Are the oxymorons?
I remember having a jarring personal experience midway through my second year of college. I had grown tired of what I considered far too much elitist behavior; people who thought they were better than everyone else because their parents had a lot of money. Parallel to this, I was just beginning to become interested in fashion, and despised the notion of trends, and that those with social status dictated what was cool, and that such cool things were typically prohibitively expensive.
As a relatively unfashionable 18 year old with little social status or parental riches, these were all perfectly natural feelings. I’m sure millions of other people have felt/do feel the same way, and I still think somewhat in the same way.
Then one day, I claimed to a friend that I “hated elitists,” and that I was “anti-elitist.” No sooner had the words come out of my mouth did I realize that this, of course, made me elitist. I was too good of a person to be an elitist, I was better than the elitists…oh. This realization bothered me for weeks, as I considered how it carried over to many disciplines where I simply felt inadequate.
There is certainly a significant group of people who are self-proclaimed anti-fashion, and I wonder if they experience the same thing. Is being anti-fashion simply a way to feel better than other people, who decide to embrace fashion and trends? While I don’t advocate blindly following trends, going too far in the other direction is hypocritical and damaging.
Tags: anti-elitism, anti-fashion, antifashion, elitism, fashion, philosophy
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12.12.08 at 10:12 am
Brian
If you stated you were anti-elitist, couldn’t you equally feel not as good as an elitist? Take a bully for example – he generally picks on everyone (especially the helpless) because he feels that he is better than his victim. The victim generally doesn’t take a strong liking towards the bully, and may even go as far as to dislike him (pardon my sarcasm). This is primarily because the bully puts down on the victim and makes the victim feel inferior to the bully – similarly to how an elitist might consciously or unconsciously treat others.
Although I agree on your analysis of Anti-Fashion, from an objective standpoint I cannot submit that it is very damaging. Anti-fashion has paved the way for many trends that have even become quite prominant and mainstream (take the “punk” or “gothic” looks, for example). Punk rock had the similar results; “The first wave of punk rock aimed to be aggressively modern, distancing itself from the bombast and sentimentality of early 1970s rock” [Robb, 2006]. Look at its mainstream popularity now.
I do agree, however, that it can be hypocritial and damaging when a person truly believes his position is the outright best. This person generally fails to analyze how another position might affect himself or others, especially for benefit, and in doing so they lose insight on the topic as a whole.
12.12.08 at 10:48 am
Barry
First, thanks for the discussion.
Your first point:
“If you stated you were anti-elitist, couldn’t you equally feel not as good as an elitist?”
Absolutely, in fact, I think that’s often the case. My point was only that anti-elitism is simply another form of elitism.
Your second point is interesting. I suppose the opposite of “blindly following trends” is “blindly opposing trends,” which I maintain is damaging (as one shuts themselves out of many viewpoints just as someone who only follows trends does.
I wonder how much the punk and gothic movements had to do with actively eschewing contemporaneous looks, rather than the afashion view of simply doing what they wanted to express. Being aggressively modern, for example, could either be a strong statement against the status quo, or something a group of people just thought was cool (or anything in between).