A day without blogger. And a difficult day it was too. My complete inability to update the site at lunchtime or before work has been profoundly frustrating. In general this has been a pretty weird day, and one that cannot hope but improve (that is of course assuming that my meeting with my new flatmates goes well). After that, I am off to the Liquid Lounge, before (possibly) heading on to Popstarz. I’m wearing a dark blue Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt with the number “36” on the back should anyone else be there.
What is it with A&F anyway? We don’t have them in the UK (so forgive my ignorance) – I picked up some of their clothes while in LA with Kerry and Sean. The catalogues are renowned for their homoerotic imagery (and with good reason), but they still seem to sell just as much to straight men of a pretty conservatively masculine disposition as they do to gay people.
A&F are basically part of the same trend in clothing that spawned the horror of the Evil Gap Clones – ie. everyone wearing the same thing – looking the same. This is a great source of horror to many people, and given my politics you might expect me to have a similar reaction. Weirdly though, I don’t – it’s almost as if clothes have become so generic that they have become invisible – for most of us they are no longer the demarcation points of culture or class. Perhaps homogeneity has resulted in a certain amount of liberation. Perhaps if we all wore the same thing….? On the other hand, I always have in the back of my mind the line from A Handmaid’s Tale – spoken by the arch-conservatives who want to ‘free’ women from dangerous things like ‘free will’ – that there are both freedoms to and freedoms from. It is the sign of the politically libertine to always aim for the former (“go libertines!”).
Homogeneity in and of itself shouldn’t be considered a bad thing – sometimes the act of mimicry inevitably carries with it a certain amount of irony. Take openlog for example – is this a piss-take, an affectionate (self?)tribute or a straightfoward design decision? It’s the same and yet because of its mimicry it has its own unique identity. [Check out kottke.org if you don’t know what I am talking about.]