LAYERED TECH-STYLE : SOFT MASCHINES LARPING IN YOUR AREA WANT TO KNOW YOUR LOCATION
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No, I won’t tell you its rhythm, because i don’t know it.
Techwear has been baader meinhoffing me lately, specifically TheNorthFace brand which I notice everywhere and everyday (it’s kind of scary, really), in the subway or on the news, black down-jackets and tracksuits, caps.
That recurring brain-tweak did start to happen while in public transports where/when I was initially thinking about how to make necessity beautiful. (yes i was thinking about propagandasing, how can you tell?)
Anyways, today I shit on techwear.
(Others have obviously done and thought this before but bear with me)
Techwear constantly reminds me of the process of displacement of a functional clothe from a terrain to another :
StreetPunks and Skins did it before: >be a young brit from the streets, go to work at a factory, wear the boots and fatigues, then go to a concert and wear your dirt and sweat with style because you want to annoy the precious Mods kids, have the bougie-bohemians start to look at you as a fashion icon of sorts, see rockstars wear them for a while and then witness doc martens that were selling at 2£ a pair have their price slowly but surely climb with their fame. The displacement happens from the workplace to the concert-hall to the street, a commodity’s upward mobility.
Then there’s Bosozoku’s Kamikaze aesthetics, descended from post-war Nippon youth’s disaffection and as a reaction to the looming american influence on culture: the japanese army uniform becomes a relic and a defiantly nationalist/(defeatist?) statement after the country’s army is disassembled by the Surrender Agreement of 1945. Tokko-Fuku passes from basic working uniform to streetgang regalia, the displacement occurs from the military barracks to the highways and the streets.
Techwear is a flexible term simply designating a certain type of “functional(ist)” clothes, I’ll try and expand on what that means or rather what i understand from it and what it does and how, i don’t know the why and I don’t think it matters as much as the possibilities the style offers. If you’re looking for a simple definition/overview any number of articles can be more straightforward than I can hope to be.
But first it’s important to provide some context as to what Techwear builds on :
HEALTH GOTH, the thirst for gains. (Here, I will focus on the gym aspects of HG given that the original impulse of the trend-”movement” got pretty much subsumed by these.)
The most interesting idea within health goth (not the actual engine of the trend but the potentials I saw in it as it made a name for itself a few years back) was that what one feels in exercising is [not just the pain of muscles stretching and burning/not just pain as the cost of self-improvement] but suffering as an end in itself and the body-in-building as a collateral : in pushing against the boundaries of one’s potential and, after having grown/negated your body into something more sensitive, realising that this was all waiting for you, all along.
The body ceases to be a given when you realize new ways of hurting as well as changes in your sleep pattern ; when you stop being short of breath from climbing stairs and start to crave exercise and release : your bodymind reveals itself to you as sensational. And if you break something in your body, something that won’t repair itself until a few weeks/months have passed or even something that won’t repair at all, you learn the cost of being a body in this world.
In this frantic search for pains and gains The Body reveals itself as a site for raw epistemological self-exploration and the romantic-melancholic contemplative state of the “classic goth” is replaced by the post-effort ecstatic stillness, sweat pouring from brows and covered flesh radiating heat : that’s Health Goth.
As a practice, it’s based in activity and movement, One’s attempts at pushing the bodymind in a certain direction through a myriad of targetted tensions and exercises that seek to create spaces for health(y) g(r)o(w)th. As a style and aesthetic it’s just another assemblage of elitist aesthetic markers longing for Other-ness because after all the fascination/thriving for outsider-status is an elitism, eventually every clique that exists in opposition to the mainstream, generality or “the populous mass” becomes an elite of some sort, with its own set of ideals, codes, linguo and criterias.
In Health Goth, and its successor Techwear, the fascination is not for clothes resting on a body-mannequin but for the potentials of drapped bodies, (no wonder there’s an overlap to fetish culture there), but then again this is what i saw, not what actually emerged from the trend :
Though Health Goth offered a possibility for thinking the body-in-decay-in-activity (a trend where the squirming life of worms eating at a corpse of classical classic Goth is replaced by tired tendons and acidic activity, life-in-death : knowing you’re going to die but exercising anyway), it ended up being more of a door for the fascistic-fascination-for-the-functional-body-as-beautiful-because-of-its-function peppered with cartesian dualism, all of that while covered in black ; a joyfully brooding approval of empty aesthetics. Not concerned with what they mean, only with “being the best and looking cool and edgy while doing it.”
