Random Rhetorical Hypebeast Fashion Thoughts

[stoogesjacket]

I’m really fascinated by all of the “archival” instagrams that have recently seemed to pop up, all with the same old Raf/Rick/Helmut/Undercover/AnnD/Margiela/now Kapital for some reason pieces that were all culled from y!JP, all in the same format of garment photographed flat on white background. Makes me wonder both if these pieces are actually being *worn* by anyone anymore and who/what exactly is making all these people have the exact same taste

[b4my]

the grailed prices are coming from inside the house

[smiles]

*scene of teens feverishly posting #grailed pics of archival raf to IG in a sweaty cellar in Long Island *

The wolf of hypebeast

[fun_yunchables]

Since i seem to spend too much time reading niche memes and stuff i see some definitely relevant ones

(bless u fakeyeezyboosts)

[rjbman]

one of my coworkers at work is into boots and talks about mr porter, superdenim, and grailed... weird to see how far-reaching fashun facets are

[kremvax]

the interests of like a ton of the "fashion guys" i meet are
raf simons (the angsty/moody looking outwardly cool stuff) - sterling ruby - hedi - helmut lang [bondage straps and bulletproof vests] - margiela when they're told - basquiat - warhol - and yeah, all that ~archive~ stuff.. - raving about things shortly after an asap rocky or luka sabbat cosign/mention - off-white/abloh, things for the culture etc. i don't know their exact points of entry but i'm like, it can't only be rappers right? / it feels weird because after that "entry" so many of them seem to develop their tastes in the exact same places/through the same channels or something (& don't really seem able to evaluate stuff other than what aligns w all that)

it can be worse when they actually speak though idk i've tried to follow various "collectors" and stuff and ones that often post things in the same format/talk about those brands on various social platforms but get exhausted/find myself unfollowing really quick bc of weird condescension and/or annoying sexism/horny posting/creepiness/???? when it came to womens stuff/how women dress


:(
yeah you are probably right about /fa/ slash mfa(?) which sucks bc i like really don't want that to be the case lmao. & it feels like the ways a lot of fashion guyz i know/have known from effay (specifically) talk about fashion can be incredibly uh... i dont know i havent been on there in ages but i think that board is one of the most anxious places on the internet & it shows

that that male-fashion-forums taste has persisted/i still see it even tho its been like half a decade might also be a thing that factors into the obsession with "archive" stuff like i'm not very sure if a lot of these guys are paying attention to other fashion media/anyone else/anything new/that isn't like forcibly dragged in by some random anon that almost immediately gets accused of trying 2 shill something/force a Jarvis

i also just realized kanyetothe's "fashion" section really resembles what i was describing and is still pretty active/it always seemed like a lot of its users got a good amt of their news/exposure to this stuff from highsnob/hypebeast etc and idk i guess its just an addition 2 the general "mens fashion forum" thing

[b4my]

it's just flexing level 2 isn't it...like the same people probably think it's lame to be into box logos but their mentality toward archive raf and whatnot is the exact same so you're going to see all the same weird pathologies and anxieties you see w/ hypebeasts.

also i think the collector's impulse as some sort of pathway around having to say you're "into fashion" as an aesthetic experience which is seen as like...less masculine somehow. vs the value of collections and knowledge gatekeeping and stuff. "i'm into fashion" vs "i'm into vintage nike", "i'm into archive raf", etc, the latter is definitely seen as less frivolous, or still frivolous but in a more acceptable way. i've definitely found myself doing that around new people. i used to DJ a lot and the mentality around rare disco and soul and stuff was the exact same.

to its credit i think that mfa (and c-t obvs) has actually been really good about shunning that mentality as a community and the tone there is a lot more welcoming and friendly and less creepily self loathing than fa or ktt.

[stoogesjacket]

I mean, you definitely can't discount the influence of rappers (something something Kanye West's dreams of working alongside Helmut, Rick, and Margiela) but we also like, don't suddenly have Rihanna in Raf Simons fw02 or Kendrick Lamar in Craig Green from nothing. All of these sources (4chan, reddit, archival igs/twitters, guys in general who say they're into archival fashion) are all interested in these same designers' work from 1995-2005 that while all pretty excellent are not in a vacuum. Nobody really ever talks about much stuff before or after this period; you don't get guys trying to buy vintage Armani or Balmain under Christophe Decarnin even if those were the popular "menswear" of the day (cycles of cool perhaps?). If you talk to your average male teenager/young person, I doubt they'd suddenly start talking about avant garde menswear as they would Supreme or whatever. I'm curious in the source that lead to influencing these rappers (and now their fans, and I guess fashion in general) that wasn't present even five years ago.

