on the path to the fullfullment of my prophecy that “circus is the next hip hop” (the next original urban trend) are such milestones as the do lab bringing the dome to coachella, lucent dossier going on tour with panic! at the disco, and now….
for those that HAVEN’T ever had to endure working in the fashion PR industry (sigh):
“POOL is where the visionaries of retail come to scout hot new items for the boutique market. From emerging brands, to the world’s best graphic artists POOL is where designers and thinkers come to shape the trends.POOL has an industry reputation as a launching pad for emerging brands that soon become the popular standard for specialty boutiques and leading retailers around the world.”
http://www.pooltradeshow.com/facts.html
….soooo, if you’re in L.A. on June 9, come check out the inevitably jaw-droppingly epic skin.graft show.
sure to be an incredible fashion experience, and trend history making in the process! (and you just thought their holsters were cool!)
people keep asking me what i’m up to these days. people that don’t know that my life has been completely taken over by Lightning in a Bottle. and i try to explain something about how there’s this 3-day greeen music festival, and how i’m directing the whole marketing strategy for it, and how that involves managing everything from our email communications, website updates, street promotions, pr efforts, and to all kinds of other initiatives… but the truth is that when you’re so in the thick of it, it’s really hard to step back and gain enough perspective to really be able to articualte ANYTHING that you’re doing. it’s hard to comment on the state of the battle from the trenches.
so it’s dawned on me that i should have started this months ago. but what the hell, 4.5 weeks out is better than not at all, right?
at this point there’s new moves happening fast and furious, and i figured this could be a good place to document the LIB07 marketing & communications strategy process. it’s also the process through which a grassroots organization is transitioning from the underground to the spotlight, elevating both its community of fans and network of creators with it.
here’s what’s happened within the past few days in the land of LIB promotions:
– LIB + worldchanging = : worldchanging is an online hub that aims to connect innovative, forward-thinking people who are doing things now to create profound, positive change for a better future. i thought they were great even before that fortuitous introduction to alex steffen at sxsw that resulted in this great little piece. turns out worldchanging digs us too: we’re now officially the “coachella for environmentalists”! awesome!
– what lucent dossier really wants to know is… : met with dream this weekend about really kick-starting community interaction among lucent’s 16,000+ myspace friends. we’re so excited by all the great response we’ve gotten already that we’re planning to continue stirring up conversation among that community on a very regular basis leading up to LIB. (taking cues from gnarls barkley on this one, for sure. 😉 )
– the santa barbara news press, which did an article on LIB last year wants to know what’s new about LIB this year. they’re saying that unless there’s something drastically new it probably won’t warrant extensive coverage. so what do you say to that when you know that the santa barbara community digs us hardcore for what we are, not for any gimmick we might be doing differently?
i say:
“last year it was the first time we’d ever done an event in s.b. we have a devoted following in l.a. but we had no idea how people there would react to it. whether they’d even care. the response we got from the people there was really overwhelming. we kept hearing over and over how excited they were that we had brought an event like this to santa barbara. people really loved this festival.
so the big difference is that while last year our venture into s.b. was somewhat of an experiment, the genuine enthusiasm for LIB within the santa barbara community (the same community where “earth day” originated) is what’s giving us the support to bring LIB back on a larger scale in all areas in 07.”
david starfire, one our mainstay event djs, and on the lineup for LIB, turned us on to this really great video of an event we did in february 2006 (yeah, that’s how long it takes us to catch up here, at the Do!) anyway, we contacted the creator, and are considering using this video in the Spring issue of the Do LaB Artist Network email blast, which is going to be all about videos, especially music videos. he says he’s got footage from LIB06 as well, maybe we can find some way of convincing him to edit that too…- lots of other bits and ends going on, and in the works, including that ad in Plenty Magazine, now on newsstands, gonna be getting some coverage from bijoubreaks.com, the San Luis Obispo New Times is gonna be doing an interview with some our crew–jesse, dream, and shena, i think. brian shaw is hopefully programming our music contest as i type, i think…brian? are you? will we be able to announce it to the bands that sent in submissions soon? ….
and then there is, of course the constant construction and preparations going on for another little festival called Coachella where the Do will be producing an acre-big installation with full performance stage and sound-system just two weeks before LIB…. so that’s going to be madness….
i think this is all i can think of for right now…. not sure how often i’ll be making these “what the hell is a strategy?” posts, but i’m positive it’s a good idea that i started.
based in downtown l.a., The Do LaB is an “open source” artists collective of event producers, lighting designers, choreographers, performers, djs, constructors, welders, costumers, jewelry makers, dancers, airbrush artists, musicians, installation artists, glassblowers, photographers, and anything else you can imagine, all dedicated to creating interactive environments where experience itself is the artform.
in addition to producing our own events and creations, we also work on events for traditional clients such as lexus, scion, redbull, the coachella music festival, e! entertainment, aids project los angeles, and many others.
after almost two years of involement with the do lab–first as the production manager for the collective’s performance troupe, Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, and later as the sponsorship coordinator for our 3-day, green energy-powered, summer music festival, Lightning in a Bottle–i became the do lab’s director of marketing and communications this past october.
this responsibility is not only a huge committment in my life right now, but is also one from which i draw incredible personal satisfaction and pride. it is an honor to get to create and collaborate with this incredible bunch of folks in such a dynamic, innovative atmosphere. it is also extremely exciting to be a part of a company so prescient both in the experiential nature of its “product,” and in the democratic structure of its organization.
the do lab is a fascinating example of future trends in marketing and business, in action now.
there will absolutely be a lot more to say on these and other subjects involving our circus of a startup company in the future, but for now i’ll just offer a few highlights from our portfolio….
