the real dupes

more on taste, class, and who's ripping off who

Thanks to all the new subscribers! I’m still getting used to Substack’s features, restacking etc. but thanks to everyone who read, commented, and restacked my first post on “taste”. Definitely check out

Jesica Elise

to read about race and taste and

Max Read

to read a review of Chayka’s book itself.

It’s fascinating how the discussion around taste and algorithms has tapped a nerve with so many of us. Not to beat a dead horse but I’ve been thinking more about the perceived collapse of taste and have an addendum to my first post. I think what might explain our collective confusion around taste, what it is and if anyone has it, is coming from the fact that digital media provides a direct line between popular culture and mass culture two terms I borrow from John Fiske’s 1989 book, Understanding Popular Culture, which 10/10, highly recommend. In addition to taste being a mechanism of stratification, it’s also a generative site of cultural production.

A quick not on terms I’ll use here: ‘subordinate class’ refers to anyone who is NOT a capitalist, or who does not have the ability to mass produce commodities. ‘Dominant class’ refers to those who mass produce the goods we, the subordinate, consume. So, Tim Cook, Ralph Lauren, Kim Kardashian are all dominant. Anyone else, even those with high incomes, who don’t own the ‘means of production’ are in the subordinate class. Marxism, in other words. Phew!

Popular Culture

Far from passive dupes to trends, we, the subordinate, are all actively making new meanings with whatever it is we can get our hands on. The things we can get our hands on are commodities. Fiske defines popular culture as that which “is made by people” who are “making do with what’s available”, ie commodities they can access. I love this. Fiske describes the importance of popular culture here:

The politics of popular culture is that of everyday life. This means that it works on the micropolitical level, not the macro level and that is is progressive, not radical. It is concerned with the day-to-day negotiations of unequal power relations (pg 46).

His theory traces not only the agency and genius of everyday people, but also the fun we have playing around, making new meanings, and redefining our places in the world.

Because we live in a class system, a system based on opposed and conflicting interests, the meaning we make with what’s available challenges the status quo, sometimes dramatically and sometimes in small, quiet ways. In the 1980s and 90s, dressing in thrift store finds was a form of resistance to the fashion system, ie mall culture. Or, consider the rise of baggy jeans from Hip Hop. As Holly Alford details, the tight jeans of the 80s were hard to dance in.¹ She writes,

Hip hop’s emphasis on dancing led to athletic wear and baggy clothing growing extremely popular. She said coming out of the 1980s no one wanted to wear tight pants. It was around this time Alford said a lot of kids, especially in New York, started buying their pants two and three sizes larger than their fit.

“It became an extremely popular movement which really just started because Black kids were like, ‘They’re too tight. The pants are too tight,’” she said.

The masses are not passive consumers. In fact, we’re the innovators of culture, fashion, trends, and yes, even, taste. Without us and our daily oppositions to the status quo, nothing new would happen.

Mass Culture

Fiske defines mass culture as what is produced by the dominant class. They produce commodities such as jeans, movies, technology, algorithms, etc. Mass culture is not popular culture, which is made by us, regular people. Mass culture often comes from the dominant ripping off what the subordinate are making. Examples are everywhere, especially in fashion. One that stands out to Gen X me is the infamous Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis 1993 collection. Jacobs created a luxury line based on the aesthetics of the grunge music scene, a scene that came out of a revolt against the excesses and dominant markers of taste of the 80s. Grunge resisted the global, corporate restructuring that exploded during this decade. A luxury flannel shirt does not send the same message as finding one at a thrift store and wearing it as a middle finger to the spread of capitalism.

Christy T. in Perry Ellis 1993. Image: Vogue

Suffice it to say, the fashion critics did not like it. Like many young designers, Jacobs, who I like, was engaging in the practice of taking what the subordinate make and reworking it for the upper strata.

It was an early example of taking fashion directly from the streets—a palimpsest that would be employed by everyone from Alexander McQueen with his low-riding bumsters to today’s Hedi Slimane at Saint Laurent. —Lynn Yaeger (see footnote 1 for numerous earlier examples)

Grunge, in its original iteration, stands as an example of taking what we, the non-dominant classes, have access to and manipulating it to make new, defiant meanings. Fiske termed this process excorporation. He used the practice of ripping jeans as a way to show how everyday people changed the meaning of a commodity. In the 1980s, Ripped jeans signaled defiance and resistance to the status quo. Punk rock, hippie, hip hop, heroin chic, rancher….jeans are an amazing commodity to look at the endless ways we make new meanings. Crucially, excorporation is fun.

The process of excorporation showcases the contentious relationship between the dominant and subordinate classes. Whatever new thing we make out of what we can get our hands on (jeans, music, TikToks, etc), the dominant take the idea and mass produce it. With their command of the means of production, they can obviously scale the trend. Once scaled, any defiant meaning is lost. Back to the 80s, it wasn’t long after subcultures started ripping jeans that companies began to mass produce pre-ripped jeans. You could go to a department store and buy ripped jeans. Fiske refers to this as incorporation—when the dominant co-opt whatever it is the subordinate have made. Back to Jacobs, he incorporated the aesthetic of grunge. We know how this goes. Once it’s been incorporated, we, the people, move on to something else.

Another defiant trend started in the Hip Hop community and in 1992 brought to the white mainstream by Calvin Klein, which saved him from bankruptcy btw. See footnote 1 for more examples.

So, change comes from below! Popular culture comes from below! And we have fun chipping away at our unequal social system in the small ways we can.

Thinking about cultural change in this way, especially regarding fashion, highlights how the real vanguards of culture, style, fashion come from the non-monied, non dominant class. This puts into relief the massive and unacknowledged fashion work African Americans and numerous other minority groups have contributed throughout history.

Digital Excorporation

Back to algorithms and taste, Fiske’s ideas provide a tonic to the doomsday narrative that algorithms destroy culture.

Before digital media, new styles would have time to simmer and build up meaning. New trends stood out as too weird or too fringe for many, for a substantial period of time. Importantly, however, new trends created new alliances. Punk, Hip Hop, Grunge are all examples. Now, digital media gives everyone a front row seat to the emergence of new trends (check out the defiance behind the mob wife trend from

Viv Chen

), allowing it to spread, quickly and everywhere.

Social media give the dominant a direct line to the nascent emergence of popular culture. What used to take a decade to move from subculture to high culture to culture, now happens in a week thanks to the internet. One minute we are reclaiming girlhood with bows, and then the next we become calculating mob wives working the heteronormative gender roles for economic ends! Our defiant meanings, styles, trends, are instantly co-opted but this does not stop us from pivoting and making new meanings. We keep doing it, in large part, because it’s fun and also because this is how we signal, often proudly, our belonging to the subordinate classes. I don’t think even the most powerful algorithms can stop the process of excorporation, the process of making new meanings. If anything, the fast paced nature of micro trends showcase how the subordinate classes are always one trend ahead of mass culture.

All to say: Dupe culture starts at the top!

1. Not really, fashion has been ripping off street culture well before the 1990s. See: https://news.vcu.edu/article/2023/02/how-black-designers-models-and-musicians-have-influenced-fashion