# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/dec/24/outcry-residents-london-bollo-brook-youth-centre-gentrification-coffee-shop

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/1/what-does-gentrification-really-mean

# data[].attributes.body
https://gal-dem.com/puma-and-the-gross-fetishisation-of-working-class-struggle/

# data[].attributes.body
https://mallarduk.com/the-fetishizing-representation-and-demonizing-of-the-working-class-sarah-stook/

# data[].attributes.body
https://carto.com/blog/spatial-analysis-gentrification/

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.crisismirror.org/library/political-analyses/the-poor-fetish-commodifying-working-class-culture/

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.complex.com/style/nu-lad-working-class-fashion-trend-the-guardian

# data[].attributes.headline
Britain fashion exploits working class BOF

# data[].attributes.subject
Britain fashion exploits working class BOF

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/news-analysis/british-fashion-exploits-celebrates-and-fetishises-the-working-class-heres-why

# data[].attributes.headline
Are brands guilty of misappropriating WC culture

# data[].attributes.subject
Are brands guilty of misappropriating WC culture

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/brands-guilty-misappropriating-working-class-culture/1490370

# data[].attributes.headline
How gentrification benefits long-time residents of low income neighborhoods

# data[].attributes.subject
How gentrification benefits long-time residents of low income neighborhoods

# data[].attributes.body
https://cityobservatory.org/how-gentrification-benefits-long-time-residents-of-low-income-neighborhoods/

# data[].attributes.headline
The right-to-buy, gentrification and working-class displacements in London

# data[].attributes.subject
The right-to-buy, gentrification and working-class displacements in London

# data[].attributes.body
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0038026120906790

# data[].attributes.headline
Fashion gentrification is pushing people in need out of charity shops and into the claws of fast fashion

# data[].attributes.subject
Fashion gentrification is pushing people in need out of charity shops and into the claws of fast fashion

# data[].attributes.body
https://medium.com/@chaudlamouette/fashion-gentrification-is-pushing-poor-people-out-of-charity-shops-and-into-the-claws-of-fast-abe9f2f4c73b

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.fashionroundtable.co.uk/news/gentrification-thrifting-vintage

# data[].attributes.headline
CHARITY SHOPS, DEPOP AND THE GENTRIFICATION OF SECOND-HAND CLOTHES

# data[].attributes.subject
CHARITY SHOPS, DEPOP AND THE GENTRIFICATION OF SECOND-HAND CLOTHES

# data[].attributes.body
https://twssmagazine.com/2020/12/12/charity-shops-depop-and-the-gentrification-of-second-hand-clothes/

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Kill-City-Gentrification-Neighborhood/dp/1568589034/ref=asc_df_1568589034/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=310778801271&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=16384540075163004550&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1006853&hvtargid=pla-524452639130&psc=1&th=1&psc=1

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.amazon.co.uk/New-Urban-Crisis-Gentrification-Inequality/dp/178607401X/ref=asc_df_178607401X/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=311043780415&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17374305776995941132&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1006853&hvtargid=pla-579163643647&psc=1&th=1&psc=1

# data[].attributes.headline
Why fashion fetishises the working class

# data[].attributes.subject
Why fashion fetishises the working class

# data[].attributes.body
http://fashionanthropologist.com/fashion-fetishises-working-classes/

# data[].attributes.headline
HERE'S WHY BURBERRY'S NOVA CHECK PRINT HAS A PROBLEMATIC HISTORY

# data[].attributes.subject
HERE'S WHY BURBERRY'S NOVA CHECK PRINT HAS A PROBLEMATIC HISTORY

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/burberrys-nova-check-print/

# data[].attributes.body
Padlet represents all research to present date.

# data[].attributes.body
By September I want to have the majority of the research completed that will inform the main body of my dissertation.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/county-lines-child-trafficking-minority-matters_uk_6033cc03c5b673b19b6a12f5

# data[].attributes.body
Ive started researching the fetishisation of working class culture to try and understand the causes behind it. Ive explored the different concepts and brands that have led to this and created a toxic environment that systematically sets up the working-class to fail

# data[].attributes.body
I have decided that its important to explore the psychology behind fashion exploring different concepts such as trickle down theory, unclothed cognition theory and the historical relevance of this

# data[].attributes.body
After doing research I decided it was important to explore the correlation between music and fashion, especially when exploring a fashion genre that is so heavily connected to a genre of music. I am exploring hip hop and grime in relation to working class fashion and exploring how there can be such a huge change in attitudes

# data[].attributes.headline
Formative Assessment - Thursday 4th November 2021

# data[].attributes.subject
Formative Assessment - Thursday 4th November 2021

# data[].attributes.body
https://roarmag.org/essays/london-middle-class-culture-poverty/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Literally, he paints her portrait, then he can fuck off  -  he can leave. When Leonardo DiCaprio is freezing in water, she notices that he's dead, and starts to shout, 'I will never let you go,' but while she is shouting this, she is pushing him away. It's not even a love story. Again, Captains Courageous: upper classes lose their life, passion, vitality and act like a vampire to suck vitality from a lower-class guy. Once they replenish their energy, he can fuck off. - Slavoj Zizek on Titanic

London's middle class are in crisis - they feel empty and clamor for vitality. Their work is alienating and meaningless, many of them in " bullshit jobs " that are either socially useless, overly bureaucratic or divorced from any traditional notion of labor.

Financial services exist to grow the fortunes of capitalists, advertising to exploit our insecurities and public relations to manage the reputations of companies that do wrong. Society would not collapse without these industries. We could cope without the nexus of lobbyists, corporate lawyers and big firm accountants whose sole purpose is to protect the interests of capital. How empty if must feel to work a job that could be abolished tomorrow. One that at best makes no tangible difference to society and at worst encourages poverty, hunger and ecological collapse.

At the same time our doctors, teachers, university professors, architects, lawyers, solicitors and probation officers are rendered impotent. Desperate to just do their jobs yet besieged by bureaucracy and box-ticking. Their energies are focused not on helping the sick, teaching the young or building hospitals but on creating and maintaining the trail of paperwork that is a prerequisite of any meaningful action in late capitalist society. Talk to anybody in these professions, from the public or private sector, and the frustration that comes up again and again is that they spend the majority of their time writing reports, filling in forms and navigating bureaucratic labyrinths that serve only to justify themselves.

This inaction hurts the middle-class man. He feels impotent in the blue glare of his computer screen. Unable to do anything useful, alienated from physical labor and plagued by the knowledge that his father could use his hands, and the lower classes still do. Escape, however, is impossible. Ever since the advent of the smartphone the traditional working day has been abolished. Office workers are at the constant mercy of email, a culture of overwork and a digitalization of work. Your job can be done anytime, anywhere and this is exactly what capital demands. Refuge can only be found in sleep, another domain which capital is determined to control.

And when the middle classes are awake and working, they cannot even show contempt for their jobs. Affective (or emotional) labor has always been a part of nursing and prostitution, be it fluffing pillows or faking orgasms, but now it has infected both the shop floor of corporate consumer chains and the offices of middle-management above. Staff working at Pret-à-Manger are encouraged to touch each other, "have presence" and "be happy to be themselves." In the same way the open plan, hyper-extroverted modern office environment enforces positivity. Offering a systemic critique of the very nature of your work does not make you a 'team player.' In such an environment, bringing up the pointlessness of your job is akin to taking a shit on the boss's desk.

