Let's talk about Style Lab areas

I'm not just talking about music. It's also fashion and art.

Well then, what do you recommend to those of us who aren't allowed to sit at the Cool Table?

And there's lots of wild sex and orgies and stuff.

guess what? like everything ever the answers lie somewhere boringly in the middle. i know not of other areas but shoreditch is as deserving of mockery as it is of praise. now i can understand ruling in favour of creativity (or rather whichever side you happen to be on) but why does it have to come at the cost of imagining said places as hubs of pioneers persecuted by a jealous laity? why fool yourself!

There isn't a branch of Diesel in Williamsburg. They have their own mini-mall with no-brand-lab-boutiques stuffed with clothes by local 'designer terrorists'.

(I kid you not, I photographed a label tag in one Billyburg store that described the girl who made the garment as a 'designer terrorist'. I can probably find the photo for you if you like. I think it was made pre-9/11 and hadn't sold. It dated from the halcyon days of the In Flight exhibition, a show at Deitch which had, as its catalogue, a satirical In Flight magazine full of instructions on how to hijack a passenger jet.)

It's not inconceivable that there are people in B'burg who work for, say, Diesel or Urban Outfitters or whoever. Members of Fischerspooner work(ed) for Donna Karan. But the High Street version of the Style Lab styles will always be just a bit more boring. They'll always leave the diversity and subversiveness on the cutting room floor. Which is why it doesn't take away the labs' raison d'etre to say that there is commerce with commerce going on.

I don't know anything about art, but this is just fascinating to me; it makes me think of the image I've formed of Warhol or other pop artists based on cultural osmosis: that obsessive, neurotic attention to detail over something completely trivial (this could be completely wrong, obv). Except this *is* trivial; there's no galleries or scenes or commerce involved, and I doubt anyone's going to beat a path to her door hailing her as the next outsider artist. Of course, I'm also not sure that my interest in the way she behaves isn't shaped to some degree by the pop art scene, by people who called attention to this type of behavior by selling it. I guess my point, if I even have one, is that value is where *you* find it (whoa, dude. deep huh?). Momus finds it in Williamsburg; everything I've heard/read about it has made it sound like a glorified art school: lots of stuff being made that wouldn't necessarily be interesting to people outside of the scene being bouyed by the social network. Personally, I find whenever I'm around people I have *too much* in common with, I feel stifled. I guess I need people like my coworker, who lack that self-awareness and codification that come with scenes, to be creative.

This is the sort of thinking that gave the world Hampshire College, and the world is no better for it, Mr. Momus.

In all honesty, my sometimes ridicule of areas like that isn't because of the people you describe, it's because of the people who are there because they aspire to be the people you describe. It's a fine line but I really doubt you don't know what I'm talking about with that. That's why "Style Labs" are so fucking annoying - they're full of assholes pretending they're part of the Style Lab.

It's well cool to not be part of the FUTURE FASHION WAVE (TM) or whatever the hell the hipster goons are meant to be - but it's not cool to be a not-part-trying-to-be-a-part. That's just annoying.

Also, I don't like having to go to Williamsburg.

Presumably Dan would be comfortable with the idea that there are consumption areas in every city. That's where you go shopping, or looking at exhibitions, or watching films or whatever. The things you buy and see in these 'consumption areas' have styles, right? Some of the styles -- a Rolling Stones album, a Coke can -- change very little over the decades. Others change all the time; new products come and go, smaller companies tend to take bigger risks. They can find new gaps in the market by experimenting with style.

Now, maybe Dan would also concede that there are production areas in many cities too. Some are just factories and sweatshops. Others are more specialised in R&D. They go further out in terms of the risks they take, they attempt to do more than just make new products. Often they focus on changing the world. You recognise these areas the moment you enter them. To the list above I could add places like Civic Center or Santa Monica in LA, Castro in SF, Olympia in Washington... Every city has them. Even Edinburgh. It might just be one record store, one art gallery, one cafe, but you're going to know that those are places frequented and fuelled by a self-selecting elite of (insert enraged deprecating epithet here)s.

The poet Robert Lowell (who never skateboarded) once said that being a poet was a bit like being a scientist. Maybe very few people know your name or will come into contact with your work, but that doesn't mean that it isn't going to filter through, trickle down, butterly-effect and ripple out through the world, changing things.

