This morning I was on WBEZ Chicago, talking on Eight Forty-Eight about the ways our ancient, social instincts play out in contemporary culture. Thanks to host, Tony Sarabia, and fellow guest, Rabbi Adam Chalom, for a great discussion!
(My part starts at 12:20)
[audio:http://social-creature.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/120418-seg-b_1.mp3|titles=“Tribalism in the modern age” on WBEZ Chicago|width=60%]
A musician friend of mine was once seeing the best friend of a famous heiress and he told me this story: “I had been dating her for a month and one night she invited me out to go meet her whole crew for the first time. I was SUPER nervous. Meeting the group of friends of someone you’re dating for the first time can be nerve-racking anyway, but especially if they are like…. that. I drove there and I was standing outside like, ‘OK… I need to get my shit straight and go in there and own this place.’ All of a sudden it hit me: ‘Channel your inner Tony Stark!'” It worked, he said, “Game over.”
Hearing this story, I wondered, who was my inner spirit superheroine? What clever badass would I conjure for existential ammo in a situation like this? I started searching my mental pop culture database for an acceptable candidate and this is when I realized I could barely think of a single one. The only two vaguely applicable options coming to mind were both from a decade ago: Buffy foremost, and, more hazily, Trinity. But Buffy’s final episode had aired, and Trinity had devolved from enigma to boring love interest saved by her boyfriend at the end of the Matrix trilogy, both back in 2003. As far as contemporary, mainstream, pop culture was concerned, there was a giant void.
I turned to the Internet for help, and found a list of the 100 Greatest Female Characters, compiled by Total Film. While not exactly rigorous in its methodology (fully 6% of the list’s alleged 100 greatest female characters are not actually human; 3 — Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, Lady from Lady and the Tramp, and Dory from Finding Nemo — aren’t even humanoid), the audit is, at the very least… directional. Narrowing the list down to just those heroines who’ve graced the big screen within the past 10 years (minus the non-human entries) the chronological order looks like this:
Among these 15 possible spirit superhoreine candidates there are 6 victims of sexual abuse, 3 are dealing with some form of depression, 4 haven’t hit puberty, 2 are addicts — including one vampire — and, most notably, a full third who would sooner slaughter a party than charm it. New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis observed this trend last year, writing:
It’s no longer enough to be a mean girl, to destroy the enemy with sneers and gossip: you now have to be a murderous one. That, at any rate, seems to be what movies like Hanna, Sucker Punch, Super, Let Me In, Kick-Ass and those flicks with that inked Swedish psycho-chick seem to be saying. One of the first of these tiny terrors was played by the 12-year-old Natalie Portman in Luc Besson’s neo-exploitation flick The Professional (1994). Her character, a cigarette-smoking, wife-beater-wearing Lolita, schooled by a hit man, was a pint-size version of the waif turned assassin in Mr. Besson’s Femme Nikita (1990), which spawned various imitators. Mr. Besson likes little ladies with big weapons. As does Quentin Tarantino and more than a few Japanese directors, including Kinji Fukasaku, whose 2000 freakout, Battle Royale, provided the giggling schoolgirl who fights Uma Thurman’s warrior in Kill Bill Vol. 1. Mr. Tarantino and his celebrated love of the ladies of exploitation has something to do with what’s happening on screens. Yet something else is going on…. The question is why are so many violent girls and women running through movies now.
That question is particularly pointed since this genre is not exactly blockbuster material. Hanna was only slightly profitable. Sucker Punch flopped, as did Haywire and the Besson-produced, Colombiana; both Kick-Ass and Let Me In were “gore-athons that movieplexers don’t want to see,” and, in spite of all its hype, the American remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was a “huge box office disappointment.” And that’s all just in the past two years.
In an April, 2011, New Yorker article titled, “Funny Like A Guy, Anna Faris and Hollywood’s Women Problem,” Tad Friend wrote:
Female-driven comedies such as Juno, Mean Girls, The House Bunny, Julie & Julia, Something’s Gotta Give, It’s Complicated, and Easy A have all done well at the box office. So why haven’t more of them been made? “Studio executives think these movies’ success is a one-off every time,” Nancy Meyers, who wrote and directed Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, observes. “They’ll say, ‘One of the big reasons that worked was because Jack was in it,’ or ‘We hadn’t had a comedy for older women in forever.”