I think a lot about ( http://lacollectionneuse.tumblr.com/pos ... -simons-99 ) this post from La Collectioneuse, a tumblr run by a set of related people (most notably names like humalien, ohyescoolgreat, and cotonblanc (r.i.p.)) who all started posting about this sort of fashion early in this decade (although cotonblanc is gone, you can see him posting helmut lang magazine scans in the thread on stylezeitgeist, for example). La Collectioneuse collects the listings and corresponding images of garments from the designers these archive guys are interested in, with images and links dating back to 2010. The linked post is for a listing for a Nebraska sweatshirt from Raf Simons' fw02 collection Virginia Creeper, sold in 2011, which various colorways sell for on Grailed for usually $3,000 nowadays, when Rihanna or SZA aren't wearing them. The thing is that clicking the link to that ebay listing show the sweatshirt selling for just £125, or $180 today (if only I was hip enough to be trawling ebay for Raf when I was 14).

I'm interested in the switch that happened to make this kind of change in demand and thus price. I guess 2011 was the height of the #menswear craze, so I guess nobody was really interested in distressed sweatshirts as they were like, oxford shirts or whatever. I think Grailed had more handle in it than its given credit for; I remember when their first curated sale came out for fw16 (lol) it gave me an idea of what were "grails" that I should aim for and thus what designers to pay attention to in general. I didn't know about Helmut Lang pillow neck bondage jackets or Raf Simons New Order Parkas or especially Carol Christian Poell Drip Sneakers before that (though I did only "get into fashion" as a senior in high school in 2015).

I bring this up to say that the hype around these archival pieces is a really new phenomenon. While I've seen some fans nowadays try to instantly determine what pieces in new collections will be "future grails," I don't think you can make such fast judgements on what will or won't become popular (and why I hope the Raf hype won't be sustained and cause prices to crash, lol). While Grailed kind of codified it (the most glaring example being the craze for IS Tsumori Chisato Bomber Jackets-- Tsumori Chisato's design for the Issey Sport line was specifically designed for teenage girls in the 80's, and now people like Ian Connor wear them), I think it was really fashion nerds on tumblr and forums (like us!) that eventually dictated all of this interest in the "archival" (rebranded from secondhand) market, along with timing of trend cycles, a sluggish design industry this decade, and new austerity post-recession. Granted, I have no knowledge of how these brands were received or bought pre-2010, which would be interesting to know, though I have heard that Helmut Lang's final collections were not well received from a retail standpoint, causing bondage bombers to be on clearance racks for years, which is why there are so many on the secondhand market in mysteriously new condition.

Does that make sense? I know this was long and it's just my observations but I definitely think young men desiring the (mostly quite gay, definitely difficult-though-well-designed) fashions of two decades ago goes deeper than rappers wearing it. I mean, the rappers had to get it from somewhere.

[candy]

i think what's really interesting to me is also the progression of the ideas of buying (sometimes niche) designer clothes spreading out towards the "general" people outside of fashion forums and etc.
i joined SuFu around my senior year of high-school; and around that time i started buying japanese fashion magazines at my local kinokuniya.
back then i think the knowledge of designers and "grails" were way less abundant, as well as proxying items from Japan to the U.S; it just didn't reach a lot of people yet at that time.
flash forward to now, where even my friends who i'd never thought get into fashion start wearing techwear and are actually so engaged with japanese/non-japanese streestyle trends.

i think once i saw frank ocean wearing a lad musician "shoegazer" shirt i knew it was real l o l.

i've also been noticing the trend of N(N), Undercover, or in other words Urahara movement names lately amongst the late-teens or early 20's group that "know all about fashion" (in which I think the credit for this is due to those whoisjacov + fernando youtube channels). in which case i almost get a bad taste in my mouth mainly because they act high-and-mighty knowing about these "foreign japanese designers".

also there's the almost nostalgia or extinction of what was once known as past grails or what the most sought after clothes were. (geller dip-dye, raf astros/velcro, visvim fbt's, undercover parka, etc..)

idk this is just a little spew of what i've been thinking of, especially after reading above. i think right now i'm at the spot in my life where i've pretty much found what i want to wear and don't have an outward need to talk about it too much anymore, which is why i don't really post anywhere and just lurk.

[Lorcan]

There's also David Casavant who bought up masses (over 1000 pieces) of og Raf and Helmut back when it was reasonably affordable (late 00s, early 10s?) and then basically made a business of renting out rare pieces to famous people (Kanye, Kim, Pharrell) and for music videos, editorials, etc.

So like Travis Scott wearing old Raf in a music video - its actually David Cassavant's old Raf. And no doubt the hype has in turn made his collection more valuable...can't knock the hustle.