Let's turn the clock back to 1960 and nuke SF's Haight Ashbury and London's Chelsea. Now FF back to 2002. Is the world different? I think it probably is, and I say, personally, a lot of the things we love and take for granted are suddenly missing.

Are you forgetting that there exists many times more "chaff of production" than that which actually makes itself felt (ie: brings itself into recursive consumption)? Don't you think the lines of, I don't want to say influence, but something like that are more diffuse?

To expand upon Jess's point, wouldn't signifying a locale as a Style Lab only help its inevitable implosion? That would seem a premature call to all the culture vultures to which Ally is referring.

In fact, I'd further argue that this concept of a Style Lab is eventually "Style"'s biggest handicap, as it makes basic assumptions that only a few atoms in this world, at any given time, is allowed the distinction of proclaiming relevant fashion, music, art, what have you. This is all too convenient to all the fashion companies and major record labels... oops, excuse me... Style Wards and Style Dispensers (teehee), because that saves them precious scout time. Meanwhile, there are tons of artistes out there -- Momus's kind -- who are grossly overlooked because they can't afford to move and compete with all the wannabes.

It just seems silly to me that "style", "art", etc. being these omnipresent abstract qualities are being treated like some natural resource.

Over-production is an important part of production.

Yeah, I'm all for diffuse production (with the ultimate utopia being Beuys' 'Everyone is an artist') but for the moment we live in a world of specialisation and concentration, and that can be exciting. It's just really exciting to arrive in Berlin Mitte, for instance, and see Kitty Yo's office, and feel something special in the air. Or to arrive in B'burg and see those 'asymmetrical hairstyles'. Cos it's possible that a couple of years down the line 'asymmetrical' is how your own hair will be.

Hell, having grown up in Santa Monica, I would have said the exact same thing... except now, Santa Monica has since become Hollywood 2, and would distinctly lift its cigarette holder and fake cheekbones in honor of your comment.

Lemme think about the specialization thing for a minute...

Well, Alex in SF, are you really in SF? Because if you are, you must be gnashing your teeth all the time. Cos it's packed with people ten times 'worse' than me in that respect!

Best ILE question of the day...

Then your insult to me is forgiven, and rather meaningless.

But the property developers wouldn't be doing anything of the sort if not for the people I was talking about...culture vultures, as better said above, that's your real qualm there. And, I'm sorry, but 90% of the people I meet and interact with in the trendy "Style Lab" areas are of that type of persona. That's why everyone else gets shoved out. And that's why the WHERE is completely unimportant and the concept of "Style Lab" becomes useless...

And yes, the Dostoyevsky question is the best of the day. Hell, that should be its own thread.

haha, I grew up in Olympia and have never seen it as anything but a cultural backwater with a thin film of college student creativity over the top.

Except if the next big style area is right here, where you're posting. (Rent on the real estate of this thread very reasonable.)

The poet Robert Lowell (who never skateboarded) once said that being a poet was a bit like being a scientist. Maybe very few people know your name or will come into contact with your work, but that doesn't mean that it isn't going to filter through, trickle down, butterly-effect and ripple out through the world, changing things.

That's good and all, and it plays nicely into the whole "woe is me oh misunderstood artist" thing but isn't there an issue of communication? Pursuit of knowledge, is in many ways it's own reward, but pursuit of an aesthetic seems more closely tied to its reception, its viewer, its listener.

I like how mark s has INFLUENCED everyone so strongly they're terrified to use this word.

I think most scientists out there would agree in principle, but see that as a consolation prize. They, like artists, want to matter and to change things. But only on their own terms. If I were a scientist, I wouldn't become a car designer (rather than work on my dream, the maglev train) just because I knew that people would probably never give up their cars to ride it.

Unrelated: I checked out Williamsburg in 2000 and decided not to live there because it felt like a ghetto. Not sufficiently diverse. But I like to visit.

anyway Jess' original point blows this away. Oooh... asymetrical hairstyles, jerkin! I mean did a style lab produce hip-hop? Only in a certain limited sense. The problem is that this is like a mad scientist's lab where 99.9% of the production is very clever but utterly useless. Communities of artists are a time honored phenom -- but usually only those which emerge *outside* of a recognized style-lab ever point in a new and interesting direction rather than progressively refining nothing in particular.

