Last week Kay Hanley posed this question on Twitter:
Dear God, When I look back on my life, will I view my days as a Twitter whore the same way as the days of “Where’s The Beef?”. Shoulderpads?
Now I’m not one to play God, but as I spend a great deal of my time thinking about consumer trends I am compelled to answer this question.
Well Kay, it’s like comparing apples to oranges.
Do you feel nostalgic for the days where you paid for long distance in the same way you feel nostalgic for saying “Where’s the Beef?” as a punchline twenty times a day? I don’t.
Do you feel nostalgic for wearing shoulder pads (or in my case “acid-washed” jeans) in the same way you feel nostalgic for using Prodigy or AOL? I don’t.
Telecommunications and pop culture never really have the same cultural effect on us. The notion that they might is simply due to the fact that everyone is trying to turn every brand into a strong emotional attachment within our psyches in order to keep us giving them money.
You want to know which trend you will look back on like shoulder pads?
Intentionally distressed graphic t-shirts.
In ten years the general population will look at this the way you look at Cybil Shepard’s orange Reeboks now. “Man, people were dumb, couldn’t they see what a crappy job the designers were doing in an attempt to make something look old?” This doesn’t seem cool at all. You remember that commercial where Michael J. Fox photocopies a Pepsi and then drinks it? That was cool then, it’s still cool now. Trying to repackage it as nostalgia in such a predetermined way makes it positively uncool.
Same thing applies here
Let’s say you were the biggest RUN DMC fan in the world. You probably own original t-shirts which you may or may not wear. Finally after more then fifteen years you have the opportunity to purchase new ones. This sounds exciting enough until you see the new ones and they look worse then the original ones you still own. Then you have the additional stigma of being labeled a poseur. How so?
Well a real RUN DMC fan would know in ten seconds that you had bought the shirt at Target and were probably not very serious. You are not Tougher Than Leather, so to speak.
Do you know what they were doing before they were distressing the images? They were putting those stupid *$*R%&$* ringers on everything regardless of whether or not ringers were the style at the time. Example:
Having been totally obsessed with Ghostbusters as a kid, I can assure you that the original t-shirts didn’t have ringers on them. Even the Wikipedia entry on ringers clearly notes that they were out of style by the 80′s and then came back into style in the early 2000′s. It was frustrating to see all these great 80′s brands finally appearing on new apparel only to have the positive memory of the brand destroyed by what was clearly a “snow job” as we say in the field.
I agree, this is not the best example, so I am going to give you one last example that is sure to drive the point home. Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” is the single best selling album of all time. Undoubtedly more has been written about this album then any other album in the history of recorded music. It was released in 1973.
I have no idea how these fonts were picked for the style guide, but they would appear to be inconsistent with the fonts used for this album. So how did this t-shirt get designed with a date that was a full year before the album’s release? Simple. The band wrote and rehearsed the album in it’s entirety on the road for a full year before it was released. The album was still titled “Eclipse” and the cover had not been designed on February 17, 1972 when the band began a run of shows at the Rainbow Theatre. But the designer probably just Googled “Dark Side of the Moon Tour”, picked a date and ran with it. It’s like paying $12.99 to demonstrate your ignorance.
But don’t worry Kay, some bad trends are easy to spot up front. Like this thing I saw on the Men’s rack
Mossimo Supply Co : Supplying ugly *@#& to aesthetically impared consumers.
11 responses so far ↓
1 Mark Sullivan // Apr 8, 2009 at 4:39 am
DO NOT WANT
to see men”s underpants of any era. If Tom Cruise is wearing them in the 80s while he dances around in the hallway, it might be acceptable to show em off. If it’s 2009 and you’re walking down the street ahead of me, I don’t want to be looking at them. Although the same rule could be applied to ‘whale-tail’ thongs from about 3 years ago. Keep your underdrawers to yourselves, people…..
I’m getting old, I know…
2 Hemlock Philosopher // Apr 9, 2009 at 7:08 am
I heard about this blog on NPR this morning. It’s fantastic! Generica and the massive consumption of craptacular crapola is a big part of what’s wrong with this country. Good work!
3 april // Apr 9, 2009 at 11:32 am
Ahhh, I disagree on the ringers. Sam, I have a t-shirt from 1988 that has blue ringers that I wear all the time because it’s sooooo cool and all my summer camp t-shirts from the 80′s had ringers.
Okay, I live in Kansas, we might be a bit behind on fashion trends, but we were all wearing those t-shirts.