This culture is symptomatic of neoliberal contradiction, one which tells us to be true to ourselves and follow our passions in a system that makes it nearly impossible to do so. A system where we work longer hours, for less money and are taught to consume instead of create. Where fulfilling vocations such as teaching, caring or the arts are either vilified, badly paid or not paid at all. Where the only work that will enable you to have a comfortable life is meaningless, bureaucratic or evil. In such a system you are left with only one option: to embrace the myth that your job is your passion while on a deeper level recognizing that it is actually bullshit.

This is London's middle class crisis.

But thankfully capital has an antidote. Just as in Titanic, when Kate Winslet saps the life from the visceral, working class Leonardo DiCaprio, middle-class Londoners flock to bars and clubs that sell a pre-packaged, commodified experience of working class and immigrant culture. Pitched as a way to re-connect with reality, experience life on the edge and escape the bureaucratic, meaningless, alienated dissonance that pervades their working lives.

The problem, however, is that the symbols, aesthetics and identities that populate these experiences have been ripped from their original contexts and re-positioned in a way that is acceptable to the middle class. In the process, they are stripped of their culture and assigned an economic value. In this way, they are emptied of all possible meaning.

Visit any bar in the hip districts of Brixton, Dalston or Peckham and you will invariably end up in a warehouse, on the top floor of a car park or under a railway arch. Signage will be minimal and white bobbing faces will be crammed close, a Stockholm syndrome recreation of the twice-daily commute, enjoying their two hours of planned hedonism before the work/sleep cycle grinds back into gear.

Expect gritty, urban aesthetics. Railway sleepers grouped around fire pits, scuffed tables and chairs reclaimed from the last generation's secondary schools and hastily erected toilets with clattering wooden doors and graffitied mixed sex washrooms. Notice the lack of anything meaningful. Anything with politics or soul. Notice the ubiquity of Red Stripe, once an emblem of Jamaican culture, now sold to white 'creatives' at £4 a can.

The warehouse, once a site of industry, has trudged down this path of appropriation. At first it was squatters and free parties, the disadvantaged of a different kind, transforming a space of labor into one of hedonistic illegality and sound system counter-culture. Now the warehouse resides in the middle-class consciousness as the go-to space for every art exhibition or party. Any meaning it may once have had is dead. Its industrial identity has been destroyed and the transgressive thrill the warehouse once represented has been neutered by money, legality and middle-class civility.

Nonetheless many still function as clubs across Southeast London, pumping out reggae and soul music appropriated from the long-established Afro-Caribbean communities to white middle-class twenty-somethings who can afford the £15 entrance. Eventually the warehouse aesthetic will make its way to the top of the pay scale and, as the areas in which they reside reach an acceptable level of gentrification, they will become blocks of luxury flats. Because what else does London need but more kitsch, high ceiling hideaways to shield capital from tax?

The 'street food revolution' was not a revolution but a middle-class realization that they could abandon their faux bourgeois restaurants and reach down the socioeconomic ladder instead of up. Markets that once sold fruit and vegetables for a pound a bowl to working class and immigrant communities became venues that commodified and sold the culture of their former clientèle. Vendors with new cute names but the same gritty aesthetics serve over-priced ethnic food and craft beer to a bustling metropolitan crowd, paying not for the cuisine or the cold but for the opportunity to bathe in the edgy cool aesthetic of a former working class space.

This is the romantic illusion that these bars, clubs and street food markets construct; that their customers are the ones on the edge of life, running the gauntlet of Zola's Les Halles, eating local on makeshift benches whilst drinking beer from the can. Yet this zest is vicarious. Only experienced secondhand through objects and spaces appropriated from below. Spaces which are dully sanitized of any edge and rendered un-intimidating enough for the middle classes to inhabit. Appealing enough for them to trek to parts of London in which they'd never dare live in search of something meaningful. In the hope that some semblance of reality will slip back into view.

The illusion is delicate and fleeting. In part it explains the roving zeitgeist of the metropolitan hipster whose anatomy Douglas Haddow so brilliantly managed to pin down. Because as soon as a place becomes inhabited with too many white, middle-class faces it becomes difficult to keep playing penniless. The braying accents crowd in and the illusion shatters. Those who aren't committed to the working class aesthetic, yuppies dressed in loafers and shirts rather than scruffy plimsoles and vintage wool coats, begin to dominate and it all becomes just a bit too West London. And in no-time at all the zeitgeist rolls on to the next market, pool hall or dive bar ripe for discovery, colonization and commodification.

Not all businesses understand this delicacy. Champagne and Fromage waded into the hipster darling food market of Brixton Village, upsetting locals and regulars alike. This explicitly bourgeois restaurant, attracted by the hip kudos and ready spending of the area, inadvertently pointed out that the emperor had no clothes. That the commodified working class experience the other restaurants had been pedaling was nothing more than an illusion.

The same anxiety that fuels this cultural appropriation also drives first wave gentrifiers to 'discover' new areas that have been populated by working class or immigrant communities for decades. Cheap rents beckon but so does the chance of emancipation from the bourgeois culture of their previous North London existence. The chance to live in an area that is gritty, genuine and real. But this reality is always kept at arm's length. Gentrifiers have the income to inoculate themselves from how locals live. They plump for spacious Georgian semi-detached houses on a quiet street away from the tower blocks. They socialize in gastro-pubs and artisan cafés. They can do without sure start centers, food banks and the local comprehensive.

Their experience will always be confined to dancing in a warehouse, drinking cocktails from jam jars or climbing the stairs of a multi-story car park in search of a new pop-up restaurant. Never will they face the grinding monotony of mindless work, the inability to pay bills or feed their children, nor the feeling of guilt and hopelessness that comes from being at the bottom of a system that blames the individual but offers no legitimate means by which they can escape.

This partial experience is deliberate. Because with intimate knowledge of how the other half live comes an ugly truth: that middle-class privilege is in many ways premised on working class exploitation. That the rising house prices and cheap mortgages from which they have benefited create a rental market shot with misery. That the money inherited from their parents goes largely untaxed while benefits for both the unemployed and working poor are slashed. That the unpaid internships they can afford to take sustains a culture that excludes the majority from comfortable, white collar jobs. That their accent, speech patterns and knowledge of institutions, by their very deployment in the job market, perpetuate norms that exclude those who were born outside of the cultural elite.

Effie Trinket of the Hunger Games is the ideal manifestation of this contradiction. She is Kaitness and Peeta's flamboyant chaperone who goes from being a necessary annoyance in the first film towards nominal acceptance in the second. The relationship climaxes when, just as Kaitness and Peeta are about to re-enter the arena, Effie presents Hamich and Peeta with a gold band and necklace, a consumerist expression of their heightened intimacy. And in that very moment, her practiced façade of enthusiastic positivity finally breaks. Through her sobs she cries "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry" and backs away, absent for the rest of the film.

For Effie, the contradiction surfaced and was too much to bear. She realized that the misery and oppression of those in the districts was in some way caused by her privilege. But her tears were shed for a more fundamental truth - that although she recognizes the horror of the world, she enjoys the material comfort exploitation brings. That if given the choice between the status quo and revolution, she wouldn't change a thing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The poor fetish: commodifying working class culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Literally, he paints her portrait, then he can fuck off  -  he can leave. When Leonardo DiCaprio is freezing in water, she notices that he's dead, and starts to shout, 'I will never let you go,' but while she is shouting this, she is pushing him away. It's not even a love story.