Really I think that style-labs are not places of innovation, but of following of particular trends generally, and that those trends aren't set in "labs" but by the success of various style-arbitrators (i.e. the hip media establishment) who on occasion replenish their ranks from wherever the next big thing is.

The problem is the word style which is too big. "trend-labs" would probably be a better term or "fad-labs" because the real shifts come from elsewhere.

This is why the dirty secret of the Style Labbers' sense of superiority is spoken in a coded language. Sometimes it's just the names of people that members of the elite recognise and nobody else does. Sometimes what happens is that you get eager democratically-minded journalists conveying the superior textural qualities of Style Lab products by saying 'This is the coming thing, soon everyone will be doing / wearing / singing / copying it.' In other words, it's not democratic now, but it will be one day. (For this we need ambassadors straddling the elitist / populist divide. A sports star might be useful, because sports is unashamedly elitist. Enter Becks wearing a sarong!)

The trouble with the 'once they burn the bridge with the masses they're cunts' theory is that if you discount what the 'cunts' are making and wait for the masses to make some truly grassroots and subtle and marvellous art, you might be waiting a very long time indeed.

Did a style lab produce hip hop?

That's a bigger question than I could answer. But hip hop is very much about name-dropping and narcissism too. It has its elites, and its key streets.

Momus -- you missed the point entirely. Who sez you have to 'burn bridges to the masses' in order to produce? You close things up to the "cunts" and the "masses" but what about the decent artists with connections to their roots and community?

How does that inversion work? Which experimental hip hop artists are we damning there?

hahaha Hip-hop artists "burning the bridge" = undie! And even then only in the guise of "keeping it real".

Style Lab culture is torn between trying to imitate that success and succumb to a kind of elitist separatist impulse (partly because the Billyburg-type ghetto is a lot nicer than the Bronx-type ghetto.) What's nice about elitism / separatism? Well, for a start it's more sheltered and tender-minded, and for certain kinds of cultural production you need that. The sad thing about capitalism's co-option of the black subculture is that it has used the guns and sexism and bragging as justifications of its own gun-dealing, sexist braggardry.

I should say 'subculture'. But I think we now live in a period when subculture and culture are so intermeshed it's hard to distinguish.

add 'speech patterns'

I think that Einstein may have had the answer, though... When asked why he possessed seven identical suits - which he changed into each and every day - he said simply that it meant he didn't have to worry about what to wear.

Einstein... Style guru? Discuss.

The elite of the black American subculture and They have a totemic status as 'the masses for the masses'.
That status is literal, not totemic. If any distinctions arise, they tend to do so within the individual. It's like you can't even conceive of a group without elites.

It's like you can't even conceive of a group without elites.

Actually, I can't. But we have to be careful of who we call elites. The term, correctly used, should only be applied to people with power.

this is the biggest load of horseshit i have ever heard.

i think i'll rephrase that to "an understanding of hiphop and its culture through the lens of twee german electronica who adopted ambient 1993 warp records breakbeats in or around 97, to which supporters can claim some reverse cultural loop bullshit for bambaataa sampling 'trans-europe express' 25 years ago."

'Sneaker Pimp' was originally someone who scoured thrift stores for discontinued trainers for wealthy Grand Royalists. I'm about to work on a book about rockstars and their clothes and our main rule is if there's a stylist in the mix, a la Britney, the star does not go in the book.

Most people I know who moved into areas that became Style Labs were moving there before their neighbourhoods boomed because it was cheap. If they made art, it was because big spaces were cheap. You don't have to be intentionally leading to be copied or followed, the shit just happens. I'm sure there was a little cell of people in Renaissance times who said, 'fucking Medicis, getting their filthy meathooks into everything we love, wankers.'

I think the distinction must be made between Ideas Labs (neighbourhoods where it's cheap, full of weird shit and too dangerous for trustas/their parents to consider, so lack of money no barrier to entry, you just have to make the rent) Style Labs (places like Hoxton where you don't have to work in advertising to buy/rent here, but it helps) and Fashion Labs (places like Notting Hill or Soho, and accessible only to the de facto rich or their children whose ideas about urban 'slumming' are either 30 years out of date or just a sign of how sheltered and rich they are).