Amy Pascal, who as Sony’s cochairman put four of the above films into production, points out, “You’re talking about a dozen or so female-driven comedies that got made over a dozen years, a period when hundreds of male-driven comedies got made. And every one of those female-driven comedies was written or directed or produced by a woman. Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy than experience a woman’s point of view. “Let’s be honest,” one top studio executive said. “The decision to make movies is mostly made by men, and if men don’t have to make movies about women, they won’t.”
Except, it seems, if those women happen to be traumatized, ultra-violent vigilantes of some sort. Perhaps these movies keep getting made because their failure is seen as a one-off every time, too.
“Men just don’t understand the nuance of female dynamics,” Friend quotes an anonymous, prominent producer. Although the conversation is about comedy (why men can’t relate to Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones, for example), it could explain why all these vengeful heroines seem to inevitably wind up defective. This violent femmes sub-genre — which expands the traditional Rape/Revenge archetype to also encompass psychologically violated prepubescents — by default demands female protagonists. But since their creators don’t understand how to make them, they stick to what they know. Consider that the title role in Salt was originally named Edwin, and intended for Tom Cruise before she became Evelyn and went to Angelina Jolie. The emotionally stunted, socially inept, tech savant protagonists of David Fincher’s two latest films — male in The Social Network, female in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — are equally as interchangeable. From Hannah to Hit Girl, all the way back to Matilda in The Professional, it’s always been a father, or father figure who’s trained them. A woman, this narrative suggests, would have nothing to offer in raising a powerful daughter. When a film needs a Violent Femme the solution has become to simply write a man, and then cast a girl. (Failing that, just mix up a cocktail of disorders — Asperger’s, attachment disorder, PTSD; a splash of Stockholm Syndrome — where a character needs to be.) No understanding of female dynamics required.
“What if the person you expect to be the predator is not who you expect it to be? What if it’s the other person,” asks producer, David W. Higgins, on the DVD featurette for his 2005 film, Hard Candy, about a 14-year-old girl, played by Ellen Paige, who blithely brutalizes a child molester. Whereas for 20th century heroines like Princess Leia (#5 on Total Film’s 100 Greatest Female Characters), Sarah Connor (#3), or Ellen Ripley (#1 — of course), not to mention their brethren, overcoming trauma is what made them become heroes, for this new crop, trauma is what excuses them from seeming like villains in their own right. We love to see the underdog triumph, but do we really want to watch a victim become the predator, and a predator become the hero? The ongoing failures of films fetishizing this scenario suggest we’re just not that into this cognitive dissonance.
So much for movies no one wants to see, but what about those those every girl has? On the one hand there’s Twilight, whose Bella Swan is a dishrag of a damsel in distress so useless her massive popularity is a disturbing, cultural atavism. On the other, there’s the Harry Potter series, whose Hermione Granger (#7) might be “The Heroine Women Have Been Waiting For,” according to Laura Hibbard in the Huffington Post. “The early books were full of her eagerly answering question after question in class, much to the annoyance of the other characters. In the later books, that unapologetic intelligence very obviously saves Harry Potter’s life on more than one occasion. Essentially, without Hermione, Harry wouldn’t have been ‘the boy who lived.'” Meanwhile, here’s how Total Film describes Leia: “Royalty turned revolutionary, a capital-L Lady with a laser gun in her hand. Cool, even before you know she also has Jedi blood.”
And that is the one, simple, yet infinitely complex element that is consistently missing across the entire spectrum of stiff, 21st century downers: Cool. “Of all the comic books we published at Marvel,” said Stan Lee, the creator of Iron Man, Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, and more, “we got more fan mail for Iron Man from women than any other title.” Cool is the platonic ideal Tony Stark represents. It’s what makes him such an effective spirit superhero for the ordeal of party. But while Stark may be special he’s not an anomaly. From James Bond to Tyler Durden, male characters Bogart the cool. And it’s not because they’re somehow uniquely suited for it (see: the femme fatale). It’s because their contemporary female counterparts are consistently forced to be lame.
“You have to defeat her at the beginning,” Tad Friend quotes a successful female screenwriter describing her technique. “It’s a conscious thing I do — abuse and break her, strip her of her dignity, and then she gets to live out our fantasies and have fun. It’s as simple as making the girl cry fifteen minutes into the movie.” That could just as easily describe Bridesmaids as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Which is totally fucked, first of all. And secondly, it’s boring. You’d think there’d be more narrative to go around — though I suppose I did just see the once female-driven Carrie, and The Craft remade as an all-male superhero origin flick called, Chronicle. Perhaps we really have reached Peak Plot. In which case now would really be the time to be R&Ding some alternatives.