# data[].attributes.body
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/researchingsociology/2018/01/18/the-poor-fetish-sociology-is-guilty-too/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In this reflective piece, Solene Auzimour considers her experience as a researcher, the importance of asking ourselves 'why' and 'how' we carry out sociological research, and her decision not to choose squatting as a dissertation topic.
October 2017, 1am. I am on my way to a rave, cycling on the empty streets near Stratford's Olympic desert. Four dudes I met on the way are accompanying me, two of them on skateboards and completely hammered. It's not freezing yet, but it will take us a good half an hour before we reach Bromley-by-Bow's warehouses. Suddenly we hear a techno-like music coming out of a gritty building covered with street art - the guys get excited, it's a rave! We're here! I try to tell them that we're still in a gentrified part of East London, there's no way this event isn't privatised. Indeed, the party is shielded by a gate with a code. Some yuppies arrive, ignore our questions, and slam the door in our face.

I try to explain. I use the word 'hipster', but it's wrong. There's something about it that I grasp, a feeling, a sense of atmosphere or experience - but I don't have the words for it. Not yet. Then I read this article. It's not the hipster, it's the middle-class and young creatives who like to fetichise the poor. I will not talk about working-class dynamics here, or race and ethnicity. I'm going to talk about a general idea of edginess associated with poverty. When you sit in a trendy café with gritty aesthetic, scrappy wooden chairs or cans used as glasses; when you go to a club with graffitied concrete walls, when you go for an overpriced latte in what looks like a warehouse[2], do you like this shabby chic atmosphere of authenticity? Does it make you feel real, does it give you some sort of escape from the continuous pulse of the city and its extremely demanding sensory stimulation?

Raves and squat parties aren't glamorous. It's dirty, dusty, you don't have toilets or cloakrooms. Yet the VICE-reading, sheltered youth also managed to fetichise then commodify that. I am quite angry about it. What is it exactly that they want to fetichise? Raving is a movement of freedom constrained by law and policing, and they tried to grasp its spirit and make it a commodity. A simulation of poverty entered through consumption. I'm not trying to say that raves should be kept crappy: I argue that people who go to raves are stigmatised as 'scums'[3] and have a history of police violence, but gentrifiers don't care about that. They just want to slum it for a while.

I was temporarily accommodated by squatters in 2015 because I was fed up with trying to find a decent place to rent. This is where I met the people of various ages, gender and nationality, who squatted out of necessity rather than choice but made their lifestyle some sort of philosophy. It was quite naturally, then, that I picked up squatting as a topic for study on the SO221 ('Researching London') course. Residential squatting in London is a topic that has virtually never been covered in academic work since the 1980s, and there is a belief that it has been dying ever since. Yet it is very much alive, and squatters keep occupying London's empty buildings. They are organised, knowledgeable, they practice dumpster diving, and they often repair the buildings they occupy and contribute to activism against gentrification[4]. Some of them open social centres to the public and organise soups for the homeless. In 2012, section 144 of the LASPO made it a criminal offence to trespass in residential properties with the intention of living there. They now use the law against the law by occupying non-residential properties (which is a civil offence), but face poorer conditions of living. They have to deal with insalubrity, permanent instability, insecurity, and police violence.[5]

This is the reality of squatting. And I wanted to keep talking about it, to explore the squatting scene and reveal its importance to the world, reveal the fact that we needed to acknowledge it instead of letting the media criminalise it. I soon realised it was all pointless and selfish. Will my actions help them? Absolutely not. Will people care? Not really. I remember asking on an LSE freshers' Facebook group in first year if people were interested in going to squat parties with me. I got several answers from people thinking I wanted to go to the gym. Most of us do not realise our privilege as university students and academics, and me included, maybe up until recently. We think that because we understand the causes of things it makes us somewhat exempted from being proactive about changing them. Most of us academic lefties (and me included) talk about the struggles of the working class, the underclass, and BAME people, often without having experienced them. Most of us (and me included) have been engaged on LSE campus, very satisfied by the micro-effectiveness of our actions. Discuss working-class struggle over expensive beers. Organise a workshop on housing in LSE's poshest room. Micro-protests as a simulation of effectiveness. Intellectual protest for intellectual people who do not engage with the reality of the situation. In the end, everyone goes home satisfied with the idea that they tried to make a difference. We speak 'for them' because we like to hear the empathetic sound of our voices, but in doing so we reinforce the very same mechanisms that prevent them from being heard.

I was about to do that. I was about to exploit my friends' personal stories and vulnerability, and discuss it in a paper that would be marked, probably considered as an original topic, possibly greeted with enthusiasm, but then discarded and forgotten about. In the meantime, my friends are being arrested for going through supermarkets' trashes or resisting social cleansing.

This is what is called the ivory tower. And many university academics need to be thrown out of it.
References
[1] Todd,J. 2015, The poor fetish: commodifying working class culture, ROAR, accessed 06 January 2018, <https://roarmag.org/essays/london-middle-class-culture-poverty/>.
[2] Countless addresses can be given here, but here is a non-exhaustive list: the whole of Shoreditch, Brick Lane, pretty much every vegan café in East London, and Broadway Market.
[3] Quick Google search of 'rave daily mail' and 'rave the sun' will give you a picture.
I would recommend reading: Van der Steen's The City is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movement in Europe from the 1980s to the present (2014), and Hans Pruijt's 'The Logic of Urban Squatting' (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2013, Vol.37(1), pp.19-45), as well as having a look on the following website: https://planet.squat.net/
[5] This assertion is made after two years of frequenting and interviewing squatters. Women, POC and people with mental health issues are especially vulnerable, more because of systemic violence than because of the practice of squatting: if they are rough sleeping squatting is said to offer them a better shelter than the existing structures. The agency given to squatter through the practice of occupying a building and developing a community is crucial here.
Solene Auzimour (@SAuzimour) is a BSc Sociology student. Her research interests include discourse, power mechanisms, housing, gentrification, and social activism.
About the author

Posted In: Doing Sociology | Social Inequalities | Student Voices | Studying Sociology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The 'Poor Fetish': sociology is guilty too

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In this reflective piece, Solene Auzimour considers her experience as a researcher, the importance of asking ourselves 'why' and 'how' we carry out sociological research, and her decision not to choose squatting as a dissertation topic. October 2017, 1am. I am on my way to a rave, cycling on the empty streets near Stratford's Olympic desert.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/27/shoreditch-cereal-cafe-targeted-by-anti-gentrification-protesters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hundreds of protesters attacked a cereal cafe in east London on Saturday night, daubing the word "scum" on the shop window and setting fire to an effigy of a police officer.

Riot police were called in to defend the Cereal Killer Cafe in Shoreditch after it was targeted by a large crowd of anti-gentrification activists carrying pigs' heads and torches.

The owners of the cafe, which has been seen by some as a symbol of inequality in east London, said on Sunday that the attack left customers including children "terrified for their lives".

Gary Keery, 33, who founded the cafe with his twin brother, Alan, said: "It's senseless violence, isn't it? We've had some letters through the letterbox saying 'die hipsters' and stuff but nothing to this extreme. It just doesn't make sense." Footage of the attack filmed from inside the shop and obtained by the Guardian shows masked protesters shouting outside the shopfront. One man daubs graffiti on the window while another is seen holding a burning stick.