(click the links of the creation headings to find out more about the events).
“The kids are doing the normcore,” my friend Quang said, trying out the new phrase with a deliberate, old fart dialect.
Only a few moments earlier I had tossed off the word like common parlance.
“‘Normcore?’” he had repeated, making sure he’d heard correctly.
“Yeah,” I explained, “It’s exactly what you think it is. It’s us, now.”
A shockingly pleasant March afternoon had arrived in Boston that day, on the heels of a cold that had felt like osteoporosis. A decade in LA had turned me into a wimp. I had forgotten how I’d ever managed to live through this in my youth.
But that day in Boston, in 2014, hanging out with friends who had come up through the rave, circus, and goth subcultures, you could hardly tell where any of us had been. What we wore now was nondescript. Non-affiliated. Normal.
The week before, at a craft beer tasting party at an indie advertising agency in Silver Lake, a sculpture artist was remarking about recently looking through photos of style choices from the aughts. “What was I thinking,” she said in bewilderment. That evening she was wearing a black tank top, and, like, pants. Maybe three quarter length? Or not? Maybe black jeans? Or not-jean pants? I couldn’t recall. Perhaps, I thought, this was just a symptom of getting older. There was some kind of sartorial giving a shit phase that we had all grown out of. But it turned out this, too, was a trend. Kids, too young to have grown out of anything, were dressing this way.
“By late 2013, it wasn’t uncommon to spot the Downtown chicks you’d expect to have closets full of Acne and Isabel Marant wearing nondescript half-zip pullovers and anonymous denim,” wrote Fiona Duncan, in a February New York Magazine article titled, “Normcore: Fashion for Those Who Realize They’re One in 7 Billion:”
I realized that, from behind, I could no longer tell if my fellow Soho pedestrians were art kids or middle-aged, middle-American tourists. Clad in stonewash jeans, fleece, and comfortable sneakers, both types looked like they might’ve just stepped off an R-train after shopping in Times Square. When I texted my friend Brad (an artist whose summer uniform consisted of Adidas barefoot trainers, mesh shorts and plain cotton tees) for his take on the latest urban camouflage, I got an immediate reply: “lol normcore.”
Normcore—it was funny, but it also effectively captured the self-aware, stylized blandness I’d been noticing. Brad’s source for the term was the trend forecasting collective (and fellow artists) K-Hole. They had been using it in a slightly different sense, not to describe a particular look but a general attitude: embracing sameness deliberately as a new way of being cool, rather than striving for “difference” or “authenticity.”
Oh my god, I thought reading this: this is me.
In Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, published in 2004, cultural critics, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter examined the inherent contradiction in the idea that counterculture was an opposition to mass consumer culture. Not only were they not opposed, Heath and Potter explained, they weren’t even separate. Alternative culture’s obsession with being different — expressing that difference through prescribed fashion products and subcultural artifacts — had, in fact, helped to create the very mass consumer society the counterculture believed itself to be the alternative to.
“To me, Nike’s famous swoosh logo had long been the mark of the manipulated,” wrote Rob Walker, author of 2008′s Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy And Who We Are, ”A symbol for suckers who take its ‘Just Do It’ bullying at face value. It’s long been, in my view, a brand for followers. On the other hand, the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star had been a mainstay sneaker for me since I was a teenager back in the 1980′s, and I stuck with it well into my thirties. Converse was the no-bullshit yin to Nike’s all-style-and-image yang. It’s what my outsider heroes from Joey Ramone to Kurt Combain wore. So I found [Nike’s] buyout [of Converse] disheartening…. but why, really, did I feel so strongly about a brand of sneaker–any brand of sneaker?”
In response to Buying In, I’d written, “Whether we’re choosing to wear Nikes, Converse, Timberlands, Doc Martens, or some obscure Japanese brand that doesn’t even exist in the US, we’re deliberately saying something about ourselves with the choice. And regardless of how “counter” to whatever culture we think we are, getting to express that differentiation about our selves requires buying something.”
But that was five years ago. A funny thing happened on the way to the mid twenty-teens. The digital era ushered in an unprecedented flood of availability — of both information and products. This constant, ubiquitous access to everything — what Chris Anderson dubbed the “Long Tail” in his 2006 book of the same name – had changed the cultural equation. We had evolved, as Anderson predicted, “from an ‘Or’ era of hits or niches (mainstream culture vs. subcultures) to an ‘AND’ era.” With the widespread proliferation of internet access, mass culture got less mass, and niche culture got less obscure. We became what Anderson called a “massively parallel culture: millions of microcultures coexisting and interacting in a baffling array of ways.” On this new, flattened landscape, what was there to be counter to?