And also Sunday night a very funny thing happened that might have relevance here. I was meeting Larry Clark and his girlfriend for a drink and a chat, we were sitting in the lobby bar of a very swank hotel and suddenly this brick shithouse in a Lawn Guyland leather coat approaches and claps Larry on the back. "Larry! You da man! I can't wait to see your movie!' Puzzled looks from the three of us, as the guy just stands there. "Oh...Shane from V*ce. Hey. I'm here to get a film deal." So Larry introduces the guy to me and Tiffany, we shake-and-fake, and the guy waddles off a minute later. Thirty seconds later, the three of us mutter "Cunt!" in unison, realise we *all* have identified a slick poseur, and totally lose it in giggles.

I was also sampling 'TEE' 25 years ago. Do I get to claim I invented hip hop now?

;--)

there is an awful lot to be said for "I don't know a lot about art, but i know what i like." and the same goes for fashion, music, etc.

we should all pull our heads out from the sheep in front's arse and try to learn to breathe on our own. otherwise individualism will die.

subliminal pressure aside, if you can't think for yourself, then... be a ditch-digger, as someone put it.

"ziggy do you come from some horrible after-school-special future world to show us the error of our ways before it's too late?!?"

for time-travelling fashion tips, scroll up for Einstein, Jess.

...or that.

(And nowhere inbetween).

Style is innate. It feeds fashion's ideas mill while at the same time being quite repulsed by it. With style, it's not how much you spend, but some more abstract reason why you've chosen what you bought. A person who says: 'I bought that suit in the thrift store because it reminded me of an Otto Dix portrait' is thinking about style.

Fashion is copying what others are doing RIGHT NOW, or trying to anticipate and be at the foreground of the next current trend. You follow, you have aspirations to be something someone else "better"/more culturally powerful/wealthier than you currently are. It costs a lot of money to be fashionable, which is where labels and conspicuous consumption come into it. Someone who says 'I bought that Vuitton handbag just after the collections and now everyone's on a waiting list for it' is thinking about fashion.

Most of the Style Labs Nick identifies started being about fashion a while back, which is why I've gone a bit off them, especially Williamsburg.

1. 'the streets'
2. hipster
3. high street

or: manor house-shoreditch-clapham.

style labs=tottenham, manor house, haringey.

people who can afford to live in shoreditch/williamsburg lack style. this much is obvious. they are claphamheads in scuffed jeans, the endless conservatism is drab and unfortunate. what i would like is for people in these areas to stop playing so damn smug and safe, take a risk, be pretentious, stop worrying about it so damn much! too forced, forcedness negates style everytime, buncha try hards! why i oughta...

where do you think these haircuts came from dude, not from shoreditch/williamsburg man! these places take whats going on on the street, and 'develop it', make it more accessible to non-orbanites by filtering through magazines. just think, in a couple years people in shoreditch may go out with a comb in the hair, or a toothbrush in their mouth...

And when you work on style/fashion magazines you *do* try to invent ridiculous things for trendmongering people to copy. And are the copyists 'style victims'? No, if they get it wrong they're always 'fashion victims'.

Mmm, spesh.

But wot about Xtina Aguilera? Shurely that girl's face is the ultimate mashup - Too Many Stylists being the title of her next album (in my head). PostMentalism in action.

Is Style the new Content? Bwahaha. Honestly, this makes me want to cry into my cornflakes.

Mr C: Binary oppositions are, like, so last year, hon.

A: Its either this...

...or that.

(And nowhere inbetween).

I use binaries (and in language they are totally unavoidable fully aware of their fictional nature. I prefer to think of them in the form of the classic Hegelain dialectic:

Thesis

Antithesis

Synthesis (itself the thesis to a new antithesis)

You don't invest heavily in any particular thesis. You send it out to meet its antithesis, and watch how they negotiate, then restate. In this way you jump from one tumbling structure to the next.

ilxOr is very dialectical, which is why I like it.

The Laird of Inversnecky here, back to make ye greet
The Portobello pierrots, they cannae compete

And you are *so* not into diffuse production (at least nothing I can remember you saying on these boards has ever even vaguely suggested you're into anything but exclusivity).