This is not to say that health goth is “secretly fascist oooh”(it kinda is tho), just that it’s secretly boring if all it’s about is working out while dressed in black.
Then what’s the big deal? Cyberpunk gets recycled through a pseudo “anti-nostalgic” impulse that picks it up and smoothes the edges and gets rid of the complexity and the grimy in it while retaining the Randian subtext, not much right? just a part of the culture-industry cycle: old aesthetics get segmented and recycled then bottled up and sold, that’s how it works.
Yeah but then climate change rears its many-headed body.
I don’t think Climate change is the reason behind the rise of functional-wear/hard-weather attire but it damn sure is a funny coincidence that tropical weather patterns and increases in tsunami-risks throughout the western parts of the globe coincides with the advent of this (bougie)public thirst for windbreakers, waterproof materials and durable clothes.
Eco-anxiety pervades, what with the journalistic trend for shaming headlines about straws and degrees and even asthma when most emissions(as well as the extinction event/biodiversity loss, oil spills, increases in wildfire risks etc…) are the fault of the capitalist class and not the general population, and even if you’re intent on placing blame on “humanity” as a whole : you can’t have a consumerist context if there’s no productivism to fuel it ; demand doesn’t drive offer, investment does. And investment is not an automatic process that responds to the most likely rational path to economic growth, it’s a decision made by people in rooms based on what they want and what they feel will minimize costs and loss, or just what they fancy as a funny investment : the economy is not driven by the Public Will.
Anyways, climate change and techwear : confluence over influence, the two impact each others and have common causes without one being the definite responsible party for the other’s existence.
Eco-anxiety and eco-guilt at the “Murder Of The Planet” instead of being a driving-impulse for collective gathering and organizing, is, to some, an inciting factor towards the anxiously masculine response to change: to build a shell and aggregate power to fend off the outside, the most striking and obvious manifestation of this response being the individualist-survivalist “Me-And-My-Gun VS The World” stance.
That isolationist response is intensified by the plethora of post-apocalyptic and eschatological narratives we can find in high culture, pop-culture, political theory, theology… Scrutinising such narratives can easily go from an attempt at habituation (a sort of makeshift exposure therapy), to a perverse appreciation of the aesthetics of decay, the anxious wait becomes hopeful because even if many die “at least the world will be interesting and I’m prepared to defend myself”.
That perverse and adolescent-doomer outlook largely ignores that decay is not instantaneous : the end of the world is not an event, it’s a process. You will never live (long) in that Fallout looking post-apocalyptic future you and your rifle, it’s not just a fantasy, it’s a ridiculously callous one.
Techwear as a trend, though again it’s probably just a case of confluence, not influence, recalls the cowardly survivalism of people rich enough to get a go-bag, tactical wear, rifle and military rations but too scared to fully commit to the fantasy and go leave in the woods on their own.
MASCULINITY: as a witness to absence
Techwear functions as anti-camo ///the least stealthy thing you can do is dress like a tech-ninja/// Generally a techwear item works better as a discrete functional attire when worn with more “normie” clothes : wool sweater and white sneakers with Northface black legging ; Deliveroo rucksack with a pair of nikes and a Stone-Island shadow project jacket ; Patagonia Puff-Jacket with jeans and Adidas ConsortiumxNEIGHBORHOOD shoes, etc.
Then again most of the brands that get taken up under the umbrella of techwear are so ridiculously expensive that you’d have to be a rich fuckboy to own and wear a full-kit, and then why would you want to be stealthy, right ?
I am obviously going to grossly oversimplify the totality of the projects of class, race and gender as they occured and keep happening in the western parts of the world but main dynamics and tendencies of masculine fashion can be drawn out from the mess of currents and flows that is society when one looks at fashion as a tool for signaling.
Can’t talk about signal and performance without J. Butler obviously. (tldr: in the book, gender is thought of not as an essence but as a sociological construct/context, akin to theater in some aspects, that repeats and generates itself through different signaling events, be they clothes, ways of holding yourself in public, language etc.) I do want to empathize the class aspect of the dynamics of signaling, where men and masculine people of different social standing will necessarily (attempt to) signal differently towards different audiences, with different outcomes, purposes and functions.
Middle-to-higher class Masculinity generally rhymes with visibility, an attempt at exhibiting status through either loud designs or the appearance of flagrant authenticity, (the idea behind authenticity is that you’re the ideal [man] without even having to try). The ideal man is the man that exists as individual, as father, as producer, as creator, as enacter : the active one, the doer. In that sense, for a man, the act of stylistic rebellion against convention is the ultimate act of submission to the prime masculine ideal of the “system” of patriarchal fashion and God the father framed Lucifer into rebelling against him so that he’d become his own man.