[Julio]

lovely run of discussion right now, but i find myself too tired atm to really try to voice much out, moreso when the discussion surrounds brands that i don't religiously follow.

instead i'm going to be shallow and segue into this:


since the advent of such things like adiraf hype and later forms such as the triple s (i don't think the speed trainer is nearly weird enough) i've been feeling like old/weird sneaker type things are kind of dying, and frankly d3s on asap's feet could really just be the nail in the coffin for me. moreso if he's wearing d3 referential sneakers he made with under armor. purely speculative, but yknow.

i... had more to say
such as trying to unpack my being an anti-hype sort of elitist and also trying to assert what it is about old/weird sneakers i liked so much
and no, i don't think it was purely just to be different

i think part of it was just challenging myself to make something seemingly janky work
but i guess the moment it becomes the aesthetic expression of a hype machine it gets watered down and disconnected

they were never supposed to be ~*fashion*~, i guess is what i'm trying to say. just things that coincidentally could be, sometimes. i guess that's my thing.

yes this is scatterbrained i will revisit it tomorrow after i get some sleep my apologies

[b4my]

[turkeyschmitt]

[Lorcan]

Lol yeah I guess if you're buying tons of Raf as a random teen its inevitably daddy's $$$

What I was stumbling inarticulately towards was it could seem like Casavant was driving hype for his own stuff in a relatively opaque way lending pieces out to specific people, which I thought was interesting. Ur casual observer who doesn't follow his insta might not realize who owns what.

As a long time Needles fan it was kind of strange seeing the track pant explosion, luckily that hype seems to have passed now

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

let me just note that the idea of a horde of blindly hype-driven, pretentious fashion teens is a rhetorical concept that pretty much only exists in concept within fashion forum discussions. i've come into contact with a number of guys that could fit into that description and they've all been pretty well-meaning people with a genuine interest in fashion, and they have their own reasons as to why those particular brands speak to them. i have a friend that's into current lang and midnight studios and it's like whatever, it's not my thing but who am i to tell him it shouldn't be his either

the issue with fashion forums and instagram is that it collapses the entirety of someone's personality and interests into a list of brands for other people to judge independent of that person's actual personality or personal connection to fashion as a broader concept. /fa/ and ktt suck but that's more due to their userbases' external insecurities more than anything else, and obviously most grailed scalpers suck but there's clearly a market demand for what they're selling if they're sucking all the way to the bank to the degree that they are

people can be pretty annoying/OD about certain things in fashion but the "ugh hypebeasts ruined x brand" sentiment is also emblematic of shitty elitist gatekeeping. nobody came out of the womb with a fromjapan account and personal taste is constantly shifting with time

edit: he's into current lang, i still have a soft spot for the archive stuff (not enough to justify the prices though)

[blanket]

[Julio]

[fun_yunchables]

[fun_yunchables]

i did state it was obviously not as bad/serious and i feel like there's a misunderstanding here but idc you can interpret the response however you want

[b4my]

screaming at the fact that this number nine jacket that goes for $850 on grailed looks exactly the same as this space jam jersey with taz dribbling a basketball.

[INNIT]

where do we all stand on rolling up pants. is rolling up pants dying? are we moving towards "respecting the pool"

[popcorn]

[CheerUpBrokeBoy]

my main point was really that the concept of the rhetorical hypebeast has been almost completely divorced from the actual people driving the hype. in forums like c-t hypebeasts are sort of referred to as this amorphous hivemind of marketing-hypnotized zombies – especially wrt "oh no, kanye wore [x designer], expect their stuff to sell out/grailed prices to surge"

the only real interaction that non-hypebeasts have with hypebeasts is pretty much through instagram, grailed, or if you choose to go to ktt for whatever reason, and i really think that it serves to collapse every single person feeding the hype machine into the same definition. i'm discounting resellers from this, because they're only interested in consuming fashion for the most mercenary reason possible, but i bet if you asked 1000 "hypebeasts" why they like the brands/clothes/styles they like you'd get 1000 different answers. it all ends up contributing to the same hype machine, but they're all individual actors with their own personal reasons for participating, and that's lost when people that like margaret howell and cdg whine about them on forums

i just feel like if you're interested in clothing in any intellectual way, as anyone on a fashion forum presumably is, your first instinct on encountering hypebeasts should be curiousity rather than revulsion or annoyance. the fact that a sneaker is manufactured for like ~$45, retails for ~$200 but can resell for ~$1000+ on the aftermarket should FASCINATE anyone with an interest in fashion. there's so much space to ask WHY hypebeasts like what they do, and investigate that on the basis of identity, branding/brand marketing, cultural capital, commodity fetishism, whatever – but having a kneejerk negative reaction against them is so intellectually incurious that i really can only see it as basic elitism

case in point – there are plenty of care-taggers that wear some of the brands that the stereotypical hypebeast might like (myself included): how do you differentiate your reasons for wearing raf/UC/rick/supreme/etc. from this imagined hypebeast, or are you complicit in fueling the hype machine? as someone that likes acronym, it's been really funny to see this "me vs. them" thing play out in realtime – some techwear IG dude with 10k+ followers will post something about wearing acronym "before acronym was hyped", like motherfucker that shit is hyped because of YOU! you don't think posting fit pics might make other people want to check out/buy those brands? isn't that the entire point of posting brand lists with your WAYWT shots

idk i walk past the supreme line every day on my commute so maybe it's influenced my thinking on this. maybe i'll sell 75% of my clothes and become a full-on hypeboi as part of my quarter-life crisis. who knows