I sometimes get around to thinking that people who need to go to signposted 'style labs' to sense 'something special in the air' are people who aren't very good at noticing 'something special'. I see exciting things happening every day where I live.

All I can say is that some places do make my heart skip a few beats. Yes, 'the everyday is full of magic', but, honestly, go to Mitte or go to B'burg and there is something in the air. Now, it may be just ludicrous pretension, or it may be talent. Personally, I'm impressed by -- say -- Kitty Yo Records, the Mitte galleries. They are not the only source of good work by any means, but I like the intensity, concentration, heroic sense of purpose of such places, the same way a glass-blower would get bloody excited to arrive in Venice and see the glassworks there.

I understood what you meant about areas of excitement, and I stand by what I said.

Broad thing: the idea that when people don't like something it's cos they're jealous *is* apparently a big crossover between style labs and hip-hop (and politics too and pretty much every semi-competitive arena). This idea has always bothered me. Maybe I should try and come up with a thread on it.

Narrow thing for Momus: I first heard Momus' music about a decade ago and first looked at his website in its very early days (mid 90s sometime). It strikes me that in this time his public tastes have changed very little - Japanese culture, dressing-up, playfulness, an interest in the interface of technology and history. This being so, is Momus at the leading edge of style in general or is he a connoisseur of a certain aesthetic which he has identified with the idea of "style"?

'Taste' is presumable the instrument via which we negotiate fashion with our sense of style?

The value arrives when the lump of phosphorus flies out off the stage and — if it does — lands in the body of water which is the audience, not always self-selected. If it skitters under the fridge instead, a lot less value arrives.

"Exciting" is in the eye (or mind) of the beholder. The real effect of these "style labs" is to hype what its elites believe to be worthy of interest, and you, Momus, drank their Kool-aid.

I was in a record store on Sunday and they had none of my records, but they had a genre heading called 'Folktronica' and a divider for my label American Patchwork, and I felt actually that I had changed the world in some tiny way. Much more so than if they'd just had a couple of my own albums.

Having been on the fringes of many, many movements (but never really at home in any of them) I think my style and the fashions of the day are in a continual dialectic, altering each other without making each other untrue to their natures. In any given decade I can point to the people with 'my' kind of sensibility. In ancient Rome they're satirists like Martial, in 21st century they're perhaps making Flash pieces. But something links them.

my motto for today = JEL IS A COTTAGE INDUSTRY TOO!! (pigeons have you met mr cat?)

My sympathies, there's nothing worse than that turgid prose. I liked Bank's Faxback exhibition, where they scrawled on gallery press releases their outrage at the stupidity of the things therein, and faxed them back. They were London's cleverest pariahs after that.

The bottom line is that there's really no such thing as a Style Lab, Idea Lab, or Fashion Lab because it's too easy, it defines everyone as "masses" and "the other" which is highly silly because, as bnw said way up thread, where do the so called labs come from?? There's artistry in every neighborhood, somewhere. It might not be Momus's idea, or Jess's idea, but it's there...

Anyway I am talking bollocks cos I made the mistake of GOING TO BED and thus missed all the conversaion.

Feel it, don't fight it, baby! You know you want to! ROWR!

I prefer the points brought up here and there that place the Internet (or some part of it) as its own, hrm, style lab (god, that term just sounds weird). Who needs a place in real life when you can chat with everybody if you're into exchanging ideas?

"Behold, my new song. Have an mp3!"

"Thanks. Here's my latest design work."

(Obviously real life places to chat and talk aren't going away, but no need to make them so privileged. If you're stuck in a fairly dreary town and like-minded souls want to do something and your only option if you want to go out and hang around somewhere for a bit and talk is a Starbuck's at the end of a drab minimall, then go to the Starbuck's! Hell, make it the Denny's if that's the only place open after midnight. You could also gather at someone's house or apartment, but I think everyone likes the idea of going to someplace where you don't have to clean up after the empty glasses and coffee cups. ;-) )

NONONONONONONONONO. Denny's is the devil!