The Metropolitan police said one of their officers had suffered an injury to his face as a result of a bottle thrown during the disorder, caused by a "criminal element within a group of several hundred people" who had thrown missiles and attacked shops on Brick Lane.

They added that one protester was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage.

Cereal Killer Cafe (@CerealKillerUK)
Tonight we were attacked with paint and fire by an angry mob of 200. Riot police are on the scene. pic.twitter.com/GPXLmyMmuN

One protester who was at the demonstration said the Cereal Killer Cafe was targeted as a "symbol of gentrification", although he said a nearby estate agent, Marsh & Parsons, was also attacked. The cafe, which opened in December, was open as usual on Sunday morning, with queues of customers paying up to £4.40 for a bowl of cereal.

Gary Keery said customers - including children - barricaded the cafe doors when the disturbance started but then had to be moved downstairs to safety. At one point the protesters managed to break into the small shop and threw a smoke bomb and furniture inside the doorway, he said. Other masked figures threw red paint and cereal at the shop windows.

"If they really believe in the protest, why are they covering their face while they're doing it? Why are they wearing pig masks?" Gary said. "It's not just the fact that someone threw paint on the windows, there's more of a deep-rooted issue that needs to be looked at. You need to look at why they're attacking us."

The cereal-only cafe has sparked controversy since its opening. The Keery brothers were forced to defend their prices after a Channel 4 News interviewer asked whether local people could afford £3.20 for a bowl of cereal.

Gary dismissed the suggestion that his business had become a symbol of east London gentrification. "There's another Pret at the top of the street here and that wasn't targeted. We're an independent business, we've got two shops, we've only been open months," he said.

"If you want to talk about gentrification and different classes, you don't go about attacking independent businesses who are putting their whole life on the line to open a business, you go to the conglomerates and big companies."

The protest was advertised on Facebook as the third Fuck Parade, and was apparently organised by the anarchist group Class War. The event page stated: "Our communities are being ripped apart - by Russian oligarchs, Saudi sheiks, Israeli scumbag property developers, Texan oil-money twats and our own home-grown Eton toffs. Local authorities are coining it in, in a short-sighted race for cash by 'regenerating' social housing.

Jamie Osman (@jamieosman)
Whatever happened in Shoreditch tonight is making my life exceedingly difficult pic.twitter.com/g2jXaEVpJu

"We don't want luxury flats that no one can afford, we want genuinely affordable housing. We don't want pop-up gin bars or brioche buns, we want community." The Fuck Parade organisers had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

Esther Planas Balduz, 55, an artist who attended the protest after hearing about it on Facebook, said she supported the cause because she was evicted from her home of seven years when her rent doubled last year.

"I've lived in Shoreditch for 17 years and it's appalling what's been going on. Its our fault, artists like me go to these kind of areas, then the architects follow, the developers, the hipsters etc," Balduz said. "The problem is social cleansing. There are no protections for us. The law does not protect us, only the greedy landowners."

Lisa Mckenzie (@redrumlisa)
Anti-gentrification tonight in Shoreditch #FuckParade #classwar pic.twitter.com/qK9IWnh5kp

Balduz said the protest seemed "more like a punk carnival" and hoped it would open up debate on the issue of gentrification. "Even if a few became a bit aggressive, it was really less aggressive than the masses of drunks I have to cope with every weekend in the area," she said.

Another protester, who declined to be named, conceded that there were "more justifiable targets" than a small independent business, but played down the scale of the attack.

TfL Traffic News (@TfLTrafficNews)
Due to an impromptu demo, Old Street Roundabout is currently blocked. Expect delays on all approaches. pic.twitter.com/qyRszSWJ68

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Shoreditch Cereal Killer Cafe targeted in anti-gentrification protests

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hundreds of protesters attacked a cereal cafe in east London on Saturday night, daubing the word "scum" on the shop window and setting fire to an effigy of a police officer. Riot police were called in to defend the Cereal Killer Cafe in Shoreditch after it was targeted by a large crowd of anti-gentrification activists carrying pigs' heads and torches.

# data[].attributes.body
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oW3hMxU8qYsC&pg=PT171&lpg=PT171&dq=“London+is+a+world+by+itself.+We+daily+discover+in+it+more+new+countries,+and+surprising+singularities,+than+in+all+the+universe+besides.”+–+Thomas+Brown&source=bl&ots=uR9qJ_y_cV&sig=ACfU3U287Fbf9HnvhhYnqnDOAudbsCN4fw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwidn6n82Iv1AhX-h_0HHST4DE8Q6AF6BAgNEAM#v=onepage&q=“London%20is%20a%20world%20by%20itself.%20We%20daily%20discover%20in%20it%20more%20new%20countries%2C%20and%20surprising%20singularities%2C%20than%20in%20all%20the%20universe%20besides.”%20–%20Thomas%20Brown&f=false

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
‘A tour de force of biography, history, politics, philosophy and experimental science’ ECONOMISTThe remarkable and inspiring story of how London was transformed after the Great Fire of 1666 into the most powerful city in the world, and the men who were responsible for that achievement. ’Wonderfully…

# data[].attributes.headline
Gentrification, exploring the effect on community in London

# data[].attributes.subject
Gentrification, exploring the effect on community in London

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.academia.edu/34822323/Gentrification_Exploring_the_Effect_on_Community_in_London

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Gentrification: Exploring the Effect on Community in London.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A wave of gentrification and regeneration is a happening that penetrates every nuance of the society it grips, inherently effecting the economic and social makeup of said community. Gentrification is a widespread occurrence, defined as the process of

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.sociologygroup.com/gentrification-sociology/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Sociology Group: Sociology and Other Social Sciences Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The term gentrification can be used to denote the various changes in the urban neighborhoods which includes economic changes due to the arrival of wealthier people such that rents and property values increase resulting in the displacement of the poor people. This process although leads to various positive changes like reduced crime rates, improvements in infrastructure, and economic growth, it, however, marginalizes already established residents, who are not financially strong. Hence, it is a controversial political topic of urban planning. The benefits coming from it are mostly enjoyed by the rich and wealthy alone.

Gentrification brings with it various changes. In terms of demography, a decline in the proportion of racial minorities and household size takes place due to the replacement of poor families by young singles and couples. Prices of properties and rent increase and lands are occupied mostly for building offices, restaurants, storefronts, and multimedia companies rather than industries. In addition, various cultural and social changes occur in terms of lifestyle, consumption pattern, occupation, etc. Not only does the income structure changes, but changes in education level are also noticed.

An example can be mentioned here in New York City. To make the reputed city it is today, in 2003, 225,000 renters were pushed out of the neighborhood due to some financial issues. Among those renters, 96000 were displaced either by their landlords or by the officials of the government. The other neighbourhoods also faced gentrification, and today, along with New York City, they are also some of the nicest cities in the world.

In order to understand the complex process of gentrification better, various changes can be considered. To begin with, there come the historic conditions that made the communities susceptible to it. In this, the rules and policies can be taken into consideration which has often created racialized patterns of disinvestment in communities that led the low-income population susceptible to gentrification. People of color, for instance, were denied loans which could help them in investments or building houses. Extension of highways was also done mostly by displacing the low-income population. Most policies greatly favored the growth of white settlements fuelling the entering of rich people into the neighborhood due to their affordability. Increased investments, economic development, and better infrastructure by real estate development businesses, all lead to this restoration process by luring rich people to move into these neighborhoods. Poor residents, on the other hand, are not able to benefit from new investments in housing, healthy food access, or better infrastructure. Instead, they are displaced, faced with a rent increase, evictions, etc.

