Humanities Core Course, Week X: Contemporary Scenes of Making
Lecture 10a: Cool Hunting and “Thinking with Jane Jacobs” (with readings by Malcolm Gladwell in the HCC Reader)
1. From Street
Photography to Street Fashion
Last time we ended with street photography as a special kind of “making in places,” in particular urban places. Street photography was born at the same time as Impressionist painting, and shared with it an interest in capturing the random images cast up by the “sidewalk ballet” of modern urban life. Contemporary street photography, unlike the more historical genre as practiced by Eugene Atget, Paul Strand, or Weegee, is a heavily “youth” genre (young people checking out other young people); it is also digital, social, mobile, and global. (The merging of the camera and the phone captures these qualities of contemporary street photography.)
Street fashion (what kids in different cities are choosing to put on their bodies) is a frequent subject of street photography. In his essay “The Cool Hunt,” literary journalist Malcolm Gladwell writes,
“What
they have is what everyone seems to want these days, which is a window on the
world of the street. Once, when fashion trends were set by the big couture
houses -- when cool was trickle-down -- that wasn’t important. But sometime in
the past two decades things got turned over, and fashion became trickle-up.
It’s now about chase and flight -- designers and retailers and the mass
consumer giving chase to the elusive prey of street cool -- and the rise of coolhunting
as a profession shows how serious the chase has become.” (HCC Reader, p.
120).
Even
high fashion is increasingly influenced by street fashion – by the stuff that
young urban people actually wear, often in highly specific subcultures such as
hip-hop, skateboarding, snowboarding, the club scene, and gang culture. Gladwell
documents how coolhunting developed as a way for big companies like Reebok,
Nike, and Tommy Hilfiger to find out what’s cool and translate it into new
product lines that will play outside the
Gladwell
describes the cycle by which a particular street culture spontaneously
generates a new trend or style; a cool hunter picks up on it; the style gets
mainstreamed through branding and mass-marketing as well as word-of-mouth; and
the style finally loses its cool due to overexposure.
Gladwell
gives the “three rules of cool” (p. 130):
1.
It takes one to know one.
2.
You can’t manufacture it.
3.
As soon as you call it “cool,” it stops being cool.
The
first principle in particular is associated with what Gladwell calls “the
hermeneutic circle of cool”: you can only “know” something’s cool if you’re a
bit cool yourself.
The hermeneutic circle: the movement back and forth between the parts and the whole
of a text, or between the text and its context, a movement that depends on some
element of former knowledge or exposure to the thing being studied.
THE
GLOBAL HUNT FOR COOL
Although
Gladwell focuses on the American cycle of cool, he quotes his cool hunter
DeeDee Gordon on the styles of
“DeeDee
is convinced that
So,
let’s take a trip to
>
1940s and 50s: Site of U.S. military residences after World War II
>
1960s: meeting place for Japanese kids wanting to know more about Western
culture
>
Major Japanese fashion labels began in this district (Comme des Garçons).
>
Global cool-hunters go to Harajuku to see what Japanese kids are wearing,
reversing the flow of the cool hunt. (It’s no longer Japanese kids checking out
what the Americans are wearing, but American trend-spotters checking out what
Japanese kids are wearing.)
MILK
Designer:
Hitomi Okawa; founded in 1970
The
look: “cute punk”
“girly,
romantic, and feminine, but not sexual”: part of kawaii culture (kawaii
= “cute”). Kawaii derives its cute
energies from a variety of sources, including girly handwriting, anime, “cute”
toys and merchandise, and
FRESH
FRUITS
This
is a fashion “fanzine” started by street photographer Shoichi Aoki, documenting
the street style of
FAN
ART, dependent on anime, also partakes in kawaii
values (as shared by HCC student Stephanie Hufford).
“RESOLUTION”:
“a Music Video with clips from a Computer Graphics
movie based
after
a Japanese video game called Final Fantasy VII.” Link shared by HCC student
Samantha Burkett. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM6w3V3l3kU
BAPE: A bathing ape
Founded by “Nigo,” the company’s art director and sole proprietor in
1993.
clothes ... shoes ... hair ... cafes ... records ...
