I. Style Radar

A. Coolness = "a performance of stylized autonomy" (117)
B. Empty mind of chatter, be patient, "know" (121)
C. Style radar = not thinking, but being receptive and then acting decisively to get a photo (124).

1. Affective: visceral feeling, a kind of vital force that we feel but don't consciously register
2. The subject affects you

D. Is style radar a form of habitus?

1. Habitus = how we come to know what we like in ways that distinguish us as members of a particular group
2. Street style photographers tend toward cultural creatives, members of the creative class
3. Class-based reproduction of hierarchical distinctions, such as age and body type
4. Photographers must learn to embody the affective dimensions of this habitus as a way of knowing, thinking, and feeling
5. BUT: habitus is not fixed. It's a process, a becoming, not a being

E. Street style bloggers reflect how people affect us and hence expand the range of style that gets represented in fashion

 

II. Street Style Messages

A. Image versus written clothing: Barthes, redux
B. Luvaas's three questions to his subjects
C. Fast fashion as blank canvas
D. "Whatever" and comfort (physical or social or psychological)

 

III. Blogging Business

A. Self as brand

1. Street style blogging: collaborative, democratic
2. Aspirational labor
2. Brand = assemblage, process over time
3. Neoliberal precarity of labor
4. Brand culture isn't shallow

B. "Collaborations" and "partnerships"

1. Social capital
2. Financial, including advertorial: Luvaas's photo and text for Members Only
3. Unpaid labor?
4. Hired to take photos

C. Serious hobby

1. Amateur versus professional
2. Serious = social consequences

a. Geertz on Balinese cockfight
b. Deeply meaningful recreational activity: social status, social decorum
c. US football: militaristic masculinity, violence, heroism

3. High stakes: serious play displays, reflects, or reinforces the social dramas of a group
4. Blogging as way to make the self in pervasive brand culture
5. Inside, yet outside of fashion

 

IV. Street Style Goes to Fashion Week

A. Suzy Menkes: bloggers have turned Fashion Week into a circus
B. Luvaas: Bloggers were invited in
C. Bloggers at Fashion Week

1. Social networks

a. Venue info
b. Subjects
c. Links and posts increase buzz in mutually beneficial ways

2. Not paparazzi
3. Personal aesthetic vision
4. Shooting etiquette
5. Overlapping personal/professional relationships with subjects

D. Insider/outsider status blurs
E. Comparison to Hebidge: diffusion/defusion?
F. Has the heyday of street style blogging passed?

1. Luvaas is nostalgic for 2005-2012
2. Focus on people as inventive artists (297)
3. Instagram and Tumblr
4. At its best, street style blogs, like visual anthropology, document looks, feature sartorial expression, and capture an urban feel (302).

 

V. Universal Expression of Individuality

A. Denim goes global: homogenization or heterogenization?
B. Global Denim editors Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward: jeans allow people around the world to navigate the conflicting forces of conformity and individuality

1. Ubiquity enables expression of individuality
2. "The paradox was that at the very time when blue jeans were becoming the global ecumene of clothing, they were simultaneously becoming the most developed expression of specific individuality" (4).
3. "The more global the world then the more global the jeans but also the more the world created a sphere for the personal and the intimate the more this applied also to jeans" (4).

C. Powerful, meaningful because globally intimate

1. Standardized
2. Intimate through wearing, distressing, conforming to body
3. Default option

D. Increasingly popular worldwide

1. Worn on average 3.5 days/week in 2008; Germany = 5.2 days
2. 62% of consumers globally say they love or enjoy wearing jeans
3. Only 13% of Russians don't own jeans; 29% of Malaysians do not

E. Distinction

1. High end brands
2. Variations in material terms are relatively small
3. Premium jeans, yet just jeans
4. Less expensive jeans, yet look good
5. Fashionable, yet not as embedded in capitalist fashion changes

F. Consider "how objects make people and people make objects" (19).

 

VI. Bollywood Blues (Wilkinson-Weber)

A. Jeans started to appear in the late 1980s and 1990s
B. Transformation of Indian economy

1. 1991: remove/reduce tariffs, devalue the currency, encourage foreign investment, and reduce government control over economy
2. Exports more attractive, domestic consumers purchase fewer foreign goods
3. Devaluing the currency reduces wages and hits domestic consumers hard
4. Import substitution and growing exports ==> production and consumption boom (although there are sustainability issues)
5. Indian consumer revolution, growing middle class
6. Consumption is alluring, but lingering moral ambivalence

C. Jeans become regular item in urban middle and upper class wardrobes
D. Movies and emulation

1. Fueled by greater access to consumer goods
2. Starting in 1970s, jeans signal characters stepping outside of conventions, such as being sexually provocative
3. Men, jeans and sexual assertiveness

a. "Dard e Disco" from Om Shanti Om
b. Akshay Kumar's Levi's 501 commercial: unbuttoned

4. Brands enable on and off-screen exclusivity in context of limited consumer goods
5. Jeans = only garment at home in both actor's work and daily lives: "poised between the personal and the iconic" (64)

E. Stars as cultural brokers for audience

 

VII. Brazilian Jeans (Mizrahi)

A. Brazilian jeans: giving a bum
B. Funk Balls in Rio: not jeans, but "calca de Moletom Stretch"
C. Materiality and agency of jeans as objects
D. Men's clothing styles, bodily appearance, and lifestyle = homologous
E. Women's clothes = diverse, not systematic

1. Individual choices in dialogue with material features
2. Fabric permits movement, stretches vertically and horizontally
3. Unlike skirts, jeans cover body, permit movement, accentuate curves
4. Gender opposition through sexual movement = women assert power to get men to look

F. Jeans have expanded choice
G. Dynamics of mimicry

1. Bubble-up: popular culture symbolizes Brazilian identity
2. Jean-like, yet locally specific
3. Materiality permits construction of difference through copying

 

VIII. Carrot-cut Jeans in Germany (Ege)

A. Carrot-cut = connected to German gangsta rap

1. High waist, tight crotch and butt, wider knee, narrow hem
2. Picaldi brand
3. Turkish, Arab, other immigrant backgrounds
4. Working-class whites in former East
5. Proll (Proletarian) = coarse, vulgar
6. Masculine body images: Picaldi jeans make thighs look muscular, emphasize the butt, display a narrow waist and broad shoulders

B. Picaldi jeans as performance in context of negative discrimination to make ambiguity evident
C. "Is Tarek a good boy or a bad boy?"

1. Impression management: putting on a show is empowering, but just a show
2. Swagger and ability to deceive
3. Embarrassment and anxiety: posturing or actually threatening?
4. "'Yes, I wear stuff that makes me look tough. No, I don't mind that people may take me for a thug. I can see why they would feel intimidated, and I kind of like that. At the same time, these are just clothes. I deserve to be treated like everybody else. Clothes don't tell the story of an individual. No one should be categorized on such superficial terms'" (174).

D. Ethnic and class discrimination coded in clothing: just a Proll
E. Clothing versus discursive statements

1. "By wearing, for instance, specific denim, then, one makes statements, in a somewhat conscious manner, but one reserves the right to change frames of meaning: from assertion to ambiguity, from the serious to the playful" (175).
2. Contrast to McCracken: Picaldi jeans are effective language because they communicate play and ambiguity through performance art