Displacements make people lose their jobs, children are affected in terms of their education and mental health, and families are separated leading to a reduced sense of belonging. Public, private, as well as non-profit organisations should take initiatives to give the long term residents assurance of non- displacement. Strategies should be taken so that even poor residents can somehow benefit from the various investment schemes and infrastructural changes.
References: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentrification

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What does Gentrification mean in sociology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The term gentrification can be used to denote the various changes in the urban neighborhoods which includes economic changes due to the arrival of wealthier people such that rents and property values increase resulting in the displacement of the poor people.

# data[].attributes.body
To be completed by the 10th for adequate time

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsHvOJTo3UY

# data[].attributes.headline
Exploring the Negative Impacts of Gentrification

# data[].attributes.subject
Exploring the Negative Impacts of Gentrification

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.law.georgetown.edu/poverty-journal/blog/examining-the-negative-impacts-of-gentrification/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Examining the Negative Impacts of Gentrification

# data[].attributes.body
https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/4/8542/files/2014/09/Whats-Race-Got-to-Do-With-It-1iiw6hz.pdf

# data[].attributes.headline
Measuring Gentrification and Displacement in Greater London

# data[].attributes.subject
Measuring Gentrification and Displacement in Greater London

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43084636

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The use of aggregate data to understand the linkages between gentrification and displacement has been considered problematic because of a lack of refinement or closeness to the nature of these processes as well as lacking the ability to 'track' displacees. This paper presents the results of pioneering work designed to overcome these problems by combining cross-sectional census data with spatially re-aggregated longitudinal census data (the Longitudinal Study). Using established approaches to measure gentrification, via proxy measures, and devising others for its potential displacees, the work demonstrates a displacement effect clustered around gentrified wards. Attempts are made to quantify flows of displacement relative to city-wide changes over the decade. The paper concludes that, although replacement and displacement are difficult to distinguish, displacement appears prevalent for certain groups and this requires further research initiatives to explore a process that is socially and psychologically harmful.

Journal Information

Urban Studies is the leading international journal for urban scholarship. Since its inception in 1964, the journal has remained at the forefront of intellectual and policy debates on the city, and has hosted ground-breaking contributions from across the full range of social science disciplines. The Editors aim to maintain and extend the role of Urban Studies as the journal of choice for those working on the cutting edge of academic research about cities. We welcome all original submissions that further our understanding of the urban condition and the rapid changes taking place in cities and regions across the globe, whether from an empirical, theoretical, or a policy perspective. In addition to research articles, Urban Studies publishes peer-reviewed critical commentaries, policy reviews, book reviews besides a regular series of Special Issues. The journal is also committed to developing Social Media as the means of informing debates about the contemporary urban condition. Urban Studies is published in association with Urban Studies Journal Limited.

Publisher Information

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 900 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. A growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. SAGE remains majority owned by our founder and after her lifetime will become owned by a charitable trust that secures the company's continued independence. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. www.sagepublishing.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Measuring Gentrification and Displacement in Greater London on JSTOR

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The use of aggregate data to understand the linkages between gentrification and displacement has been considered problematic because of a lack of refinement or closeness to the nature of these processes as well as lacking the ability to 'track' displacees.

# data[].attributes.body
https://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1027&context=honors_theses

# data[].attributes.body
Over Christmas I spoke with Anna-Maria Nash, a property lawyer, discussing avenues to take my dissertation, We discussed the sociological impacts of gentrification giving me a range of sources and books to explore further evidenced in my research links

# data[].attributes.body
I hit a wall today unsure of where to take my dissertation. I had all of the information I needed but was struggling to articulate the link between gentrification and fashion. I sat down with my partner to discuss what I had completed so far. through discussion I managed to articulate my point and through the power of two minds found a way to articulate it in writing. We continued to discuss my idea and I realised that an exciting thing to explore would be the psychology of fashion and the changes in acceptance over time. Also looking into Logomania

# data[].attributes.body
https://pages.stolaf.edu/americanmusic/author/alvare3/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Music 345: Race, Identity, and Representation in American Music

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This artifact intrigued me not necessarily the word, "uber" which is seen nearly of every street corner of most major U.S. cities today in the form of a car. Rather, what caught my attention was the name, "Guadaljara" which is actually spelled Guadalajara today. This is where my parents were originally born, near a city with a name derived of an Arabic translation, as stated in the official Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara website.
Access: Map of Guadalajara & Zacatecas "In its distant origins, Guadalajara was linked to Celtoberian culture, though the earliest historical references tell of its strategic military importance to the emirs and caliphs of Córdoba. It was then known as Madinat al-Faray in memory of its conqueror, and Wad al-Hayara, Arab translation of its pre-Roman name, Arriaca." (Guadalajara.se)
My father actually went to college in Guadalajara, and had essentially gone through what I am experiencing now, "a home away from home." His decision to sacrifice that education in Guadalajara in Mexico just to seek a better quality life in the United States without citizenship has allowed me to write this blog on this St. Olaf webpage for today. Had he not done so, I would not be here, in this very moment, writing this blog. Now you see why Guadalajara caught my attention. This city's name creates an emotional response in myself because it symbolizes my family's origins.

The map is a piece of cartography recorded in 1832 and completed in 1855 by German explorer, Carl de Berghes. One can easily (not actually) identify this source by its title, " Beschreibung der Ueberreste Aztekischer Niederlassungen auf ihrer Wanderung nach dem Thale von Mexico durch den gegenwärtigen Freistaat von Zacatecas "

According to a dear friend and Berlin, Germany native, Leander Krawinkel, the title translates into - " The Map which shows the directions and through which ways the Aztecs emigrated to Mexico " Aztecs were a group of the indigenous peoples who occupied a majority of the territory of today's Mexico. By this account, it is fair to state that this was one explorer's observation of how the indigenous people lived and traveled in their land. However, one may be skeptical of Berghes's perspective on these people's reason for migrating.

In this following image of a map titled, " Mexico, Texas und Californien" by a German explorer, Heinrich Kiepert indicates the different locations of French and German colonies near Mexico. This is significant because it is a clear reminder to all that that which makes up today's Mexicans ethnically, around the world and especially the United States, is not just Spanish and Aztec blood, but also German and French blood, as evidenced in the presence of these European explorers in these areas. These cultural encounters were written solely from the perspective of the European explorer's eye. This blog analysis should aid in the modern Mexican and white-American community's understanding of their ethnic diversity and similarities as a whole, in hopes of encouraging a more united attitude rather than a separatist attitude from both cultures in a time of political and racial turmoil.
Sources:
Berghes, Carl de (1792-1869). 1832-1855. Beschreibung der Ueberreste Aztekischer Niederlassungen auf ihrer Wanderung nach dem Thale von Mexico durch den gegenwärtigen Freistaat von Zacatecas [manuscript]. [Manuscript]. At: Place: The Newberry Library. VAULT Ayer MS 1045. Available through: Adam Matthew, Marlborough, American Indian Histories and Cultures, http://www.aihc.amdigital.co.uk/FurtherResources/VisualResources/Image/Ayer_MS_1045/61# Accessed February 20, 2018.