“I love to take reality and change one little aspect of it, and see how reality then shifts.” said director, Jon Favreau. “That was what was fun about Iron Man, you [change] one little thing, and how does that affect the real world?” Favreau’s experiment has yielded a superhero archetype that reflects a slew of Millennial mores, from the intimacy of his relationship with his gadgets, to his eschew of a secret identity in favor of that uniquely post-digital virtue of radical transparency, to his narcissism. “If Peter Parker’s life lesson is that ‘with great power comes great responsibility,'” I wrote in a post titled, Why Iron Man is the First 21st Century Superhero, “Tony Stark’s is that with great power comes a shit-ton of fun. Unlike the prior century’s superhero, this new version saves the world not out of any overwhelming sense of obligation or indentured servitude to duty, but because he can do what he wants, when he wants, because he wants to. Being Iron Man isn’t a burden, it’s an epic thrill-ride.” Breaking with the established conventions of the genre to create a uniquely modern superhero has made Iron Man a success, to the tune of a billion dollar box office between the two movies, and launched Marvel Studios and ensuing Avengers’ franchises in its wake. But there’s one 21st century shift Tony Stark will never be able to embody. And it’s kind of a big one.
From The Atlantic Magazine:
Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing—and with shocking speed.
In the wreckage of the Great Recession, three-quarters of the 8 million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance. Some of these jobs will come back, but the overall pattern of dislocation is neither temporary nor random. The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. About a third of America’s physicians are now women, as are 45 percent of associates in law firms—and both those percentages are rising fast. A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge. Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood.
To see the future—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools, where a quiet revolution is under way. Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and 42 percent of all M.B.A.s. Most important, women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. In a stark reversal since the 1970s, men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.
American parents are beginning to choose to have girls over boys. As they imagine the pride of watching a child grow and develop and succeed as an adult, it is more often a girl that they see in their mind’s eye.
Yes, the U.S. still has a wage gap, one that can be convincingly explained—at least in part—by discrimination. Yes, women still do most of the child care. And yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men. But given the power of the forces pushing at the economy, this setup feels like the last gasp of a dying age rather than the permanent establishment. It may be happening slowly and unevenly, but it’s unmistakably happening: in the long view, the modern economy is becoming a place where women hold the cards.
That view makes even comedian (and father of two daughters) Louis C.K.’s pronouncement in a recent Fast Company article that “The next Steve Jobs will be a chick” not unimaginable. And when she is, who will be her inner superheroine? Any of the girls brandishing medieval weaponry headed, like crusaders, for movie theaters this year?
Considering the cruel, dystopian premise of The Hunger Games, Katniss will likely get to have as fun as an overachiever prepping for the SATs. And while Kristen Stewart as persecuted maiden turned, apparently, warrior in Snow White and the Huntsman (whose producer previously suited up Alice for battle in Wonderland) couldn’t possibly be more joyless and blank than as Bella (….right??), my money’s on Brave‘s Merida to win in the the flat out cool department, here:
Either way, while Tony Stark is an archetype boys grow into, the above are all manifestations of one girls grow out of, and when they do, they will expect their own spirit superheroine to aspire to. Someone who doesn’t have to be brutalized to be a badass, or a predator to be a hero. Someone clever and charming and cool as fuck, whom you’d just as soon want to party with as have saving the world; who’s faced the dark forces that don’t understand her and threaten to break her and strip her of her dignity, and, like the century of superheroes before her, has overcome. The next 21st century superhero will be a chick. The girls coming for the 21st century won’t be satisfied with anything less.
SocialCreature, I haven’t forgotten about you! I still love you and think of things I want to tell you all the time, (like what Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous says about “the intersection of art and politics and role of the artist in society”, or the similarities between the Snow White & the Huntsman trailer and the trailer for Timur Bekmambetov’s Night Watch — hint: crows). I miss you lots but things have just been been TFC* busy lately, and I have no time to get into details. A lot of super cool stuff has been happening behind the scenes, and I’m looking forward to being able to talk about more of it next year. But in the meantime here’s something I call tell you: I have recently become a partner in an intriguing little Los Angeles boutique called Gather.
