Lately I keep finding myself in conversations about fashion’s tendency toward revivalism and pastiche. It seems especially commonplace in the last decade, but it ain’t a new phenomenon. Before the ’00s riffed on the ’80s, the ’80s was really into the ’50s. It took us the last twenty years to try to forget that bellbottoms made a comeback in the ’90s, but it was the Roaring Twenties that sported ‘em first. So, granted, these things are cyclical. But! Here’s a little nugget of late-night wisdom for you: they’re also political.

Okay, okay, maybe I’m not blowing your mind here. Yes, you may have already noticed that women wore gigantic, man-shaping shoulder pads both times they found themselves trying to muscle into the office, in the ’40s and the ’80s. But check this out, I think you can predict what era will be in vogue for a comeback by who is in the White House. Eisenhower and Reagan both hated Commies and glorified the notion of a clean, orderly suburbia with plenty of time-saving gizmos and great new stuff to acquire. Change the Commies to Evildoers and it’s easy to understand how the ’80s were so huge in the ’00s. The Obamas/Kennedys-era fixation with long, sharp silhouettes and solid colors has already been discussed enough.

How about, let’s try for a bit of a stretch. Teddy Roosevelt and LBJ both replaced assassinated presidents. They also both used their executive might to take on too-big corporate interests. What was all the rage with hippies? Cowboy stuff! Fringe, leather, big facial hair. It was positively turn of the century!

Well, aren’t you glad we got through that? Are you just here to look at the pictures anyway? Alright, then. This I drew on the Greyhound some time. It’s Don Rosa (as best I could remember) at a barbecue in Charlotte, thinking about Scrooge McDuck (who looks something like that?) who’s thinking about money. Well anyhow, the point is they have similar hair and glasses and mouths. Gahd, cut to the picture already!!

…I wrote one of those wacky cable news pundit-style posts??? Where I act like I’m the authority on something I know very little about, while suggesting some cockamamie scheme that is patently bunk but I keep insisting is common sense??? It’s just like TV! It hasn’t been a while? No? Really, are you sure? I think it’s been awhile…

In the ‘aughts, the diffusion of urban hip fashion switched direction. It all started in the ‘nineties when the internet hit and it became cool to be a bookish nerd with all-too clearly defined tastes. To be a High Fidelity-Williamsburg-Oakland Hipster. The articulate and critical rogue found something delightfully cute about the Victorian era while they* mashed together every  style of the past forty years. This is true in the drum machine-driven folk music, the facial hair, jeans and dresses that we** adore.

The Hipster’s position was solidified under Bush, Jr. It was definitely not cool to like him, and he happened to ideally represent the All American Jock who beat the shit out of us nerds back in school. So the convenient way to rebel against this self-aggrandized popular kid was to further nerd yourself. You could truly hone in on your singular obsessions, learn all there was to know about everything, become active, and make yourself important. It’s just like joining the yearbook and the debate squad and the student government and theater and band.

At the same time, all the jocks, popular kids and soc’s were getting really into hip hop. Black was (and is) finally mainstream. Black had a brief glimpse of being the only cool way to be back in the ’seventies, and now it has really made it. From preppies who give dap to Juggalos*** who didn’t get the note not to sag their jeans and turn their caps anymore, the youths are down!

All of which means it stopped being cool to be just hip hop. The wrong people were appropriating the style for the first time since jazz cats, rock ‘n’ rollers, beats, hippies, disco freaks and post punks. No longer the interesting, pot-smoking, bohemian types were adopting slang, fashion and music. Instead it was the dull, suburban Whities who had wriggled into some token degree of Blackness.

So, big city black kids took up skateboarding. They put on skinny jeans and learned to play guitar. Kanye West, Pharrell, Mos Def, TV on the Radio led the way to aggressively  adapting sci-fi, comics, video games, taste-making blogs, nerdy glasses and outmoded clothes. Now, I know there is still a good heap of inter-mingling, with skinny art school kids getting grills, and library scientists putting on Knicks jersey-dresses. Still, I think its going stronger in the other way.

*Yes, I’m using they as a gender-neutral singular. Ya got somethin ta say about it??

**Yes, we, because there’s nothing more Hipster to do than to say you’re not a Hipster (and therefore I’m not because I’m saying I am, right?).

***Yes, I did look up that spelling. On urbandictionary.com, thank you very much.

Your reward is a cute cat. Cute when she plays with a hair tie, but not so when she shits on the bed.

I’ve kept meaning to do a Stephen Colbert-style celebratory post with confetti and balloons on this subject for quite a while now, and my previous entry reminded me to do it. Please, consider the following (from the VH1 website):

Now, please dig this incredibly prescient comic from late in aught-six:

This was inevitable, of course. After the bell bottoms of the late Nineties gave way to the Eighties revival which was replaced by early Nineties grunge and hip hop cool, where else could we look for semi-ironic cultural inspiration but our own goddamn decade?? And so we have. Bless you, VH1. I can’t wait until cargo pants are back in style this fall.

I know it was cool in Pitchforkland to not be absolutely bonkers crazy for Paper Planes, and to instead dissect its samples and influences. I also know that by now, cool people must be sooo over this song, especially because it has gone national, being so thoroughly attached to the Pineapple Express campaign. But you know what, every time I hear it, I get so damn excited, cause it is a really! fucking! awesome song!

Also, I really like the flying hand gesture MIA makes when she let’s us know she’s fly like paper; gets high like planes. I even don’t hate her nineties-revival style. Retro pastiche of the previous decade has never been done with such aplomb.