Kiepert, Heinrich, 1818-1899. Mexico, Texas und Californien., map, 1847; Weimar. ( texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth231410/ :accessed February 20, 2018), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, texashistory.unt.edu ; crediting University of Texas at Arlington Library.

" The history of the city, from the Celtiberian origin until today." The history of the city, from the Celtiberian origin until today. - Ayuntamiento de Guadalajara. Accessed February 20, 2018. https://www.guadalajara.es/en/tourism/discover-guadalajara/history/ .

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This artifact intrigued me not necessarily the word, "uber" which is seen nearly of every street corner of most major U.S. cities today in the form of a car. Rather, what caught my attention was the name, "Guadaljara" which is actually spelled Guadalajara today.

# data[].attributes.body
https://theconversation.com/from-a-symbol-of-broken-britain-grime-has-become-a-voice-for-the-voiceless-92468

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Grime music may be one of the most maligned modern musical genres. In Britain, many in political circles and wider society view it as a front for criminal behaviour involving gang violence or drug dealing. Others point to what they see as gratuitous denigration of women. While certain artists do conform to, or at least play up to, this image, others provide a voice for little-heard and disenfranchised communities in a way that can help highlight the issues of inequality and social exclusion they face.

Grime first emerged as a musical genre in Bow, in London's East End, where young artists led by the likes of Wiley and Dizzee Rascal began to experiment by infusing the beats of garage and house with rapped vocals. This quickly found a home within inner-city estates of London and other major UK cities, where growing numbers of pirate radio stations and raves included grime music among their diet of garage, hip-hop and jungle.

However criticism soon followed, particularly within political circles. Here, many on the political right began to link grime music with the spike in anti-social behaviour that swept Britain in the mid-2000s. This caused the genre to become closely linked to the concept of " Broken Britain " expressed in right-wing media.

This led to a moral panic emerging around grime and other music of black origin popular in cities - particularly the association with violence. For example, grime was implicated in the gang feud that resulted in the murders of Charlene Ellis and Leticia Shakespeare, who were gunned down in Birmingham over New Years' Eve celebrations in January 2003. The roots of this incident lay in a clash between two rival gangs over the lyrics used by an MC (rapper) at the party to mock a fatal stabbing that had occurred earlier in the city.

The fall-out saw grime stigmatised and held as a symbol of a wide range of illicit leisure activities and deviant behaviour - something sometimes referred to as "dark leisure". Among the consequences was that grime events, and by extension music events featuring music of black origin, became more strictly policed. In London, the Metropolitan Police's Form 696 was explicitly targeted at music venues and promoters that attracted grime audiences.

However, in spite of the negative attention directed towards grime, the genre continues to provide a prominent voice of hope to those who feel that the political classes have forgotten about them. It's important to recognise how grime artists have played a significant role in sticking up for inner-city communities, particularly within highly charged media debates about inequality and racism.

In this climate of political activism, artists such as Akala and Stormzy have played a pivotal role in providing a voice. For example, highlighting the poor treatment of victims of the Grenfell Tower fire disaster through appearances on current affairs programmes and at public events such as the 2018 Brit Awards.

Similarly, the artist JME has provided a platform for political debate by partaking in a YouTube interview with Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn to discuss issues relating to social exclusion and deprivation. Both highlight the role grime music plays as a catalyst to spark discussions of important political issues.

Not for the first time

In its cultural origins and political associations there are similarities between grime and the emergence of hip-hop in the 1980s. Rap groups such as NWA and Public Enemy provided a sounding board for the anger and distrust felt by Afro-Americans in the US brought about by the discrimination faced by black communities. This social commentary continued into the 1990s as artists such as Ice-T and Tupac rapped about police brutality, drug epidemics and political corruption.

In a similar manner to grime, the critical social commentary offered by hip-hop was glossed over by political elites. This was achieved by demonising such music as a symbol of "dark leisure" and so associating it with illicit activities, through emphasising to the wider population the negative images put forward by certain artists, for example the tendency to focus on sex, violence and money.

Grime and hip-hop are two separate musical genres with origins on different sides of the Atlantic many decades apart. However they share a similarity in terms of their capacity to offer critical social commentary and a voice for disenfranchised. Also similar are the tactics used by the authorities to paint grime artists and their fans as deviant in the minds of the wider population. The consequence is that, while grime has struggled to achieve mainstream popularity over 15 years, many of the artists are held as important voices to those whose lives they represent, even as they remain unknown or are considered dangerous by the society that keeps them on its periphery.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From a symbol of 'Broken Britain', grime has become a voice for the voiceless

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Grime music may be one of the most maligned modern musical genres. In Britain, many in political circles and wider society view it as a front for criminal behaviour involving gang violence or drug dealing. Others point to what they see as gratuitous denigration of women.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/grime-music-fashion/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Highsnobiety / Martyn Ewoma

Music and fashion intertwine continuously; the clothing choices and references to brands that musicians make often have a direct effect on fans, and we have come to see how powerful the right endorsements can be - simply look at how Polo Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger have become synonymous with '90s hip-hop.

Grime now finds itself in a similar juncture. Its rebirth has launched many of the artists embedded in the genre to the upper echelons of the UK music scene, and the sound has now transcended international barriers. However, with this rejuvenated popularity and influence comes an increasing amount of attention from brands and corporations, many of whom weren't always as supportive of the culture as they now seem to be.

While that influence has become more obvious in recent years (due to the success of artists like Skepta and his ties within the fashion hemisphere), brands like Avirex, New Era, and Burberry that were originally part of the uniform associated with early grime and garage from nearly two decades ago have also made a comeback with the new wave of fans.

Photographer Martyn Ewoma recognizes this new found corporate backing but is also adamant about the influence he believes grime has always held over British youth fashion trends. In a collaborative effort with Wavey Garms, he has enlisted an eclectic mix of current and old-school MCs to create a photo series which showcases some of the notable styles and brands that have been associated with grime culture through the years. The artists he chose to feature are half of Newham Generals duo Footsie, Roll Deep crew member Scratchy, the legendary trailblazer Flirta D, rising talent behind "Toothache" Jaykae, pirate radio maven Big Zuu, and I Am Grime label-captain Jammz.

We caught up with Martyn to discuss his motivation behind the project, counter culture, and the state of grime music today.

What inspired this series of photographs?

Over the past three to four years grime music has merged into the mainstream, and the fashion world's been taking notice in an obvious way - such as Skepta walking for Nasir Mazhar, Krept & Konan collaborating with Astrid Andersen, and so on. In my experience, grime has always been a staple of UK music since its birth, and there's always been trends derived from it - especially in my area. Grime culture just never got any of the recognition for that, so I wanted to showcase its influence through the photos.

Why do you think the culture wasn't given the recognition it was due?

I think it's taken a while for it to be recognized as a genre within itself rather than just a subsidiary of rap. In terms of the recognition of its influence on fashion specifically, although it's always had an influence, before it was more through pirate radio or things like TimandBarry, SB.TV, Risky Roadz, Aim High and that sort of thing. People would see how MCs were dressing on those platforms way before we had MCs performing on Jools Holland, a more mainstream show which many people outside the culture would be more likely to watch and potentially draw fashion inspiration from.

Highsnobiety / Martyn Ewoma

How did you connect with Wavey Garms for this project?

