This argument is one of the arguments made in a new book by author W. David Marks, Status and Culture. Fashion viewers may know Marx’s name from his previous work, Ametora, which chronicles how Japan took over American style and commercialized it. His new work reveals what he calls “the big mystery of culture” – basically why people choose certain practices and quirks for no reason.
Of course, practical considerations or judgments of quality are often the excuses we use to justify our flight to new trends or status symbols. Buyers may tell themselves that the materials and craftsmanship of the Birkin bag are second to none, although it is no more efficient at carrying things than bags that can be purchased for a fraction of the cost. Appeals for beauty or authenticity can also be used as an excuse to go from wide lapels to skinny or baggy jeans, for which we have no real functional purpose.
Such behavior exists not only in the modern consumer society. “Over the years, isolated tribes have changed their hairstyles without subscribing to GQ,” Marx wrote in a chapter on the fashion cycle. We can say that trends create the fashion industry, and not vice versa.
At the heart of these cultural operations, according to Marx, is our desire for status and our ability to boast of it. An effective status symbol requires a certain amount of expense to make it unique, be it its real price (Birkins again) or simply an estimate of knowledge about it that can only be recognized by those with that knowledge, such as an obscure Japanese label.
However, the Internet is changing how brands, products, and everything else create status value. With the advent of mass media and mass production a century ago, cultural capital such as insider knowledge may have become more important than outright displays of wealth, as it can demonstrate status and inspire imitation. But today you have instant access to almost any information or subject matter you can imagine, which contributed to a kind of “cultural stagnation”, Marx argued that nothing seems to have persistence, and that, be that as it may, culture never seems to be going to progress. This helps explain the retro craze that makes today’s fashion seem like recreations of the past rather than a recognizable period in fashion history.
“A lot of this book comes from thinking about what is wrong with culture right now and realizing that the only way I can explain it is, first, that I have some kind of theory about how culture works, or at least hypotheses. and what cultural values are,” Marx said in an interview.
BoF discusses with Marks how the Internet is changing state signaling, its impact on culture, NFTs, and the value of craftsmanship in the digital age.
In the 20th century, information and access to products have themselves become signaling costs. The Internet was the first to break down information barriers. Everything can be easily found on the Internet. Then [it affected] distribution and access to the product.
Even in the 1990s, I was interviewed in the New York Times for an article about the Bathing Monkey because people were trying to buy the Bathing Monkey in New York. It’s more or less impossible, because you either have to go to Japan, which no one did at the time, or you have to go to a store in New York, where they sometimes have it, or you have to go to London, to a store where he is. . That’s all. So simply visiting the Bathing Monkey has very high signaling costs, making it a great marker of elite distinction, and people think it’s pretty cool because there’s so little of it.
There really is nothing today that you cannot buy and have delivered to you anytime, anywhere. You can wake up in the middle of the night and order. But more importantly, everything is plagiarism. If you want something in a certain style that you see on the runway, you can get it right now. Thus, there are no barriers to information and no barriers to products.
You make it clear in the book that you do not consider this process to be neutral. Actually it’s bad. This makes culture boring, since the primary signal is the literal dollar value, not any cultural capital.
like this. I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, but there are videos of people walking around LA asking people about their outfits. When they check each garment, they don’t talk about the brand, they only talk about the value. I saw it and said, “Wow, it’s just another world,” especially since in my generation you are too shy to talk about the cost or try to downplay it.
The cultural capital has become a dirty word. After [sociologist] Pierre Bourdieu more or less wrote that the appreciation of complex and abstract art is a symbol of class and that everyone is beginning to understand, there was a clear backlash: “We should evaluate more leniently. Art, from high to low. so that the appreciation of art does not become a way of simply reproducing class structures.” Low culture is just as useful as high culture. But what he is more or less trying to do is to eradicate cultural capital as a form of exclusion. It pushes [status signals] back into economic capital, which I don’t think is anyone’s intention. It’s just a systemic effect of this change.
