BLOG #26: SEMANTICS AKA DON'T PISS ME THE FUCK OFF
Okay, don’t you find it crazy how you get your period and all of a sudden your jeans nearly don’t fit until it’s over? Pretty sure I’ve written an approximation of the phrase to follow (if not the same thing) on this blog already but: the human body is a wonderful and disgusting place.
I’ve been doing some delicious, delicious shopping. All is to be detailed in my new Substack called The Shoptimist, a continuation of my previous pursuit at Document Journal. I hit the Outline sale and the If Soho sale and ooooweee am I going to be dressing Gen Z gibberish.
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I read the NYT Opinion piece about Gen Z fashion so you didn’t have to. Thesis: Gen Z dress is made up of the deleterious scrum of Internet, and yes it is our fault for being dumb, there’s a subtext that it’s also probably our parents’ and teachers’ fault for telling us we’re unique or giving us too many unearned awards, and that we’ve made style-Pangea in the sense that there’s no more clear demarcation lines between jock and dork and goth anymore, and that this is inherent to us because we only understand things via joke or aesthetic so we dress catered toward the joke of the aesthetic. And this whole process is “gibberish” to everyone, maybe, but it’s actually super “legible” to really smart Gen X guys like him who are so smart, in fact, that they can get published in the New York Times.
More than that, it’s a lamentation of a time when people were recognizable by subcultural dress, jock, dork, and goth. The subtext: Aren’t we sick of the label-less ness that came as a reaction to the very fair and objective categorization of one by their group thinking? Don’t we like the fact that affinities (or lack thereof) for piercings and shared love for music genres, themselves, used to genre-fy people? Mmm…
Ok so Gen Z’s whole thing is that we’re a genre of no genre. But we know that that’s not real, and that everyone has to fit somewhere into a style phylum (and so on) within the kingdom. The product is all the hyperniches or -cores or whatever you may call it; I once joked about that reality in my past column at Document Journal. That whole “you say you want individuality but only further segment yourselves so algorithms can sell you things” is our Gen Z irony; we want it one way but end up becoming the thing we hate. It’s not ignorance, it’s clumsiness, I would even argue a part of the human condition (but that’s for a philosophy class I’ve never taken and don’t plan to). We Gen Z have tried to do Marxism, at least socially, but didn’t realize that we aren’t seizing the means of production or restructuring the material conditions of self-governance, we’ve just deepened our understanding of the world purely through aesthetics, everyone is an individual, a main character (my friend Nicolaia wrote something awesome about this that you should read). But still, people are not allowed to be people who wear clothes or share affinities. They went from being “subcultures” (Gen X/Millennials) to “vibes” (we, Gen Z). This is, ultimately, a semantic argument that proves that, no, it isn’t a novel concept that the youth have a funky way of dressing that confuses those who are not young anymore, and, yes, we have a different word for it. And it seems like that’s what the fool who wrote the NYT piece bemoaning how Gen Z dresses was trying to say. But instead he only outed himself as crotchety that he doesn’t understand the lingo anymore. Well, yes; time does pass, you are closer to 50 than 20, and the only one who seems to care about that is…you. Eat my shorts (they’re Miu Miu).
My body’s made of crushed little stars; Mitski said that. That’s what being ecstatic feels like. Harry says I’m prepping my saturn return (it’s next year for me). My cup overfloweth.
I’ve decided to start writing, like, forreal. Not like I’m telling you how fearless I am to get stabbed, point to the wound, burlesque around it, and then describe how unashamed I feel bleeding all over the place because I delight in the splash of my insides becoming outsides. But like I’m showing you how I can pull the knife out, plug the hole, and give myself stitches without making a sound. I’ve decided to become less histrionic this way. I’ve decided to become more theatric with my use of metaphors involving violence. And, perhaps most importantly, I’ve decided to tell you that I understand the fundamental difference between talking about being emotionally dauntless and being dauntless because, well. I hereby refuse aesthetic understanding in favor of love. This one is not a semantic argument.
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