Tag: Trend of the week

Trend of the Week: Hipster Ubiquity

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Q: What do you call someone who looks just like you, who you’ve never met?
A. A stupid fucking hipster.

Yes, the hipster has long served as a convenient scapegoat for people who aspire to be hip without the “-ster”.  Onto them, we project our insecurities about our own superficiality, inauthenticity, and even insecurity itself.  What better way to spackle over one’s embarrassing desire to be cool, then to point at some guy wearing pants a millimeter skinnier than one’s own and say “see that guy?  He’s obviously desperate to be cool.  Sad, really.”  But hipsters aren’t just a collective figment of our neurotic late-capitalist imaginations; they’re also a trend.  Since hipsters are defined by trendiness, this represents a meta-trend, a trend in favor of trendiness itself.  In “The Hipster Trap,” Steven Kurutz grapples with the contradictions and Derridean aporias created by his own internally incoherent mental conception of the “hipster.” Continue reading “Trend of the Week: Hipster Ubiquity” →

Trend of the Week: British Suits

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I typically ignore the New York Times‘ “On the Runway” fashion reporting.  It’s not that I’m not interested in fashion, both personally and as a cultural phenomenon, but rather that articles about fashion shows and other events in the world of haute couture are so abstruse, they might as well be business section news about “On I.P.O, CDW to Fall Short of Boom-Era Valuation” or “S.E.C. to Vote on Proposal to Overhaul Money Funds.”  They might as well be about the N.B.A. draft.  Fashion reporters say things like “there was a bilge of chore jackets” and “Wherever Mr. Jones goes, he never loses sight of Vuitton’s sensibility….What Mr. Jones managed to reserve from the distilled American elements was a casual attitude.”   While conventional trend pieces strain too hard for relevance, high-fashion trend pieces take place in a rarefied world of tastemakers we’ve never heard of and cultural watersheds that have utterly failed to have any effect on us.  But it’s time to get over this aversion.  It’s time to learn what an honest-to-God fashion trend looks like, courtesy of Suzy Menkes’s “In London, All Hail the Suit.”

Continue reading “Trend of the Week: British Suits” →

Trend of the Week: Obsession Obsession

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This trend piece comes to us from Teddy Wayne, bestselling novelist and author of one million mildly to somewhat amusing one-sentence articles for McSweeney’s.  (For those not familiar with McSweeney’s, it is an online humor site for people who hate dick jokes and love those Yelp reviews that are in the form of an open letter to an abstract entity, but wish they were a little edgier.)  But he’s not just a disarmingly quirky observer of modern mores; he’s also a concerned and judgmental observer of modern mores.  For instance, one day Wayne was on Amtrak, and overheard four debutantes conversing.  He found their discussion to be humorous, so he began typing what they said and posting it on Facebook for his friends to laugh at.   I know what you’re thinking:  “That’s a really cool story.  It’s a shame that only Teddy Wayne’s Facebook friends got to see those posts, when they should have been made available for everyone to read.  Teddy Wayne is too modest, making fun of teenage girls on Facebook and then trying to get out of taking credit for it.”

Continue reading “Trend of the Week: Obsession Obsession” →

Trend of the Week: Vegetable Angst

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We’ve all heard about “first world problems,” “white whines,” dilemmas of affluence and so on.  The First World is awash in blogs, Tumblrs, and free-floating disapproval for any of its members who might voice complaints  about problems that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.  But are these gibes really fair?  Many so-called “first-world problems” are legitimate pet peeves that might annoy anyone, from Brooklyn to Bangladesh, Napa to Nairobi.  No one enjoys late trains, poor cell phone reception or defective Tic-Tacs.  And whatever your position on the socioeconomic scale, it’s human nature to comment on it.  The mockery of “luxury problems,” while well-meaning, seems a bit condescending toward the underprivileged, as well as unnecessarily dismissive of affluent problem-havers.  They’re not trying to taunt the marginalized and dispossesed.  It’s not like they’re bitching about having too much food in their kitchen, or something.

Unless they actually are.  If so, let’s nail those honkies to a cross.

Continue reading “Trend of the Week: Vegetable Angst” →

Trend of the Week: Extreme Facials

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Here’s a little Cosmo-style quiz.  Instead of testing your Penis Perspicacity, you’re finding out whether you have what it takes to live the New York Times Style section lifestyle!  Just think about the question, formulate your answer, then read on to find your score.

You look in the mirror, and notice your skin isn’t looking very radiant.  You want to look younger, eliminate wrinkles and clogged pores, and have softer, more supple skin than ever. What do you do?

Continue reading “Trend of the Week: Extreme Facials” →

Trend of the Week: Nail Polish

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It’s impossible to keep up with New York Times inanity.  Every day there’s something to be incredulous about — like “truth vigilante,” “men invented the internet,” or the time David Brooks said his 12-year-old son’s “heroes include John Boehner and Tupac Shakur.”  Trying to read it all is like drinking from a fire hose, never mind producing comprehensive blog posts.  To make a greater dent in the backlog, I am launching the “Trend of the Week” series.  Each week, I will explore a recent (or not-so-recent) craze presented to us by the Paper of Record.

Today, we examine “Once Staid, Nail Polish Becomes Fashion Accessory,” by Style section colossus Ruth La Ferla.  Continue reading “Trend of the Week: Nail Polish” →