My argument is not that “we need to bring back the cultural capital of the elite as a way of discriminating against the uneducated.” There just needs to be some sort of reward mechanism for what I call symbolic complexity, which means really deep, interesting, complex cultural exploration without having to be seen as pretentious, snobbish, and xenophobic. Instead, understand that it is this innovation that drives the entire cultural ecosystem forward.
In fashion, in particular, does craft lose value in the age of the internet because you could say it’s symbolic complexity?
I think it’s the other way around. I think the craft is back. Since everything is available, mastery is a way to return to scarcity and rarity. At the same time, since everything is more or less made by machines, the brand’s storytelling becomes more complex. Brands must return to craftsmanship to create a story that justifies the premium price.
Clearly, there are different types of status signals going on in the network. NFTs have found a way to create a scarcity of digital goods by allowing people to prove ownership of something like a jpeg. You see some NFT collections, such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club, first becoming status symbols in the crypto community and then becoming more and more popular. Does this mean that signaling is still going on the same way, but we are just in the process of finding new ways to signal and signal as more culture is created on the internet?
I believe they are status symbols. I just think they are weak status symbols because status symbols require three things. They need signaling costs: there must be something that makes it difficult to get them. They have it. They are expensive or may be rare. It’s still pretty hard to get one. But they lack the other two things a good status symbol has, which is an alibi – there’s no reason to buy one other than financial speculation or you want to buy the symbol. Then he also has no connection with pre-existing high-status groups. Boring Monkeys came close when Madonna, Stephen Curry and some of these celebrities started buying them and posting them in their profile photos.
But the main thing in status symbols is that there should be remnants of behavior. They must have some function that can be a natural part of people’s lifestyle that will make them not just a whim, but a more real part of people’s lifestyle and then a desire for others.
It seems that we always have a younger generation that wants to be different and fight back against the older generation. Don’t they create their own cultural capital and status symbols? Does it change anything?
If you live on the Internet and live on TikTok, you need to know the syntax of the platform every day, because you must know which memes are trending, which jokes are in them and which are not. It’s all information based, and I feel like that’s where a lot of energy goes. I don’t feel like the energy goes into creating new forms of music that repel us, creating new forms of clothing that repel us. You just don’t see it in young people.
But with TikTok, I think they create video content that is very repulsive to adults because most adults take TikTok and say, “I’m out.” created for seniors because it has the worst, lowest overall taste standard in a 15 second video. You don’t have to be a work of art. Therefore, there are differences among young people. It’s just not the area we’re used to, namely symbolic complexity or artistic complexity.
I think one of the things that many of us have heard over the years is that fashion trends are no longer as effective as they used to be. Since everything is immediately visible and accessible on the runway or on TikTok, they pop up and dissipate so quickly that there are few, if any, distinct trends in a given year. If everything existed online for only 15 minutes, would there be something that could develop the historical value you talked about in the book for future generations?
Fashion trends are not only about adoption or buying, but about people incorporating them into their identity in ways that they consider authentic. With such a short period of time between the appearance of an idea and when it spreads or potentially spreads in society, people don’t have time to actually embrace it and make it really part of their identity. Without it, it doesn’t show up as a social trend, so you get this microscopic movement. You might even call them nanotrends. With culture, the situation is even more ephemeral.
But he still deviates from certain things over time. We are no longer in skinny jeans mode. Even if everything goes well, if you look at skinny jeans, you still think they are a little dated. J.Crew’s baggy chinos are interesting to me because if you’ve been looking at Popeye for the last four years, you can see they have a really big silhouette. It all comes from this stylist, Akio Hasegawa. Obviously he’s reacting to the fact that things have gone down so much at Thom Browne, but only men are starting to wear clothes that really suit them. But as soon as this happens, the door to a larger silhouette opens.
So to say that there is no trend, I don’t think it’s true. The fact that we are moving from the subtle to the big in everything is a trend. It’s just a very old-fashioned, slowly drifting macro trend, not the strong, all-encompassing 20th century micro trend we’ve seen in the past.
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Post time: Oct-19-2022