Random Fashion Thoughts (Part 3: Style farmer strikes back) - our general discussion thread

[Chaconne]

You do realize that the type of interests i'm discussing is heavily linked to monetary spending and pmc status? People that think they're awesome because they're good at consuming stuff are pretty ******* boring.

I’m certain there’s more agreement here than disagreement.

 

[LA Guy]

You do realize that the type of interests i'm discussing is heavily linked to monetary spending and pmc status? People that think they're awesome because they're good at consuming stuff are pretty ******* boring.

I think that you are conflating conspicuous consumption and status signaling with genuine interest. irl, it's not that hard to tell the difference. In a format that is mostly verbal, like forums, the difference is very obvious, since nearly everything is conveyed via the written word. A more visual medium, like Instagram, is more prone to douchiness. You can literally see the consumption.
Not to say that in either case, there is not a great deal of expenditure. The difference is that one requires only an expenditure, ultimtely, of cash, and the other requires an inordinate expenditure of time and intellectual and emotional and sometimes physical energy, in the pursuit of an interest.

People have differing amounts of cash, but time is remarkably democratic. It's true that some people can devote all of their time to the pursuits of their hobbies, and others, hardly any at all, but there is a maximum and minimum bound that is not at all commensurate with the relative financial resources.

Some people have no intellectual curiousity, which is that to which you are really alluding, and I agree that such people are dull and for which no amount of money can compensate.

 

[LA Guy]

Er... what is PMC status? Sorry, I never get acronyms. In presentations, people listen patiently as I struggled through some convoluted name.

 

[Fuuma]

PMC=professional managerial class. From the basic marxist point of view that almost everyone in the western world has a familiarity with (i'm not saying they share Marxism's overall viewpoint) you need to take into account that contemporary capitalist structuring has more than the bourgeoisie (they own the means of production) vs the working class (they sell their labour), you now have roughly 20-30% of your population that has higher education and about 10-20% are needed to manage or give professional guidance in various sort of way to the incredibly complex economic organization we now have (they manage it but still sell their labour), they're distinguished bu their high educational attainment, belief in meritocracy and aligning with real bourgeois to form the bourgeois hegemonic block* that dominates our culture and determines our politics.

*that most people here have at least some notion of what is an hegemonic block (without having read Gramsci) should be quite telling when talking about how far certain concepts have been integrated, at least by the 20-30% of uni educated people in a given country.

 

[APK]

Some people have no intellectual curiousity, which is that to which you are really alluding, and I agree that such people are dull and for which no amount of money can compensate.

Yeah, but it apparently makes you a viable modern US President.

 

[cocostella]

True!

 

[LA Guy]

Yeah, but it apparently makes you a viable modern US President.

lol. You know my thoughts, but let's keep that in CE.

 

[Jonas251]

From the basic marxist point of view

 

[hendrix]

I dunno. I find nerds to be considerably more interesting. They are just people who consider the things that they like more carefully. There are music nerds, sports nerds, art nerds, comic book nerds, outdoors nerds, clothing nerds (so, is), as well as academic nerds.

Imagine how boring conversations about any topic would be if everyone in the room doesn’t really care or know about any one thing. “What do you think of this beer?” “It’s fine.” “What (music) are they playing?” “I don’t know, some pop thing.” Ugh. I’ve had great conversations about cocktails, cars, bodybuilding, and manner of things give no ***** about, purely because the amount of interest and knowledge that the other person had.

fellas is it bad to have more than two interests?

It's clearly not the same thing as interests though is it? It's collecting.

An interest is a pursuit like learning a language or playing a sport or something.

Again I'm not saying don't do it or whatever but let's not pretend that it's a productive way to be spending money or time.

 

[imatlas]

Would you say “cars” were an interest for Jay Leno? Do you think he knows a little on the subject?

 

[nicelynice]

monetary spending and pmc status?

ahh yes, the powerpoint making class

furiously googling business words, arranging them on a powerpoint in order to fuel my needless consumer spending on clothes

I wish I was joking

 

[double00]

It's clearly not the same thing as interests though is it? It's collecting.

An interest is a pursuit like learning a language or playing a sport or something.

Again I'm not saying don't do it or whatever but let's not pretend that it's a productive way to be spending money or time.

totally disagree. money talks and sets the trajectory of the marketplace, and, downstream culture. for better or worse collectors matter.

 

[am55]

PMC=professional managerial class.

Perhaps it was the tacticool knives or the talk of use of non-tacticool ones by Algerian rebels to behead the opposition, but for some reason I thought you were talking about private military companies.

 

[LA Guy]

It's clearly not the same thing as interests though is it? It's collecting.

An interest is a pursuit like learning a language or playing a sport or something.

Again I'm not saying don't do it or whatever but let's not pretend that it's a productive way to be spending money or time.

That's a completely artificial distinction that falls down under scrutiny.

The only way that your paradgm works is if you impose a puritanical view on what constitutes "productive" work. A lot of Americans do this nearty instinctively. For example, to many men, especially, spending on a bandsaw is not frivolous, but spending on a fashion item is. That strikes me as a particularly a joyless worldview.

Even within this paradigm, there are numerous examples, on this forum alone, of people who have made their obsessions into "productive" careers. So, does this mean that if you can parlay your acquired knowledge into financial gain, the acquired knowledge now has value that it did not previously? We can say the same about people on watch forums, audiophile forums, hell, forums specifically dedicated tp hypebeasting.

There is no reason that acquisition precludes something from being a "productive" interest.

 

[blacklight]

I can see both sides.

I think what makes an interest an interest is frivolousness. Whether acquisition-based or learning-based is largely irrelevant as long as it exists outside the logic of compensation. This does not have to mean economic. Once you cede an interest, any interest, to productivity discourse it becomes labor (to use the earlier example of learning a language – a business student who "picks up" Mandarin because it's useful. This is not a hobby.) Granted, some pastimes are intrinsically self-defeating in this sense. It's easy enough to say that something as externally-oriented as how we choose to dress ourselves can't possibly be an "interest" as I've defined it, but even this discussion shows that for most people here, whatever personal satisfaction we derive from collecting or talking about clothes far outweighs the utility we get from being well-dressed. Now, would I want my humanity to be defined by my ability to buy ****? No. But that's why most of my hobbies can be done for free.

I see this a lot with people my age (early 20s) where almost no one I know has something that they do purely for fun. Everything, be it gaming, DIY beauty tutorials, or collecting sneakers, has gotten lost in the ethos of capital accumulation, be it economic or social. It's pretty sad.