Maybe you easterners had moved on to the next greatest shirt style while us midwestern folk were wearing our ringer Ghostbuster t-shirts.
Also, I had no idea they were called ringers.
4 kay // Apr 9, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Interesting. And I thank you for adeptly analyzing the complex nature of my (seemingly) silly query and answering it in the context of contemporary pop-cultural/tech trends.
I might argue that your argument is apples + oranges, however. Distressed tees are not in any way a collective societal trend, but merely a limited fashion statement, annoying and cliched as it may be.
Twitter on the other hand, is firmly atop the zeitgeist. Your 12 year old niece uses it, so does pretty much every one of your friends, your favorite restaurant, your church, your uncle and the President of the United States. An entire lexicon has developed around it. All of this in the span of a few short months. This is the very definition of a “fad” – no?
So, to my way of thinking, Twitter has become so hot, so fast that it will eventually become a joke that we may sneer at a few months, years down the road. That’s what we do. Technology is not immune from this human phenomenon and will eventually yield a “Where’s The Beef” moment. This just might be that moment.
Kay
5 admin // Apr 9, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I know better than to argue with Kay Hanley.
6 freelunch // Apr 9, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Someone just passed along some of the ‘best’ from a 1977 JCPenney catalog. The ’80s didn’t win the bad taste decade.
I’m glad I like oxford buttondowns.
7 Likes it Clean // Apr 9, 2009 at 8:35 pm
I was just at the Mecca of Marketing – Disney World – and spend most of the week trying to find a Mickey Mouse shirt that wasn’t “distessed”. The only ones they had looked like they fell off the truck, only every shirt had the same worn pattern – available for about 20 bucks. When I finally saw a few folks wearing a normal “clean” Mickey shirt, they said they bought it online for $3.99. I truly hope I’m worth more when I am old and wrinkled.
8 Phil // Apr 10, 2009 at 7:08 am
Cheesy as the retro-print t-shirts may be, you have to give the people buying them some credit for spending $12.95 on a graphic t-shirt rather than spending $80-$150 on a shirt with a print of some endless variation of a winged skeleton covered with roses. At least they are choosing the affordable fad.
9 Kay (another one, the other one?) // Apr 11, 2009 at 12:14 pm
I agree with Kay Hanley. Twitter is kind of stupid in a cringeful way. I was reading the blog of a person I can’t call a friend in any meaningful way – I tracked down an old childhood friend and found out he had a blog, we had a brief reunion in email and haven’t corresponded now in over a year. Anyway, he twitters today about dropping off the laundry. I don’t know if that was meaningful to anyone, including his spouse, in which case, private call or text message, yes? Most of his blog posts are about the same. He does have some better moments that I only care because I sort of know him. Most people don’t have time to blog about such stupid boring stuff, but some people do that too. Facebook updates also.
I’m actually glad I found my old friend’s blog because I had never looked at a blog before, and by following a path via a couple links on his ‘roll, I learned that they weren’t all like that (as I’d assumed), and read a handful of blogs I would call more highly interesting. I also assume some people save twitter for good stuff that you wish you were there, that may or may not come across, and is only interesting to people who know them, or people who think they know them by reading their blog regularly. I am sometimes walking around, doing whatever, I see something and wish I wasn’t by myself. I want to nudge someone and point at the thing and share the amusement instead of tell them later when it’s not going to sound as funny as it was. I could carry around a camera and post these observations to a blog and add some witty paragraph or essay. Too much work for me. I have tried twice, I just don’t have a source of material I think anyone I don’t already know needs to find and read and tell me how insightful and hilarious and talented I am.
Anyway, I think Twitter is more like “you had to be there,” and people think everyone should care that they’re picking out new bath towels at 1:34pm and picking up the car from the mechanic at 5:27pm. I can’t figure out the value of going about one’s business and broadcasting minutia, or of signing up to get spammed the idle moments of people you know and people you like to pretend you know. It is like the shoulder pads. Having to pretend you have bigger shoulders is the same as deluding yourself that your trivial announcements are important notices.
10 Ryan // Apr 14, 2009 at 3:03 am
I’m a little late on this post but the ringers stuff made me laugh aloud. I actually wrote something about intentionally “distressed” wine labels recently and totally forgot to tie it in with the obviously related idea of intentionally distressing clothing.
11 admin // Apr 14, 2009 at 3:50 am
Ryan’s post is very informative –
http://mastergrape.com/blog/?p=270
Thank you Ryan for sharing it!
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