For those of you following along at home, you may recall that Gather is the creation of one, miss Katie Kay, whose former occupations include being a co-designer at Skingraft, business partner to Amanda Palmer, and Lucent Dossier performer. She first opened Gather in Downtown LA back in July of 2010, and this summer the LA Weekly fashion issue had this to say about it:
Nearly everything in the store is an expression of what Kay calls the “slow fashion” movement, which favors one-of-a-kind pieces over mass production in China. Slow fashion is about creating a lifestyle as a designer rather than building a “career” it’s about being indifferent to “trends” because, most likely, you’re making them. “This may be fashion, but I’m very open to being genuine about things,” Kay says.
I first met Katie when we were both living in San Francisco over a decade ago and our lives have been intertwined in some strange and wonderful ways since. I came on board with Gather just as it opened its new location, at the intersection of Hollywood and Sunset, a couple of weeks ago. More than just a store, Gather is an articulation of a new kind of relationship we have with the things we buy. Our lives have become ever more like art galleries, both physical and virtual. And we are the curators. The pieces we select tell the story of who we are and where we’ve been. These things, the things we buy, are no longer consumed… they’re gathered.
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Images courtesy of Los Angeles, I’m Yours, which had some very nice things to say about the opening.
*Totally Fucking Crazy
When I was producing music festivals and nightlife events, Facebook changed its membership policy, opening up beyond just the collegiate community. Hundreds of people I didn’t know requested to add me as a friend. At first I balked at the idea of letting complete strangers into a space that had previously been the walled-garden escape from the mess Myspace had already become. Ultimately, however, I came to terms with the benefits of accepting friend requests from potential ticket buyers. Facebook became a sort of digital Grand Central Station that friends, colleagues, business acquaintances, vendors hawking their wares, strangers I couldn’t pick out of a lineup, and the inevitable crazy person talking to himself, all loudly traversed on their daily commutes through my online social world. It was really fucking noisy.
Then, at the end of 2007, Facebook introduced a feature to specifically address this noise issue, as they wrote on the Facebook blog:
Today Facebook lets us connect and communicate with people that we are connected to in all kinds of ways — friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people. They’re all here.
This all begs the question… what does being friends with someone on Facebook mean today? We pondered this for a while, and then decided that there just wasn’t any single right answer.
So instead, we’ve built and launched Friend Lists. The new Friends page lets you create named lists of friends that you can use to organize your relationships whichever way works best for you. These private lists can be used to message people, send group or event invitations, and to filter updates from certain groups of friends.
Pretty much everyone I am connected to on Facebook has been assigned to one list or another depending on the context of the connection. In a previous incarnation, Facebook offered the option of setting a specific list feed to be the homepage view instead of the default friend feed. Later that option was removed, so I’ve created a workaround to simulate the functionality: I have the URL for my preferred Friend List set as a bookmark on my browser toolbar and when I want to go to Facebook, I just click the bookmarked link. Typing “facebook.com” into the address bar hasn’t been the way I access Facebook for years.
So when I heard that Google+, the web giant’s just-launched social network, was based on grouping connections into “Circles,” I was instantly curious. Ever since Friendster first appeared almost a decade ago, there have been certain disparities between being social online and being social offline that we have come to accept. We’ve become so accustomed to these differences, we hardly even recognize they ever seemed unfamiliar. The fetishistic, collectible-card type quality to online “friend acquisition,” for example. This is not at all how we understand the process of “making friends” to work offline — aside from high school, maybe. Online we have learned, sometimes the hard way, that what we do and say is “public by default,” private with effort, the direct opposite of how it works in the analog world. And we have come to accept, despite the paralyzing plethora of privacy options Facebook offers, that we can’t expect control over social context. Online we are in all contexts at once. Friends from school, family members, long-lost high school sweethearts of yesteryear, and weird people, as Facebook lists them, are not only all here, but who we are within each of these different social groups, our identities in each of their different contexts, all exist simultaneously. Online, we are contextless by default.
But what if online sharing worked more like your real-life relationships? That’s the question posed in the video introducing the Google+ Circles feature:
Of course, it’s not a new idea. As I mentioned, this is a functionality Facebook has offered for years. It’s just that the platform has never really cared about it. As Mark Zukerberg, Facebook’s founder, inisisted in a 2009 interview: “You have one identity. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” For Facebook, Lists are literally an add-on feature. For Google+, however, Circles appear to indicate an understanding that context is as important as connection.
