The Great Culture Heist
Remember last year when half the too-online fashion adjacent New York Jonah-Hill-is-God types decided to collectively pick up climbing as the new “it” hobby? I suppose it worked well in conjunction with the sudden trendiness of Salomons and Arc’teryx — influencers being too cowardly to just wear the clothes, they felt a desire to adopt a whole personality just so they could claim they had any need to wear an $800 Goretex Pro jacket designed for mountaineering in a blizzard.
And then the pandemic hit and suddenly all the climbing gyms closed and the influencers, ever flighty, latched onto posting pictures in their most stylish loungewear — competing to see who could look coolest in grey sweatpants and $600 mules.
As summer has peaked, the “media elites” have started to leave the hallowed halls of their ancestral WASP mansions, started to go outside as they realized we are all bored of seeing leisurewear and just wanted to get dressed up for an occasion, any occasion. But parties and droll networking events are still a thing of the past, what else is there to do? Once again, their eyes turned to the outdoors, what else could be pillaged from the culture devoid of concrete and steel? The influencers dug up their Patagonia leftover from the scumbro phase and saw a couple moodboard pics, realizing wow Patagonia does neat fishing gear?
And guys, it’s totally fine to appropriate fishing culture: brands like South2West8, Snow Peak, and Daiwa have been making fishing fashionable in the East for years — never mind that the backbone of Japanese style tribes is a respect for the cultures from which they draw inspiration, something your average “jawnz enthusiast” cannot claim. But hey, let’s pretend there’s something innately Thoreauvian about your family’s rural estate and that means you’re a down to earth person. Never mind the fact that the hired cleaners would never allow a speck of dirt to leave the confines of the mud room. But I digress. Maybe you are a populist with a legitimate respect for the culture.
Double knee Carhartts, Realtree, and now fishing. Modern influencers, in all of their enlightened liberalism, love to steal culture from the same people they’ll deride with their next breath. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when your favorite GQ writer shifts from Instagram stories of classic Benzes to dented pick-ups and “No Farms, No Food” bumper stickers.
This of course is all derived from the aging fashion bros realizing that fashion is not nearly as cool as they thought. They’re in their mid-30s and the summation of their career and life experiences is Supreme living rent-free in their heads. It turns out that caring about your appearance isn’t as cool as you thought. You’re going to bars in a $1k jacket only to glumly look at the dude in ill-fitting jeans and flip-flops having the time of his life while the rest of your party drunkenly debates the merits of Kapital. You decide you need a change and you need it fast. It’s best to take your love for Gore-Tex and workwear and adopt someone else’s pastime and claim you’ve been into it the whole time. Don’t worry pal it’s totally derived from that time my granddad took me to his favorite fishing hole when I was six and not from my own crippling insecurity as my biological clock ceaselessly ticks.
All that effort, all the laborious justification and the only media-man who looks at all authentic doing it is Tucker Carlson.
🤡