They were actually suggested to me by another stylist. I've been aware of Wavey Garms as a Facebook group for a few years but I wasn't aware of their styling beforehand. Upon looking into it more, it was obvious they were the perfect people to have on board. I feel they bring a lot of authenticity. As is often the case with urban culture, a lot of people only jump on board once there's some sort of hype or commercial gain attached. We even encountered that with this project; in the sense that there are certain brands who have undoubtedly gained mass popularity because of MCs wearing their clothes and are happy for the consumers garnered from that, yet they didn't carry the same enthusiasm when asked if they would help out with the shoot. However, with a group like Wavey Garms, their genuine love of UK music and fashion culture was evident very early on with this project; without them it would have been much harder to make the concept materialize.

In what ways do the artists you've chosen to shoot for this project reflect the theme you're depicting?

I chose to use some original MCs (Footsie, Flirta D, Scratchy) styled in outfits that are representative of current grime trends and younger, new wave artists (Big Zuu, Jaykae, Jammz) wearing more old-school attire to showcase the lineage of the culture - the idea being to show the uniformity and continuity of the grime scene. It's very much a case of the originators paving the way for the new stars rather than it being an "old-school versus new-school" sort of thing. So Jaykae, for example, really represents how burgeoning MCs are delivering super cohesive projects that can do well commercially while not sacrificing the authentic sound. His recent album Where Have You Been? is a great example of that.

Why do you think genres like grime and garage have been so influential within youth fashion culture?

Counter culture is always influential, and because grime and garage music has always been subdued by the police and government through shutting down raves and demonizing urban culture through media outlets, it represents rebellion, which always appeals to the youth. Plus, the clothes are just objectively nice! I think brands are also a metonym of wealth, and because a lot of MCs start out in impoverished areas, seeing them wearing certain brands represents social mobility. Seeing someone from your area who's made it in music wearing a certain brand could make someone feel that by buying something from that brand, they're buying into that success.

Why do you think these trends have reemerged and are now bigger than ever?

Generally, I think it's because fashion itself is quite cyclical. Vintage clothes also objectively suit younger people in a practical sense, because you can express your style without paying as much. And with the popularity of grime, garage, and jungle with today's youth, if you're going to a rave or event that represents a specific style that's synonymous with a given culture, you're naturally going to want to align with that.

Highsnobiety / Martyn Ewoma

I also think that because of the social media age, people vie to create a sort of persona online, so just being a grime and jungle fan privately doesn't cut it - people want the clothes to show other people who they are. It's almost at a point where the music doesn't directly inspire trends; in the sense that someone will see their favorite artists wearing something and think it looks cool and therefore want it, so much as the fact that seeing their favorite artist in something will make them think that wearing that item is the best way to let people know they're part of that culture. Like Nike TN's for example.

Your personal favorite photos from the series?

That's really hard! Possibly the one with bossman and Jammz in front of the phone shop. He went to move out of the photo and I said he could be in it if he wanted. He said "Oh really?" while simultaneously throwing up some mad hand signs as though he'd been waiting his whole life for this moment, which you have to respect. That or the close up of Big Zuu, he's someone I respect a lot.
For more like this, read our interview with accompanying editorial with the one and only Waka Flocka Flame.

Photography: Martyn Ewoma

Interview: Nicholas Borghesi

Styling: Rhiannon Barry @ Wavey Garms

Assistant Styling: Violetta Kassapi

Grooming: Trim-It

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Grime Music Through the Ages and the Fashion That Made It

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Music and fashion intertwine continuously; the clothing choices and references to brands that musicians make often have a direct effect on fans, and we have come to see how powerful the right endorsements can be - simply look at how Polo Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger have become synonymous with '90s hip-hop.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/mar/18/ukguns.ukcrime

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Four men were today found guilty of murdering Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare in a drive-by shooting at a new year party in Birmingham two years ago.

The panel of seven women and five men at Leicester crown court came to a majority decision after spending more than 14 hours deliberating.

Charlene, 18, and Letisha, 17, were gunned down outside the Uniseven hairdressing salon in Aston, Birmingham, in the early hours of January 2 2003. The prosecution claimed the shooting was a "botched" revenge attack by one rival gang on another.

Charlene's half-brother Marcus Ellis, 24; Michael Gregory, 23; Nathan Martin, 26; and 20-year-old Rodrigo Simms, who are all alleged to be members of the Burger Bar Boys gang, were today convicted of the murder.

The four men were also convicted of three counts of attempting to murder Charlene's twin sister, Sophia, and their friend Cheryl Shaw. Three of the defendants, Martin, Gregory and Ellis, were also convicted of attempting to murder another partygoer, Leon Harris. Simms was cleared of the same charge.

The verdict on the first count faced by Martin was greeted with a cheer from the public gallery. On hearing their guilty verdicts, Ellis and Simms both shook their heads while Martin and Gregory sat impassively in the dock.

A fifth man and the alleged target of the shooting, Jermaine Carty, 24, was cleared of possessing a firearm on the night of the shooting. He was alleged to be a member of the rival Johnson Crew and taunted the Burger Bar Boys on stage at a Solihull nightclub earlier in the evening. The crown alleged this was a "catalyst" for the shooting.

Martin is also said to have wanted to avenge the death of his brother, Yohanne, who was shot dead in West Bromwich in December 2002 in an attack blamed on the Johnson Crew.

The four men charged with murder had denied any links to gangs and of having any knowledge of the shooting. They also rejected claims linking them to a number of mobile phones said to have been used in and around the salon in the minutes before the shootings and near where the car was later found burned out.

The guilty verdicts were all by majority, with the exception of the twins' half-brother Marcus, who was convicted unanimously. They will be sentenced on Monday.

Afterwards, West Midlands chief crown prosecutor, David Blundell, said: "Bringing this case to court could hardly have been more challenging. The shooting was a horrific act of violence and because of the close links between many of those at the party, witnesses were reluctant to approach police for fear of reprisals - let alone attend court."

The families of the victims said they were "very pleased" with the verdicts and praised the police and the witnesses who gave evidence. Sophia Ellis told a news conference: "Charlene was my other half and she was taken away before she could live her life in full."

Letisha's mother, Marcia Shakespeare, 38, said the case had been a long ordeal but the courts had returned the "right result". Gun crime was a "terrible thing that has brought misery to my family", she said, adding that she had a message to those who did not give evidence that they "had to live with this".

Ms Shakespeare said her daughter had simply been having a night out, had no connection to feuding gangs, and would be remembered as the "beautiful, fun- loving girl she was".

He paid tribute to the courage of prosecution witnesses, including Cheryl Shaw and Sophie Ellis, who were seriously injured in the shooting.

"Giving evidence in any case is not an easy thing to do," he said. "In this particular case, the prosecution witnesses showed great courage in being prepared to come to court and see justice done. From the start the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] and West Midlands police knew that a future court case would demand extreme witness care and we drew up a witness strategy in the weeks following the shooting."

Lawyers for the defendants said it was likely an appeal would be launched against at least some of the convictions.

"The whole defence will appeal," said Errol Robinson, the solicitor for Ellis and Simms. "It may be an application that goes beyond the domestic courts to the European Court. There has been a grave miscarriage of justice following one of the most unfair trials of modern times."

Spencer Stephens, solicitor for Gregory, said he anticipated that his client would appeal. Martin's solicitor declined to comment at this stage.