In physical space, we are constantly adjusting our behavior to the demands of different social contexts. It’s second nature, literally. In his paper, “Cross-Cultural Code-Switching: The Psychological Challenges Of Adapting Behavior In Foreign Cultural Interactions,” Brandeis University Professor, Andrew Molinsky, offers these examples:
Consider the case of an Iranian business-woman shaking hands with her Western male counterparts. In Iranian culture, shaking hands with a male colleague is neither customary nor appropriate. This situation entails behavior that is unfamiliar and also in conflict with deeply ingrained cultural values.
[Or] consider the case of a Chinese student attempting to participate in an American MBA classroom discussion. The norms for appropriate behavior within this setting in the United States encourage and require students to express themselves, as well as reward them, even when their opinions are controversial or conflict with those of another student or even with the professor. Norms for classroom participation in China are quite different. Having been socialized to respect the “wisdom, knowledge, and expertise of parents, teachers, and trainers,” Chinese students are discouraged from voicing personal opinions in class discussion. American norms for classroom participation, therefore, are quite discrepant from Chinese norms for the same situation; these norms demand a significantly different type of behavior than what the typical Chinese student is used to.
Cross-cultural code-switching is the act of purposefully modifying one’s behavior in an interaction in a foreign setting in order to accommodate different cultural norms for appropriate behavior.
But the setting doesn’t have to be as foreign as you think. For immigrants, or anyone of mixed racial or cultural heritage whose identity is inextricably linked to different communities, code-switching is an inherent part of navigating everyday life. To children of divorced parents this will likely sound familiar as well. We actively modulate our behavior even among the closest people in our lives. In writing about the tactics we use to maintain context control while engaging in a public online space like Facebook, social media researcher danah boyd describes “social steganography,” a practice of creating messages that communicate different meanings to different audiences simultaneously:
When Carmen broke up with her boyfriend, she “wasn’t in the happiest state.” The breakup happened while she was on a school trip and her mother was already nervous. Initially, Carmen was going to mark the breakup with lyrics from a song that she had been listening to, but then she realized that the lyrics were quite depressing and worried that if her mom read them, she’d “have a heart attack and think that something is wrong.” She decided not to post the lyrics. Instead, she posted lyrics from Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” This strategy was effective. Her mother wrote her a note saying that she seemed happy which made her laugh. But her closest friends knew that this song appears in the movie when the characters are about to be killed. They reached out to her immediately to see how she was really feeling.
“We used to live in a world where space dictated context,” danah writes, “This is no longer the case. Digital technologies collapse social contexts all the time. The key to figuring out boundaries in a digital era is to focus on people, roles, relationships, and expectations.”
Relationships are all about context, but for Facebook, this nuance is something that has never quite made sense. All along, Facebook has staked its claim not by adapting to existing social behavior, but rather by insisting that we adapt to the behavior the platform defines for us. As Zuckerberg said in a TechCrunch interview last year, in regards to the assertion that privacy is dead, “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” As far as the platform is concerned, managing contexts is a nuisance for the user. With every “privacy” violation, what Facebook has actually been attempting to do is outsource managing context to software; to switch code-switching with code. At this point we’ve become so accustomed to the inevitable, resulting intrusion we don’t even make too much of a stink about it anymore. Case in point: Facebook’s new facial recognition functionality — which automates the photo-tagging process by suggesting the names of friends who appear in newly uploaded photos — has caused less of fuss for how uber-fucking-creepy it is, than….. wait, what was the previous fuss about? I forget already.
Facebook’s helpful way of nudging us towards this manifest, post-identity complexity destiny is to devise ever more features to destroy our control over social context. This has created a gap which Google+, with its aim to “make sharing on the web feel like sharing in real life,” seems squarely poised to fill. Not that Circles will be the panacea for online context collapse, but this is the first attempt by a mainstream web property to directly address this disparity between the online and offline social experiences, and offer a way to bring context back to our contacts.
Jocelyn Marsh wearing headdress by Tiffa Novoa. Image: Brion Topolski, 2005
Right now all across America there is a feather shortage. In April, The Billings Gazette reported:
Jewelry-makers and hairstylists have been snatching up the premium chicken feathers used in standby trout-fly patterns, creating a sudden run on a market that’s ill-prepared for significant fluctuations of demand.