As for how much power these things wield: Lots, but not in a direct sense. You see, almost everyone despises these folks -- rich art-skool kids who get ripped-collar employment that consists of schmoozing and not much else -- so they are hesitant to adapt their style. But, it quite often filters through several more trustworthy levels and then finds its way to the mainstream. Exhibit A: Avril Lavigne. The whole electro skinny-tie-over-t-shirt look has been prevalent in NY since I came here two and a half years ago. It's worked its way through the cultural maze and now dons many a 12-year-old braces-clad girl in Oklahoma. But is this really a victory? Does this establish Williamsburg as a culture mecca? In glossy magazines, it already has, which, of course, means that the swan song is on.

A) The entire remit of the discussion is a scene/mindset that I dismissed shortly after entering college, mostly because the people I met who identified with it were universally loathsome and stuck-up and I didn't want to be associated with them.

B) The sequence of Momus posts that begin with "The elite of the black American subculture is very lucky, because for whatever historical / cultural / psychological reasons, they find themselves in the position of being totemic not only for the US public but for educated consumers throughout the world," infuriates me beyond rationality.

Hence my attempts to turn it into a D&D session.

NONONONONONONONONO. Denny's is the devil!

Hey now. If it is your ONLY choice, like I said (and obviously their problems in the past dealing with people who aren't white isn't exactly to their credit in the slightest). But consider: you're 16, you're somewhere close to nowhere in the country (and there's plenty of spots like that in California), you need someplace to hang out and chat late on a Friday night with your fellow friendly geeks or oddballs or whatever, and that's all you've got, that or something like it like a Carrow's or a Norm's or whatever.

That said (prepares to put foot in scalding water anyway) what I do know is that, fr'instance, here in Tokyo the 'cool' people are guys like Nigo whose own particular Style Lab, Bathing Ape, is totally indebted to US black street and sport culture. USBSSC (it sounds like a bank!) is associated in most places I've lived with big corporations like Nike, McDonalds, the Hollywood studios. Those corps, the international brands of the US monoculture, skip right over all the art school Style Lab-type stuff, preferring their own recasting of USBSSC as the ultimate vehicle with which to promote capitalist American values all over the world.

That's why I talk about a totemic and paradigmatic function, 'the underclass for the underclass'. It's a very special case, to do with American history / power / psychology. Underclass Lithuanians, Malawians, Filippinos etc are nobody's heroes and don't tend to get their music played in McDonalds and their faces on mega-corporate posters in every major city in the world. They don't get copied by cool cats like Nigo. They're not totemic.
I didn't invent this phenomenon, so don't blame me if you don't like it.

proves my point about second wave re-presenters though, making acceptable for collegiate audience and shoreditch office workers?

1) If you didn't want to get into racial issues, why did you bring them up?
2) I don't blame you for the existence of the phenomenom, but I most certainly blame you for saying, "They're so lucky."

To me 'the elite of the underclass' sounds like a Marxist speaking, and 'awfully smart and lucky for a colored boy' sounds like some KKK member. And to me positive images of someone don't sound much like negative images of someone. For instance, if people say 'Momus is very insightful poster' it sounds a lot different than 'Momus is an idiot whose posts lead nowhere'.

There isn't that much difference between the two in my eyes, except that the KKK member will at least tell you that he doesn't like you.

And to me positive images of someone don't sound much like negative images of someone.

I will remember this the next time an acquaintance of Chinese/Japanese/Korean descent tells me a story where someone assumed they were good at math.

Sorry, Momus. I can't resist.

Also, Dan, I'm quite surprised by your "their isn't any difference" thing which strikes me as fairly sharp nationalism which is something that I'd never have expected from you.

Also, Momus gets Hegel wrong above because he confuses mode of analysis with mode of operations -- dialectics is a hermunetics, not a guide to action. Which is, by the way, why Marxism is a great deal more than dialectics.

I don't know, I think it fits right in with my baseline "People suck ass" philosphy.

More seriously, reading _Invisible Man_, _Native Son_ and _The Jungle_ have painted Marxism and communism as forces just as susceptible to racism as any other in my mind. Also, in my response I was reacting to the _Invisible Man_-type Marxist who would say that type of thing more than the Marxist ideal (hence the equivalization, which is as a general thing extremely lazy arguing).

Personally I think it is much cooler to be an outsider artist than one on the inside. Those are the most interesting even if they aren't the most influential.

And anyway, ILE members do go to parties, meet in the pub and occasionally fuck too.