“Jeremy Lewis, the founder/editor of Garmento and a freelance stylist and fashion writer, calls normcore ‘one facet of a growing anti-fashion sentiment,’” Duncan writes in New York Magazine. “His personal style is (in the words of Andre Walker, a designer Lewis featured in the magazine’s last issue) ‘exhaustingly plain’—this winter, that’s meant a North Face fleece, khakis, and New Balances. Lewis says his ‘look of nothing’ is about absolving oneself from fashion.”
That is how normcore happened to me, too. When I quit the circus, leaving behind its sartorial regulations, I realized that difference wasn’t an expression of identity: it was a rat race.
“Fashion has become very overwhelming and popular,” Lewis explains in New York Magazine. “Right now a lot of people use fashion as a means to buy rather than discover an identity and they end up obscured and defeated. I’m getting cues from people like Steve Jobs and Jerry Seinfeld. It’s a very flat look, conspicuously unpretentious, maybe even endearingly awkward. It’s a lot of cliché style taboos, but it’s not the irony I love, it’s rather practical and no-nonsense, which to me, right now, seems sexy. I like the idea that one doesn’t need their clothes to make a statement.”
“Magazines, too,” Duncan writes, “have picked up the look:”
The enduring appeal of the Patagonia fleece [was] displayed on Patrik Ervell and Marc Jacobs’s runways. Edie Campbell slid into Birkenstocks (or the Céline version thereof) in Vogue Paris. Adidas trackies layered under Louis Vuitton cashmere in Self Service. A bucket hat and Nike slippers framed an Alexander McQueen coveralls in Twin. Smaller, younger magazines like London’s Hot and Cool and New York’s Sex, were interested in even more genuinely average ensembles, skipping high-low blends for the purity of head-to-toe normcore.
One of the first stylists I started bookmarking for her normcore looks was the London-based Alice Goddard. She was assembling this new mainstream minimalism in the magazine she co-founded, Hot and Cool, as early as 2011. For Goddard, the appeal of normal clothes was the latest thing. One standout editorial from Hot and Cool no. 5 (Spring 2013) was composed entirely of screenshots of people from Google Map’s Street View app. Goddard had stumbled upon “this tiny town in America” on Map sand thought the plainly-dressed people there looked amazing. The editorial she designed was a parody of contemporary street style photography—“the main point of difference,” she says, “being that people who are photographed by street style photographers are generally people who have made a huge effort with their clothing, and the resulting images often feel a bit over fussed and over precious—the subject is completely aware of the outcome; whereas the people we were finding on Google Maps obviously had no idea they were being photographed, and yet their outfits were, to me, more interesting.”
New media has changed our relation to information, and, with it, fashion. Reverse Google Image Search and tools like Polyvore make discovering the source of any garment as simple as a few clicks. Online shopping—from eBay through the Outnet—makes each season available for resale almost as soon as it goes on sale. As Natasha Stagg, the Online Editor of V Magazine and a regular contributor at DIS (where she recently wrote a normcore-esque essay about the queer appropriation of mall favorite Abercrombie & Fitch), put it: “Everyone is a researcher and a statistician now, knowing accidentally the popularity of every image they are presented with, and what gets its own life as a trend or meme.” The cycles of fashion are so fast and so vast, it’s impossible to stay current; in fact, there is no one current.
Emily Segal of K-HOLE insists that normcore isn’t about one specific aesthetic. “It’s not about being simple or forfeiting individuality to become a bland, uniform mass,” she explains. Rather, it’s about welcoming the possibility of being recognizable, of looking like other people—and “seeing that as an opportunity for connection.”
K-HOLE describes normcore as a theory rather than a look; but in practice, the contemporary normcore styles I’ve seen have their clear aesthetic precedent in the nineties. The editorials in Hot and Cool look a lot like Corinne Day styling newcomer Kate Moss in Birkenstocks in 1990, or like Art Club 2000′s appropriation of madras from the Gap, like grunge-lite and Calvin Klein minimalism. But while (in their original incarnation) those styles reflected anxiety around “selling out,” today’s version is more ambivalent toward its market reality.
In a post Hot-Topic world, where Forever21 serves up fast fashion in processed flavors like, Occupy:
and Burning Man:
we’re realizing that alternativeness, as a means for authentic self expression, is futile.“Normcore isn’t about rebelling against or giving into the status quo,” Duncan concludes, “It’s about letting go of the need to look distinctive.”
In our all-access, always connected, globalized world, obscurity is scarce. When everything is accessible, nothing is alternative.
“In the 21st century,” Rob Walker wrote back in 2008, not recognizing the quickly approaching end of counterculture, “We still grapple with the eternal dilemma of wanting to feel like individuals and to feel as though we’re apart of something bigger than ourselves. We all seek ways to resolve this fundamental tension of modern life.”
In 2014, normcore is one solution we’ve found to resolve it.
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.
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.
