Let them eat couture, part 2

Consider me stunned to learn that I was beaten to the punch in my association of fashion with aggressively snobby pre-revolutionary French aristocrats by none other than Juicy Couture, who have slapped the line “let them eat couture” on an ad, a bag, and a Christmas ornament. Just in case you needed any more evidence of the fashion industry’s open contempt for all who dare to not be rich. And the cheerful implication that if you’re eating couture, you sure as hell aren’t eating food is a whole other can of worms I’m not even going to open.

Ascent of Man

Be a man!
Drive a truck
Stare at girls you’d like to fuck
With piggy eyes you leer at them
And rate them all from one to ten 

Be a man!
Get a job
Shave your beard or be a slob
Even if you’re fat or gay
Everyone hears what you say 

Be a man!
Write a book
Clarify your grand outlook
With ample faux self-deprecation
Pontificate re: your generation 

Be a man!
Deny it’s true
That chauvinism’s much to do
With your so-called enlightened views
Oh, how very nice to be a dude!

Slumping along.

I haven’t done much of anything lately, so here’s something I wrote a while back:

The Low Artist

I’m a low low artist
There’s no one worse than me
Even if you had binoculars
I don’t think you could see 

I’m a low low artist
Of whom you’ll not have heard
And if you saw my poem
You would not read a word 

And if I had a painting
You wouldn’t look at it
I’m a low low artist
You wouldn’t give a shit 

I’m a low low artist
It’s terrible it’s true
Even if I had a telescope
I doubt I could see you!

Grad student ethnography: Four things grad students like

1. Reminding everyone that their lives are really hard. After getting up at 8, teaching a class, grading some papers, and going to a lecture, they might not even have enough time left over for an afternoon nap! If you think you’ve got it rough, a grad student is always around to remind you that they’re only getting a paltry three weeks of vacation time this summer before heading out to teach in Europe. Ciao!

2. Getting free money, then blowing it on shoes and booze. In the time between graduating from college and starting their grad program, most of these students seem to have forgotten that typically when you go to a university, you have to pay them for the privilege of receiving a higher education. Consequently, they’ll waste no time in telling the world how poor and undervalued they are, even as they spend their afternoons nibbling on sushi and show up to class in one brand new ensemble after another. Scholarship sponsors and grant writers must be filled with joy to know that this is how the university’s best and brightest use the thousands of dollars given freely to them on the basis of their ability to use large words.

3. Being really open-minded. Grad students love to show off the enlightened worldview their liberal arts education has bestowed upon them by measuring the worth of every person they meet according to the extent to which that person shares the grad student’s background, goals, and academic performance. Although a grad student’s thesis might be about something like “prismatic identities and authentic selves within the marginalized,”* he or she will blithely snub undergraduates, older students, grad students from different programs, better students, worse students, and anyone whose snap judgments (“analyses,” “interpretations,” or “kneejerk reactions”) don’t lead them to the exact same conclusions about life/academia/academic subjects. They probably also fail to see the irony in this.

4. Denial. Not a denial letter from that queer studies post-doc fellowship, mind you; rather, for all their snobbery, grad students desperately want to be like common people, which for them means all those folks from their undergrad years who joined frats, slept around, and knew the words to rap songs. The grad students’ 4.0 GPAs made them the academic aristocracy, but beneath it lies self-doubt and a nagging wish that they had been part of the 2.0 proletariat, which is often manifested in conspicuous “partying” behavior: Not content to just hang out and drink together, grad students must also document the occasion with numerous photographs and facebook updates and talk in class about how much they love beer and procrastination. In this way, they hope to ward off the notion that they are in any respect less hip or less indifferent toward school than their non-grad peers. Another key indicator that a grad student is slumming is the fact that, however wild and crazy they claim to be, they never seem to party so hearty that they wake up in their friend’s bathtub or get a C on a test.

 

*No, really.

Let them eat couture!

Poor little rich man.

CNN reported today on fashion designer and big whiny baby Oscar de la Renta’s hilariously out-of-touch pissing and moaning in response to the outfit Michelle Obama wore to meet Queen Elizabeth II. (I only clicked on the article because I initially confused Oscar de la Renta with boxing champ Oscar de la Hoya.) Basically, Ms. Obama wore a little skirt suit with a cardigan and some pearls — a very typical Michelle Obama outfit — which de la Renta considers some sort of huge faux pas. Being a. from the western U.S. and b. just some middle class schlub, it never occurred to me that a sweater would ever be considered an offensive garment in any context (unless it had “Female Body Inspector” embroidered on it or something I guess), but even if it is, whatever. The queen is a pretty mellow lady, and people have probably done worse things in front of her than wear a sweater.

De la Renta didn’t stop there, though, proceeding instead to deliver a very important public service message:

“American fashion right now is struggling,” he said. “I think I understand what [Obama and her advisers] are doing, but I don’t think that is the right message at this particular point.”

“I don’t object to the fact that Mrs. Obama is wearing J. Crew to whatever because the diversity of America is what makes this country great. But there are a lot of great designers out there. I think it’s wrong to go in one direction only,” he added.

To complain that fashion — a completely superfluous and frivolous industry which contributes nothing essential to society, which survives by requiring rampant waste and conspicuous consumption, an industry which therefore by definition caters exclusively to the rich, and which could not exist without the snobbery and classism of its proponents — is “suffering” at a time when literally millions have lost jobs and entire industries and universities are collapsing requires a kind of audacious “fuck the poor” attitude not seen since 1789. That or de la Renta is, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, blessed with a head emptier than a hermit’s address book.

And what exactly is this “right message” de la Renta cries out for at “this particular point” (a recession)? Ostensibly, he wants Obama to cast off her tasteful mall-clothes message and wear the uniform of the elite: couture. To hell with humility, practicality, and solidarity, and, implicitly, to hell with the American people, nearly half of whom earn less than $30,000 per year. This is the message of high fashion in general, which is necessarily beyond the means of all but the wealthiest members of society. To declare that Obama’s famous preference for J. Crew is a misstep (unless she’s just doing “whatever”), that she “should” be wearing designer labels, particularly when she meets other elites like the queen, is essentially to declare one’s belief that social, political, and economic elites are all members of the same ruling class; that those who wield political power should also dominate the masses economically; that it is a faux pas for a member of the political elite to refuse to behave as an economic elite; that brands like J. Crew, which, frankly, many people would still consider kind of fancy, are fit only for unimportant tasks and, conversely, that tasks done by the sort of people who wear regular clothes are unimportant.

If someone had made such openly anachronistic assertions in another context, if someone were to outright say “those who have less money are lesser people,” we would be outraged. And yet, although this is precisely what the very existence of high fashion does, we devote magazines, blogs, and television stations to slavishly following the words and deeds of our 21st-century aristocracy. 

I could understand the raised eyebrows if Ms. Obama had worn a tuxedo T-shirt to meet the queen, but the outfit she chose was classy, tasteful, and — dun dun DUN — bourgeois. If anything, she should be praised for her relentless refusal to indulge classists like de la Renta. Though actually we really should all just shut up and quit reducing every woman in the universe to whatever she happens to be wearing at the moment.

More Kosmatic news: Lest Ye Forget

No joke: My short story “Lest Ye Forget” has been posted in the Kosmo’s April 1st issue over here.