“Supplies are just decimated,” said Jim Cox, co-owner of the Kingfisher fly shop in Missoula, [Montana]. “We just can’t get the premium feathers. Even the (sales) reps for the suppliers can’t get them for themselves.”
What began a couple of years ago as a scattered interest in feather jewelry has erupted into a full-on fad for hair extensions made out of long, slender feathers — the exact same feathers used in the vast majority of traditional dry-fly patterns.
The feathers most valued both by fly-tiers and, lately, fashion mavens come from specific types of roosters that are selectively bred to produce long, slender feathers. Such chickens typically take almost a full year to raise before slaughter. What’s more, they’re rare: Only a few dozen commercial breeders exist in America, and most are small operations.
The situation’s getting so dire, American Public Radio’s Marketplace reports, the American Fly Fishing Trade Association is lobbying lawmakers about conservation. Tom Whiting, owner of Whiting Farms in western Colorado, one of the world’s largest producers of fly tying feathers, a third of whose sales now go to fashion, says, “We have orders far in excess of what we have in our system.” With the demand, the prices are skyrocketing. Last week the Oregonian reported a rooster neck of feathers that would have normally cost $29.95, is now selling for $360. A 300% – 700% jump in rooster saddle feather price is now typical.
In fashion parlance, feathers are in. Steven Tyler has been wearing the avian accessories as he judges American Idol contestants. Pop singer, Kesha, rocks feathers, too, even sticking one in Conan Obrien’s hair during a recent appearance on his show. Between Los Angeles’s mercantile meccas of Melrose Ave. and the Beverly Center you can get feather hair extensions, earrings, necklaces; feathers on boots, shoes, tops, skirts, hats, bras, anything. In the summer of 2011, feathers have become a staple of every sartorial and tonsorial aspect imaginable.
The other day I was asked my opinion as to where this current ubiquity of feathers has come from. But as it turns out, I happen to have something better than an opinion: I have an explanation.
Our story begins almost 12 years ago, in a little town in Oregon, by the name of Ashland, where a group of kids came together to start a circus performance troupe called, El Circo. The group would gain recognition within the Burning Man culture for the extravagant parties they threw at the festival, featuring lavish fire performances, a large, geodesic dome venue, and a top-notch sound system that attracted world-renowned music acts to perform there. In a 2005 San Francisco Bay Guardian article on the effect that the various groups within the Burning Man community have had on San Francisco nightlife — an impact which now extends to the entire west coast’s, and arguably global, dance culture — the writer paid particular attention to the influence of El Circo:
El Circo has fused a musical style and a fashion sense that are major departures from the old rave scene. [They are credited] with creating the postapocalyptic fashions that many now associate with Burning Man. Most of the original El Circo fashions, which convey both tribalism and a sense of whimsy, were designed by member Tiffa Novoa.”
Here are some of the El Circo costumes from their 2005 shows:
That same year, just two years out of college, I stumbled into the role of production manager for a newly-formed, L.A.-based vaudeville cirque troupe called, Lucent Dossier. Through that initial involvement with Lucent I would meet many other circus groups, including El Circo, who were by then based in San Francisco along with The Yard Dogs Road Show and Vau De Vire Society. There was also March Fourth Marching Band in Portland, Clan Destino in Santa Barbara, and Cirque Berzerk, and Mutaytor in L.A. As these acts grew, the I-5 Freeway became a central artery of culture, pumping a distinct combination of art, music, fashion, and performance up and down the west coast. A social scene evolved around these circus troupes the same way the punk subculture sprang up around the bands that defined it. For lack of another term, I’ve referred to this subculture over the years simply as “circus.”
In Freaks and Fire: The Underground Reinvention of the Circus, J. Dee Hill delves into the history and sociology underpinning the alternative culture circus resurgence:
Traditional forms of the tribe, like the village, have almost completely disappeared. Fewer and fewer people live in small communities where their daily interactions bring them in contact with the people they are deeply connected to, either spiritually or economically. Workers in modern corporations are replaceable and no longer bound to each other by the experience of a shared interdependence. The modern individual is preoccupied simultaneously by isolating, immediate concerns of personal survival and the larger, often intangible concerns of war, terror and economic change as transmitted by a now-seamless global media network. The intermediate space of community is not easily reached.