Jokes asides: If you have enough power and privilege you can afford to get away with anything really, regardless of social standards and conventions you’re supposed to hold up (to), you get to be mediocre to the standards of patriarchal heterosexuality and masculinity in admitting that your wife pegs you if you’re in the right context, you get to look like a homeless person in public if you’re rich enough, no fear of getting arrested : you have your ID and money on you. (this is obviously complexified by antiblackness).
Middle-to-Lower-class attire aimed at masculine people tends to go towards the interchangeable, the efficient, the assumption being that the best fashion accessory is invisible, unremarkable. If someone notices you, that’s a fault on your part buddy, shouldn’t have worn that tie with that shirt, that’s not company policy.
I specify lower-class masculine attire because to be of the lower classes is to historically be associated and assigned to one’s job and function, whereas more well-off people can generally afford to be “their own person” (though no one is safe from occupational psychosis), and to be identified to one’s job when one is lower class is generally to become a fungible quantity, a unit that can be replaced at some point, think of all the office-space-anxiety movies from the 1990s with their white shirt, black tie uniforms and you get to the crux of that lower-to-middle-class anxiety about being a drone, a cog in a machine that won’t let you be your own individual, the failure of neoliberalism to deliver on its promises (earlier works such as Lang’s Metropolis could be used as examples of the depiction of the working class as a singular, monolithic entity made of thousands of bodies that all look and dress alike).
Techwear fuses both tendencies of masculine fashion into a bizarro state that’s neither one nor the other : supposedly tactical stealthy clothes that are really just a new way of attracting attention, masked, strapped, sometimes armed, nothing subtle or seemless about any of it.
The appearance of full-techwear is that of visible secrecy, dressed as if vantablack was one’s middle name, minimalist chromatic schemes, maximalist layering, infinite folds, all the same non-color : the style centers a masculinity of negation, in that its function is to attract attention to itself through militaristic and thus traditionally masculine garment pretending insiduously that camo, stealth and pure performance is really at the center of its function while most of its manifestations just scream “i’m special, i’m not like the other boys”, android-like façade, an exageration of too-cool-for-school edgy unfeeling fuckboy mimicry, all attitude and no openings. It is oppositional in that it’s really just an attempt at being different, another thing it takes from Health Goth.
[A joke about yellow peril that leaves a bad taste in the mouth because i’m not asian]
Can’t talk about gender without talking about race and if you’re going to talk cyberpunk, you’re bound to thread on orientalism.
In the present american and white imaginery, the Asian Other exists in a different temporality, not as a remnant-of-the-past-primitive but as an agent of the future sent back in time by some unknown mecanisms or cause, meddling the western notions of the normal by bringing the alien of its culture into the mainstream’s notice.
“Neochina arrives from the future”
It’s all very simple: in the 80s Japan’s industry is at the peak of a seemingly endless (it’s not) technological growth both through cultural export and on the terrain of finance (world’s largest stock exchange at the time). Its omnipresence on the global scene of consumer commodities and electronics (from media-tech to vehicles…) gives to the average american consumer the impression that japan is both here to bring about the future and outpace america in the process. The mainstream american media obviously feeds (on) these anxieties, racism always sell in times of crisis.
(China goes through a similar phase in the 90s/00s with its “communist enemy” western stereotype shifting into the imagery of an anthill full of droning workers ready to replace the red-blooded, salt of the earth, american workers.)
Western Cyberpunk is no exception to this, in fact it’s strongly molded by it, though it doesn’t take such an adverserial approach to the Non-West :
William Gibson, in describing Singapore and Tokyo/Hong Kong, hails them as visions of futurity made manifest, not necessarily The Future but a potential one, realised. Fear and Fetish merge in the portrayal of the nebulous Yakuzas/Triads in his Neuromancer. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner depicts a multi-ethnic, overcrowded Malthusian delirium of a Los Angeles, where languages morph into uncomprehensible gibberish and only our main protagonist and some white characters seem to still speak the tongue of shakespeare.
In the western current of cyberpunk, asian people more often than not become a generality with a few distinctions such as : chinese, japanese and maybe korean sometimes, the internal ethnic, gendered, racialised dynamics within these big labels are scarcely explored even though, as GITS frames it:
And that’s largely because within Western cyberpunk, asian people and cultures exist as background, visual noise. They’re not the center of the narrative, they’re a landscape that doesn’t need to be delved into in order for the probably white probably male protagonist to explore his selfhood during the story.