[fun_yunchables]

just from my perspective:

i am pretty sure i have some personal bias at play here. the people i've had discussions about hype-driven fashion consumerism (largely people who work or own local boutique stores) note that hype is probably a significant player in making clothing sales (for example, the powers pyramid tee that pretty much sat for months on end until -- sold out within the next week). i don't want to say that this correlation implies that hype is real, but it's hard to ignore how the interest in an otherwise benign tee had skyrocketed.

another nearby boutique is a yeezy retailer -- and it's easy to say the rhetorical hypebeast isn't real, etc etc, but the people who have come for the yeezy raffles are a completely different crowd than the usual. part of the marketing of this boutique involves essentially using yeezys as "bait" (questionable tactics tbh) to inform customers of smaller, newer brands like perks and mini, liberaiders, ignored prayers, pleasures, etc etc. but a large majority are not receptive, to the point where pam & pleasures were basically dropped because they weren't selling. it's possible that there just isn't a customer base for this style in my city, but it seems like most people only came for yeezys and possibly cav empt, and couldn't give two shits about anything else in the boutique.

these are obv just my anecdotal encounters, but within these populations of customers i have definitely met several people who were genuinely only interested in a piece because of who has worn it (and don't really care for the story/identity behind the brand). on the other hand, i have definitely talked with some people who legitimately didn't know anything about a certain piece and bought it just because they liked it and weren't aware of anything otherwise. so i guess it goes both ways...?

in any case, i think trying to understand how something (not even necessarily clothes) is hyped is pretty important information from a business perspective, although i have to say i'm not a fan of the consumerism it typically promotes. more importantly, how do you get people to be hyped on things like pursuing sustainable lifestyles?? another whole earth catalog or what??

-----

on a non-related note: it seems like the majority of people/brands in the art book fair circuit are trying to be cav empt & brain dead right now

[odradek]

my take: hypebeasts are good because by buying $140 tees they are subsidizing the other weirdo stuff that i can buy on sale.

[WussWayne]

I sometimes see obviously women's clothing that I like for cheap on yjp(womenswear proxying of non-mainstream stuff seems like it barely has competition) but I find it hard to pull the trigger. I want to successfully cross-dress but that means learning how to do makeup properly and finding a way to style my hair or get a wig to let me pull it off. I think I'm slim enough to pull it off.

I could also just wear it as is without changing my appearance but then I start thinking about the cost-mileage of the clothing. I could buy it and wear it everyday without changing how I normally look. But the social fall-out would probably be worse than from my current clothes. Now I don't particularly care about what people think of my clothes when I'm off the clock but I think the psychological impact of people you know suddenly treating you extremely differently coupled with strangers feeling the need to shout slurs at you would be higher than with my current stuff which is still recognizable "male clothing". And I think getting that kind of negativity everyday would eventually wear me down and I'd shelve the clothing to once every blue moon, giving me bad value for my money.

And I dunno, I suppose maybe scouring for stuff hoping a Japanese woman is selling something that can fit a dude 6" M guy may not be worth the hassle. Maybe I should just try to get into more obscure male clothing that might probably have less competition as well

I dunno maybe I'm just a pussy overthinking things

[b4my]

re hypebeasts: i've been really into this season of palace and it's funny to see all the absolutely sick stuff sit for weeks and the logo stuff sell out in seconds.

also i'm interested in how hype is generated but that doesn't translate to a desire to be around hypebeasts...like i'm interested in why people join ISIS too ya know? doesn't mean i want to be around them lol.

[deadkitty]

[Julio]

schrödinger's hypebeast

edit:

A hypebeast, a pair of Balenciaga triple s, and an Instagram account with clout are placed in a sealed box made of Supreme™ bricks. If an internal monitor (e.g. an iPhone X) detects clout (i.e. a new series of paid followers), the account is suspended, reducing the clout, which renders the hypebeast rhetorical. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum hype-mechanics implies that after a while, the hypebeast is simultaneously real and rhetorical. Yet, when one looks in the box made of Supreme™ bricks, one sees the hypebeast either as real or rhetorical; not both real and rhetorical. This poses the question of when exactly quantum hype-superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.

[popcorn]

don't mind me i'm just receiving a metaphysics crash course from the ramdom fashion jorts thread