Not by accident, many of the newer, emergent forms of culture include a specifically tribal aspect. A return to tattooing, sacrification, fire performance and drumming, as well as a renewed interest in ritual, has occurred side-by-side with the formation of intentional (if temporary) communities such as the Rainbow Family gatherings and Burning Man festival.
It was at these kinds of festivals, in clubs and at underground raves, that alternative circus acts began appearing in the early 90′s. The performers were young, crazy “freaks” without any formal training who used circus costumes, skills or themes as performative means for expressing their own exaggerated personalities. Many went on to gain formal training or to study the history of the genre, but essentially their relationship to conventional circuses resembled that of outsider art to mainstream art circles. They didn’t really relate to the modern-day circus. They took their cues from something much, much older: the caravan-pulling gypsies.
The phenomenon of alternative circus performance can be seen as the theatrical dimension to one generation’s wholesale rediscovery of the concept of tribe.
And the inexorable feather trend is inextricably linked with this trajectory.
Novoa co-founded El Circo along with Marisa Youlden, a jewelry designer whose pieces accompanied Novoa’s costumes from the beginning. Youlden first used feathers in her pieces in 2000 and recalls this was when Novoa began creating elaborate feather headdresses for the performers. “At first, this was all costuming,” The 2005 Bay Guardian article quoted Matty Dowlen, El Circo’s operations manager, and performer, “but now it’s who I am.” The aesthetic Novoa first envisioned for the El Circo performers evolved into the prêt-à-porter of the circus subculture and became its signature style. Feathers, which had come to define El Circo costumes, became an integral component of the subculture’s street fashion:
Yup, that last one is me. You can’t see the feather in this shot, but trust me, it was there. In the early to mid-aughts (when the photos above were taken) the feather was as de rigueur a cultural signifier within the circus scene as the safety pin was for punks in the late 1970s and early 80s. In fact, back before it was so commonplace as to lose meaning (or induce a national feather shortage), condescending terms for those sporting the look sprang up within the subculture: “Feather mafia,” was one I heard thrown around; “Trustafarian peacock” even made it into UrbanDictionary.com. And then, something else began to happen.
In 2005, Mötley Crüe picked circus as the concept for their comeback tour:
The next year, Panic! At the Disco won an MTV Video Music Award for their circus-themed, “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” video:
A theme they then extended into their “Nothing Rhymes With Circus” tour:
And in 2008, the reigning queen of pop herself at the time, Britney Spears, came out with an album titled, Circus, and ensuing tour of the same theme:
Throughout pop culture, traces of circus’s influence would keep surfacing. The same year as Britney’s Circus album, this was the ad for that season’s America’s Next Top Model:
Or take this ad for the launch of Microsoft’s short-lived Kin mobile device from last year:
The proliferation of circus within pop culture has been directly tied to its growth in underground culture, and being in an underground circus troupe during the height of this infiltration offered backstage access to the proceedings. For example: The circus featured in the Kin ad is March Fourth Marching Band. The circus performers in the Panic! At the Disco music video and tour were members of the troupe I managed. The performers who went on tour with Mötley Crüe would become Lucent Dossier members, as well. Last year, Miley Cyrus’s “Can’t be Tamed” music video featured a winged Cyrus alongside a troupe of be-feathered backup dancers inside a giant birdcage:
Which bears a distinct resemblance to the birdcage (not to mention the aesthetic) Lucent Dossier used prominently in aerial performances during their 2008 residency at the Edison nightclub in Downtown LA.
Especially in Los Angeles, where the Downtown underground and the Hollywood pop culture industry coexist within such proximity of one another, their crossover was inevitable.
Which brings us back to fashion. In 2002, designers Cassidy Haley and Evan Sugerman, who’d met at Burning Man the year before, founded a fashion label called, Ernte. Two years later, Novoa joined Ernte Fashion Systems, parlaying the aesthetic vision she’d first developed for the circus stage into high fashion. Tragically, in October, 2007, at 32-years-old, Novoa suffered a fatal drug reaction while working in Bali, Indonesia. By then, Ernte had become a globally-renowned haute couture label, retailing in high-end boutiques like Maxfield in Los Angeles, Collete in Paris, and Loveless in Tokyo. Below are some shots of Novoa’s work:
In 2005, Haley went on to form a new label, Skingraft Designs, with Jonny Cota, and later Katie Kay, who was a partner from 2007 – 2010. All three had circus pedigree. Cota and Haley had performed with El Circo, and Kay was one of the original members in Lucent Dossier, for which Haley and Cota would occasionally moonlight. Some of Skingraft’s early work is pictured below.
