninjas, assassins, knights, etc.
I understand what you mean when you refer to someone contrived like David Bowie, but that's not what I mean.

But, yeah, I find this video game style imitation also a little weird. I don't see that on the street that's for sure.

[Fuuma]

What I mean is you had John Lennon or Iggy Pop or Axl Rose or Kurt Cobain. etc. as opposed to ninjas, assassins, knights, etc.
I understand what you mean when you refer to someone contrived like David Bowie, but that's not what I mean.

But, yeah, I find this video game style imitation also a little weird. I don't see that on the street that's for sure.

I dunno, I don't feel "John Lennon" the rock star is any more real than some video game character + you didn't have many candid shots at the time so each John Lennon image is infinitely more rehearsed and deliberate than what you see in a game.

My main point though is that there's an onslaught of representation now so I dunno why younger people would have a lack of them. Of course a multiplicity of images make each one less precious and you can see it when you look at the speed with which we now consume them.

[Faust]

Bump for new thoughts.

[Faust]

No new thoughts?

[messenoire]

i am reaching the point in my life where i am leaning towards solely buying more tailored pieces. at one point, for quite some time, i wanted things fucked up and dragged through a hedge and now i want clean structured lines to compliment the chaos. the chaos is more subtle and maybe that's the overall swing of the industry but i am really appreciating the tailored sides of julius and rick lately. narrowing my tastes has also really helped, knowing what i want to wear and what i want to admire has really helped.

[DudleyGray]

Spurred from the WAYWT thread mini-discussion:

What is your style philosophy?

Do you prefer mixing and matching different brands/looks/price ranges or sticking with higher lines due to quality/cut/style?

Do you support (or don't support) certain designers and lines because of their aesthetics along with their ideologies (Carpe Diem, Julius, Ann D. et al)?

My style is far from the levels of what gets posted in WAYWT, and my knowledge in clothing and funds are pretty limited, but I pull so much inspiration from this forum that I felt I should try to contribute in some form or another, so here is this post.

I've liked clothing and fashion, but at one point I was very much inspired by the video interview with LabelKing, a well-known dandy on clothing forums. He pointed out all the history and connotations of each piece he was wearing. And I realized that clothing with that kind of awareness really ups the self-expression of clothing, to have that awareness and then wear the pieces intentionally.

The purpose of my existence is ultimately self-expression. My aim is to make my existence an art. I know that sounds pretentious but I don't mean it condescendingly or anything, it is all I have, really. I'm incapable of intimate relationships or an active social life. I just spend most of my time working, raising my son, or working on my music. So self-expression is what clothing is all about for me, but hopefully on a deeper level than just "stylish."

To narrow that down to how I use clothing to express myself. I have a distaste for being human. How we lie about what we are, how we pretend like we're not just animals that eat and shit and fuck like anything else, just because we shit into holes of water gadgets and ride in boxes to get to other boxes. Civilized. And I feel a little broken inside, a little bit dead. And I feel like a perpetual outsider, including to this place. I just value this place enough as inspiration to see if I can help with engaging discussion.

I think it starts with the body. RO said something to this effect as well. I want my body to show that I feel an outsider to it all, so I'm skinny with just enough muscle to show that it's intentional and I'm not just an ectomorph. I feel like this body type is preferable to the alternatives. Fit implies healthy and happy to me, muscular would be powerful, skinny fat would be content, overweight would be lazy, and obese would be, well I don't know.

I'd like for the base layer of my clothing to complement my body, mostly skinny stuff, moving into progressively bigger more draped layers. As Yohji described his clothing for women, although I am a man, it's like protection from the elements and peering eyes. Otherwise, I'd like the pieces themselves to have the connotations of the music scenes and art that I love, whenever possible. I'm particularly inspired by German Expressionist films.

I feel that there is a level of intellectualism that comes with a lot of the looks I see on SZ, but there's something different about it that I love. For lack of better words, it makes smart look cool. Not like the stuffy trad/menswear stuff you find in other places from people who are possibly equally as smart. That might be stylish or attractive, but there's nothing subversive about it. As a nerd, I've never seen smart look cool until this place. There's a darkness to being smart that I just haven't seen expressed through clothing until SZ.

[Faust]

Heavy stuff, DudleyGray. Hopefully, you will have a turnaround in terms of your bleak vision of humanity. We are also animals who write poetry and launch spaceships :-)

[AKA*NYC]

^ yeah and animals are cute; nothing wrong with animals

[Mung_city]

My philosophy isn't anything too thought provoking, but, it's been there with me since i was a kid.

I like clothing that reflects my mood, and feels like a uniform made for my body--perfectly tailored pieces… it feels like i am being cared for when a garment aligns itself with my body just right. I like clothing that wears with my life, and the connection i feel to clothing to represent itself in a story like fashion. I like clothing that ages well, and is minimalistic, which the latter is probably based on my perfectionist tendency. I'm attracted to fabrics that have an "natural" and earthiness to it. Leathers, denim, wool. timeless, but with a modern edge. I like to feel invisible, but in my mind standing out in my intentional sense of being understated.

[delicious_not]

i think every jacket needs a matching trousers. sometimes it hurts.