I am in no position to judge on the validity of asian diasporic people picking up dystopian-cyberpunk-orientalist contextual aesthetic and bringing them into a different context, i can however point out some dynamics underlying the portrayals of these contextual aesthetics and what might come out of them, with a distinct reminder: dialogue is more interesting than critique.
For instance, Errolson Hugh’s Acronym has him as first face of the brand and has an overwhelming majority of asian descended models in its campaigns, shoots, videoclips. And he and his clique do all the cool stunts you see performance fashion models do, all the dance and the karate-moves and I really wanna buy a coat now.
Obviously this is just integration within the mainstream : the diversification of the abled-bodied, traditionally attractive, non-fat model into a bit more nonwhite bodies being forwarded. The cyberpunk protagonist is no longer white or white-adjacent and asian people are no longer background to the cyberpunk aesthetic context, the protagonists/models are still fit, able-bodied and still look like what the fashion world has habituated us to but they’re no longer white, yay ?
As I pompously and self-righteously said before, this is really just cyberpunk but less grimy, with a high pricetag, more visibility and arguably less interesting. (I’m not gonna say it’s gentrified cyberpunk because gentrification kills people.)
The body electronic and aesthetics of machinic integration into systems of control (or the escape from these, the living in the soles of the boot that squashes the general human face) : these all intersected in cyberpunk before, in fiction, in theory, in cinema, what we’ve seen lately is a smooth recycling of cyberpunk unto the mainstream, letting it filter out into different medias, it was bound to happen that fashion would remember the existence of dystopia, and this is not even the first time it did.
What comes out of the trend of techwear is clothes revealing themselves for the tools they are : textile technology. Another layer to that idea would be the way in which fashion and cos-play are not separated, not just cosplaying as a ninja but actually having clothes that exhibit the function of the aesthetic-source/model they’re supposed to ape? Imagine an iron man cosplay that can actually fly and launch ogives.
Then, Techwear turns the suffering-body-in-building of Health Goth into a soft machine, all zippers and tactical pouches (rob liefeld was only right about one thing: pouches), neuromancer techninja larping para-militaristic outsider clique of hackers, always ready to…
To?
What is the use of a feature that lets you take off your coat really fast ?
What is the use of a feature that lets you get your phone in one move ?
“it’s badass”
That’s not functional though.
And even without getting into the features of some of these clothes, one must ask : Why are rich people starting to think about necessity and practicality right now in this specific way ? When they’ve always been able to do as they please, buy what they want, discard and replace, why do they think about durability right now? What use is cosplaying necessity for these people? What use is chasing functionality for people with useless, aimless lives that are a burden on the general population ?
Techwear feels like a uniform in search of an army : functionality without purpose.
It anonymises wearers while still being rooted in the aesthetics of outsider-individualism, fueled by the elitist aspiration at being the edgy cool The Matrix-looking hero of one’s own internal movie. It draws on different, contradictory, self-reinforcing dynamics, definitely masculine in their shell-like reclusion from the outside.
A lot of pictures of techwear models show them in movement : their pose captured out of the activity of the body and the fabric, the two moving in tandem not as two surfaces rubbing in friction against each other but the way dermis layers move together. Activity is woven into the very potentials of the fabric, one must be ready to turn into an action hero at any time, yet nothing interesting really happens to these clothes besides instagram likes, moodboards and trap rap clips.
Ironically, its most obviously apt applications seem to be in the jobs that won’t see them, it being an overwhelmingly rich fuckboys province :
After all what’s more cyberpunk than the intersection of capitalism (gig-economy), complete dependence to technology (smartphone-as-working-tool) and a dangerous life ? High-tech, lo-life, high stakes, low capital.
What’s more cyberpunk than a struggling UberEATS delivery driver ?
Is it any surprising to see Kojima solicit some designs from ACRONYM/Errolson Hugh for his Death Stranding, aka the best delivery service simulator ever ?
Cyberpunk may be dead but life still festers in its decaying body, monochrome nanites pullulate as worms in the wounds, techwear has hatched and its gore-tex mouth gapes at potentials explored and paths upturned.
Don’t be so easily seduced by the zippers and the straps.
Send hatemail to ospare@substack.com - Be careful out there –
PS: I forgot to add at the end of the previous newsletter that I’ll put out a follow-up concerning emancipatory practices.