Since opening their flagship store in Downtown L.A., in 2009, Skingraft’s “post-apocalyptic couture” has graced the celebrity skins of Adam Lambert and The Black Eyed Peas. Rhianna wore a custom Skingraft headdress in her “Rockstar 101″ music video:
And both Britney Spears’ and Beyoncé’s most recent videos are dripping in Skingraft designs. As Skingraft has evolved into an established name within the vocabulary of Los Angeles fashion, countless other apparel designers with circus origins have sprung up in the wings, as it were.
Over the years since Tiffa first put feathers on the bodies of circus performers, inspiring others to follow suit, hundreds of thousands, if not millions have been exposed to the style at Burning Man, and the E3 gaming convention where El Circo would perform; at Coachella, and the Grammy’s afterparty, where Lucent Dossier performed; at countless night clubs stretching from the depths of Downtown L.A. up the length of the Pacific coast. Hollywood stylists partying on Saturday night woke up on Monday with new inspiration. And circus costumers became famed fashion designers. In the end, this cross-pollination laid the foundation for the exact kind of tipping point Malcolm Gladwell describes in his seminal, 2000 book exploring the social mechanics that lead trends to “tip” into mass, cultural phenomena. The Tipping Point begins with the words:
For Hush Puppies — the classic American brushed-suede shoes with the lightweight crepe sole — the Tipping Point came somewhere between late 1994 and early 1995. The brand had been all but dead until that point. Sales were down to 30,000 pairs a year, mostly to backwoods outlets and small-town family stores. Wolverine, the company that makes Hush Puppies, was thinking of phasing out the shoes that made them famous. But then something strange happened. At a fashion shoot, two Hush Puppies executives — Owen Baxter and Geoffrey Lewis — ran into a stylist from New York who told them that the classic Hush Puppies had suddenly become hip in the clubs and bars of downtown Manhattan. “We were being told,” Baxter recalls, “that there were resale shops in the Village, in Soho, where the shoes were being sold. People were going to the Ma and Pa stores, the little stores that still carried them, and buying them up.” Baxter and Lewis were baffled at first. It made no sense to them that shoes that were so obviously out of fashion could make a comeback. “We were told that Isaac Mizrahi was wearing the shoes himself,” Lewis says. “I think it’s fair to say that at the time we had no idea who Isaac Mizrahi was.”
By the fall of 1995, things began to happen in a rush. First the designer John Bartlett called. He wanted to use Hush Puppies in his spring collection. Then another Manhattan deisgner, Anna Sui called, wanting shoes for her show as well. In Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzgerald put a twenty-five-foot inflatable basset hound — the symbol of the Hush Puppies brand — on the roof of his Hollywood store and gutted an adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies boutique. While he was still painting and putting up shelves, the actor Pee-wee Herman walked in and asked for a couple pairs. “It was total word of mouth,” Fitzgerald remembers.
In 1995, the company sold 430,000 pairs of the classic Hush Puppies, and the next year it sold four times that, and the year after that, still more, until Hush Puppies were once again a staple of the wardrobe of the young American male. In 1996, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers awards dinner at Lincoln Center, and the president of the firm stood up on the stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and accepted an award for an achievement that — as he would be the first to admit — his company had almost nothing to do with. Hush Puppies had suddenly exploded, and it all started with a handful of kids in the East Village and Soho.
How did this happen? Those first few kids, whoever they were, weren’t deliberately trying to promote Hush Puppies. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. Then the fad spread to two fashion designers who used to shoes to peddle something else — haute couture. The shoes were an incidental touch. No one was trying to make Hush Puppies a trend. Yet, somehow, that’s exactly what happened. The shoes passed a certain point in popularity and they tipped. How does a thirty-dollar pair of shoes go from a handful of downtown Manhattan hipsters to every mall in America in the space of two years?
Right now, the roosters know, but they’re not telling.
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Special thanks for helping fill in the details and history for this post go to: Arin Ingraham, Siouxzen Kang, Marisa Youlden, and Cassidy Haley.