Cool hunter = Hiromi Okawa,
the founder of Milk (Harajuku District designer) and the patron of young
designers
Subculture = Ura-Hara (short for Ura-Harajuku, or “under
Harajuku”)
Main-streaming = BAPE stores everywhere, including BAPE Kids.
Losing its cool? = featured in a Humanities Core lecture. How
cool can it really be??
COOL-HUNTING [Lupton’s take]
Coolhunting is the means by which the sidewalk ballets of individual
streets and specific subcultures go global. Street photography is a kind of
freelance, freeform coolhunting. Corporate coolhunting employs cool people to
discover cool -- but, like most hunters, also, eventually, to destroy it. Who
loses and who gains when a subculture goes mainstream?
2. Thinking with Jane
Jacobs: Office Design
MALCOLM GLADWELL ON JANE JACOBS
Most developers did not want to build the kind of community
Jacobs talked about, and most Americans didn’t want to live in one. ... Who, after all, does have a direct
interest in creating diverse, vital spaces that foster creativity and
serendipity? Employers do. On the 40th anniversary of its publication, Death
and Life has been reborn as a primer on workplace design. (HCC Reader, p.
117)
(Read the whole article at http://www.gladwell.com/2000/2000_12_11_a_working.htm.)
Gladwell builds a series of analogies between specific office types and forms of city planning.
CORNER OFFICE = GATED COMMUNITY
“There was a time, for instance, when companies put their most
valued employees in palatial offices, with potted plants in the corner, and
secretaries out front, guarding access. These offices were suburban-gated
communities, in fact -- and many companies came to realize that if their best
employees were isolated in suburbs they would be deprived of public
acquaintanceship, the foundations of public trust, and cross-connections with
the necessary people.” (HCC Reader, p. 117).
CUBICLES =
In the 80s and early 90s, the fashion in corporate America was
to follow what designers called ‘universal planning’ -- rows of identical
cubicles, which resembled nothing so much as a Levittown. (HCC Reader, p. 117).
OPEN-PLAN OFFICE = MIXED USE “JANE JACOBS” NEIGHBORHOOD
“Today, universal planning has fallen out of favor, for the
same reason that postwar suburbs like
Slide lecture: trendy open-plan offices for
creative types, plus the real world offices of Humanities Core, Al Gore, and
Professor Lupton.
3. Thinking with Jane
Jacobs, Part Two: Porch Envy
The following short
essay looks at the rise, fall, and return of the porch in American architecture.
This piece is forthcoming in Design
Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things by Ellen and Julia Lupton (
I live on a cul de sac in
On the adjacent street, built just a few years later, the porch is back, part
of the New Urbanism, a movement to create a more social architecture for
suburban neighborhoods. Garages have scooted discretely to the sides of the
houses, and modest verandas now frame the front doors. Yet some of these
porches are so small they are really just covered entryways. Some have been
left completely bare, not even pretending to fulfill a greater social function.
Others had dreamed once of becoming container gardens, but have degraded
instead into gardening sheds, complete with fertilizer bags, old trowels, and
great hose tangles. Many serve as storage units for bikes, strollers, and
scooters – second garages for secondary vehicles.
Unlike the voluptuous verandas
of older houses, most new porches are too skinny to seat a real gathering, let
alone a broken washing machine. As for leisure, people may mingle more freely
at the local café, or in common areas like the park or the pool, than in front
of their houses. And if television first drew people off the veranda and into
the living room, the Internet has social charms that no sidewalk can provide. Face
Book is the new front porch.
Along with balconies the size of window boxes and driveways paved like patios,
these narrow newcomers may prove to be more a symptom of gas-and-electric life
than a solution to it. Even backyards have once again become refugee camps for
abandoned toys and old tools. In
Still, some people actually do use their porches. One
I asked a friend from the next street, a sexy scientist from