Alternative Fashion Is Having a Mainstream Moment. That Doesn't Make It Mainstream.

 

Originally published as part of Kunt Commentary by Kunts Live Forever.

By Rose Baxter

Something funny happens every few years.

The fashion world discovers alternative people again.

Suddenly black is interesting. Chains are interesting. Leather is interesting. Torn shirts are interesting. Goth is interesting. Punk is interesting. Something somebody would have called weird six months ago walks down a runway and now we're supposed to discuss its cultural significance.

Apparently weird becomes fashionable on a rotating schedule.

Right now, we're having another one of those moments. Gothic elements have been showing up prominently in fashion coverage, punk and rock influences are appearing on runways, rave culture is being pulled into high fashion, and London street style continues doing what London street style does best mixing things that aren't necessarily supposed to go together and making them work anyway.

And you know what?

I don't actually have a problem with it.

Nobody Owns a Pair of Combat Boots

There can be a strange amount of gatekeeping in alternative culture.

Someone discovers punk at forty instead of fourteen and somebody has something to say about it. Somebody wears black lipstick without knowing the complete history of goth and suddenly there's an entrance exam.

I'm not interested in that.

If you discovered combat boots yesterday and love them, wear the damn boots.

If you heard your first punk band last Tuesday, turn it up.

If you spent your entire life dressing conservatively and woke up this morning deciding you want purple hair, a leather jacket and enough eyeliner to frighten your neighbors, congratulations on your Tuesday.

You don't need anybody's permission.

Fashion is supposed to be personal.

The mainstream borrowing from alternative fashion isn't automatically the problem either. Fashion has always borrowed, recycled, mutated and dragged old ideas back out of closets.

Hell, half the fun is putting things together that weren't originally supposed to belong together.

The problem starts when people confuse discovering the look with discovering the culture.

Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

The Clothes Came From Somewhere

Punk didn't begin because somebody in a corporate meeting decided safety pins were going to perform well next quarter.

Goth didn't appear because a trend forecaster announced that black would be having a moment.

Alternative scenes weren't created so somebody could eventually sell a pre-distressed version of them between beige sweaters at the mall.

The clothes came from people.

Music came first in some places. Art came with it. Clubs, neighborhoods, politics, sexuality, class, rebellion, boredom, anger, creativity and young people making shit because what already existed didn't speak for them all became tangled together.

Then somebody wore something.

Somebody else changed it.

Somebody ripped it apart and put it back together wrong.

And eventually the thing that looked wrong started looking right.

That's culture.

Fashion is one visible piece of it.

The Mainstream Is Very Good at Finding the Surface

This is where things get interesting.

The mainstream doesn't necessarily want everything that comes with alternative culture.

It often wants the easiest pieces to photograph.

Give it the chains.

Give it the distressed leather.

Give it the eyeliner.

Give it the plaid, studs, boots and torn fabric.

Maybe leave out the uncomfortable parts.

Leave out the people who created something because they didn't fit comfortably inside the culture that was already available to them.

Leave out the DIY part.

Leave out the tiny bands, artists, clubs, designers and weird little stores that kept scenes alive when nobody considered any of it fashionable.

Take the surface, polish it a little, raise the price and suddenly everybody understands it.

Until the trend changes.

Then the mainstream moves on.

The people who actually liked the shit in the first place usually don't.

Trendy and Authentic Aren't Opposites

This is also where I think the conversation sometimes gets stupid.

Something becoming popular doesn't automatically make it fake.

You can genuinely love something that happens to be fashionable.

You can also genuinely love something that will be horribly unfashionable six months from now.

The important part is probably whether you still like it when nobody is telling you that you're supposed to.

That's a much better test.

I've never liked the idea that alternative fashion has to deliberately stay ugly, obscure or inaccessible just to prove that it's real.

That's another kind of uniform.

If a million people suddenly decide they love something you've loved for twenty years, that doesn't erase your twenty years.

It also doesn't mean the million new people are pretending.

Some of them will move on.

Some won't.

That's how culture works.

Alternative Doesn't Mean One Aesthetic

This matters to me with KLF because I don't want Kunts Live Forever trapped inside one visual definition of “alternative.”

Some days alternative means punk.

Sometimes it's horror.

Sometimes it's industrial.

Sometimes it's neon and completely ridiculous.

Sometimes it's workwear.

Sometimes it's an old pair of boots and a black shirt that has been washed so many times it's basically charcoal.

Sometimes it doesn't look “alternative” at all until you read what's printed on it.

That's more interesting to me than creating a checklist.

You don't need the approved haircut.

You don't need the approved bands.

You don't need seventeen patches sewn onto something before you're allowed into the building.

And you definitely don't need to dress like somebody else's idea of rebellion.

The entire point gets lost if everybody who's supposedly rejecting conformity ends up wearing another uniform.

Weird People Didn't Suddenly Become Mainstream

That's probably the part I find funniest about these fashion cycles.

Every few years, the mainstream announces that something alternative is back.

Back from where?

The people wearing it never disappeared.

The bands didn't disappear.

The clubs didn't disappear.

The artists didn't disappear.

The forty-, fifty- and sixty-year-olds who were there decades ago didn't spontaneously evaporate when magazines stopped photographing them.

The teenagers discovering it for the first time didn't invent it either.

The culture kept moving while mainstream fashion looked somewhere else.

Now the camera has swung back around.

Cool.

Take the picture.

Maybe somebody sees it and discovers something they genuinely love.

Maybe somebody buys the boots because they're trendy and wears them for six months.

Maybe somebody buys the same boots and realizes at fifty that they've finally found clothes that feel like them.

All of those things can happen at the same time.

Because the mainstream discovering weird people doesn't mean weird people suddenly became mainstream.

It just means somebody finally looked in our direction again.

We'll still be here when they look away.

Rose Baxter

Originally published on Kunts Live Forever: Alternative Fashion Is Having a Mainstream Moment. That Doesn’t Make It Mainstream.