Before and during the trial, the defendants' barristers continually expressed concerns that prosecution witnesses had been allowed to give evidence anonymously. Unprecedented special measures were put in place to ensure the witnesses could testify without fear of reprisals.

The Court of Appeal upheld Mr Justice Goldring's decision to allow the witnesses to be anonymous provided the jury were told how this hampered the efforts of the defence counsel to cross-examine them. Police said today this had brought a new era in which the "so-called untouchables" had been "touched".

College students Charlene and Letisha were gunned down at 4.08am on Churchill Parade, off Birchfield Road, Aston, as they took some air outside the party. They were hit by a burst from an illegal MAC-10 semi-automatic submachine gun, fired from a red Ford Mondeo, that also left Sophia Ellis and Cheryl Shaw injured.

Leon Harris escaped unharmed in another burst of fire seconds later from a 9mm 1944 Spanish Llama pistol aimed at a Ford Orion car in which he was sitting. The Mondeo, which had been bought just days before the shootings and had its windows tinted, was later found burnt-out in a community centre car park in Smethwick in an attempt to hid the evidence.

A forensic examination later found spent and live ammunition that matched that used outside the hair salon. Mobile phone evidence also put the men in and around the hair salon and the community centre at the time of the attack.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Four men were today found guilty of murdering Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare in a drive-by shooting at a new year party in Birmingham two years ago. The panel of seven women and five men at Leicester crown court came to a majority decision after spending more than 14 hours deliberating.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/hip-hop-streetwear-fashion-influence/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The following excerpt appears in Highsnobiety's new book with Gestalten: The Incomplete Highsnobiety Guide to Fashion and Street Culture. You can buy it here. Hip-hop culture has had the biggest influence on street culture, informing plenty of the style trends and clothing brands that rose to prominence. In just a few decades, it evolved from fringe subculture to the most dominant force in pop culture.
In '70s New York, hip-hop was born as a reaction to disco culture. Caribbean immigrants and African-American youth in disenfranchised neighborhoods began coming together for impromptu block parties in boroughs like the Bronx. Early pioneers like DJ Kool Herc, Grand Wizzard Theodore, and Grandmaster Flash started the practice of using two turntables to extend the dance break in funk and soul records - creating a seamless sound loop ideal for dancing to endlessly. The "breakbeat" formed the backbone of hip-hop music and later led to the practice of sampling existing music to create something new, adding different tracks and instruments to transform the original piece into a brand new song.

The rhythmic delivery of rapping came from the practice of "capping," where two men would compete with their words over a microphone and win over the audience. The term emcee came from the traditional acronym "MC," short for Master of Ceremonies. Before rappers, the MC's role was to hype up the audience between a DJ's songs and encourage them to dance. Early hip-hop culture was comprised of four elements: rapping, DJing, graffiti writing, and breakdancing, an athletically challenging dance form that developed in the '80s, involving acrobatic moves such as headspins, windmills, and flairs, as well as popping and locking, which relied more on precise body movements.

In the nascent days of hip-hop, photographers such as Jamel Shabazz, Martha Cooper, and Henry Chalfant documented the culture's rise in New York's inner cities. B-boys and b-girls wore adidas tracksuits and straight-legged denim over Puma Suede sneakers or adidas Superstars customized with fat laces. Kangol bucket hats and Cazal sunglasses were commonplace, and in the winter, it was time to whip out a shearling coat or leather blazer. Jewelry and chains became a prominent flex on your peers, and no other rapper embodied that more than Slick Rick.

Rick the Ruler's penchant for layered chains, rings, and self-professed love for Bally shoes and Kangol hats are expressed in his 1985 song with Doug E. Fresh, "La Di Da Di." From the start, this is what separated hip-hop from its rock-and-roll predecessors. Movements like punk were founded on anti-fashion ideals and stood in contrast to consumption and capitalism. Hip-hop fully embraced it from the start, seeing dressing up as its own competition - and every rapper boasted he dressed better than the rest.

Ironicallly, rappers weren't the original hip-hop style icons; it was the drug dealers who actually had the money and high-end gear most rappers lyrically bragged about. A great portion of the hip-hop uniform is informed by what drug dealers wore. In an age before streetwear boutiques, you had sportswear stores and old-school outfitters that peddled sneakers and workwear products like Carhartt chore coats and Timberland boots - rough items that could withstand a New York winter or a day spent hustling on the block. But if you really wanted to get fresh, there was one person you had to see: Harlem tailor Dapper Dan.

Born Daniel Day, the man known as Dapper Dan grew up in Harlem on 129th Street and Lexington. He got his name from besting an older man in craps, who went by Dapper Dan. After defeat, he passed his name down and decided to go by "Tenor Man Dan" thereafter, because he played the saxophone. He opened a boutique in 1982 at 43 East 125th Street, taking fabrics from popular luxury brands such as Gucci, MCM, Louis Vuitton, and Fendi, and repurposing them into street-ready silhouettes like tracksuits, bomber jackets, and puffy-shouldered coats. The boutique operated 24/7 for 10 years and served some of hip-hop's most prolific figures. Eric B. & Rakim wear Dapper Dan's creations - custom Chanel tracksuits - on the cover of their album Paid in Full. The store was shut down in 1992 for numerous copyright violations.

B-boys and b-girls wore adidas tracksuits and straight-legged denim over Puma Suede sneakers or adidas Superstars customized with fat laces.

Beyond the appreciation for European fashion designers like Gucci, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton, brands such as Polo Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger were gaining steam in hip-hop culture. Entire crews devoted to rocking Polo formed, like the Lo-Lifes, who couldn't afford the high-priced gear, so took to "racking" it - that is, shoplifting copious amounts of it, keeping what they wanted for themselves, and reselling the rest. Sportswear brands like Nike and adidas were always important in the hip-hop style uniform, and as hip-hop evolved, so did sneaker culture.

The first inkling of today's barrage of rapper/sneaker brand collaborations occurred in 1986, when adidas signed Run-D.M.C. to a $1 million endorsement deal that included a signature line for the group. The story goes that the trio had just released their third album, Raising Hell, and their manager at the time, Lyor Cohen, invited adidas executive Angelo Anastasio to a show at Madison Square Garden. Before performing their hit song "My Adidas," the group asked the audience to raise their shoes in the air. Impressed with the amount of three-striped kicks he saw in the building, Anastasio signed the group.

Movements like punk were founded on anti-fashion ideals and stood in contrast to consumption and capitalism. Hip-hop fully embraced it from the start, seeing dressing up as its own competition - and every rapper boasted he dressed better than the rest.

On the West Coast, groups such as Public Enemy and N.W.A came forth with their own unique sound and sense of style. Baseball caps, coach jackets, and a more militaristic dress code similar to the Black Panther Party provided a contrast to East Coast hip-hop style. As hip-hop entered the '90s, sports teams and Afrocentric colors began to seep into the style conversation, as well as early streetwear labels like Stüssy and X-LARGE. Filmmaker Spike Lee immortalized the Air Jordan sneaker series in his films, often outfitting characters like Mars Blackmon and Buggin' Out in crisp pairs of Jordan kicks, oversized eyeglasses, and African print shorts.

The '90s and early '00s were marked by a time of streetwear and "urban" brands born out of hip-hop culture. Graffiti writers like Mark Ecko, Stash, and KAWS turned T-shirts into a canvas for their work. Moguls like Russell Simmons and Puff Daddy decided to start their own clothing lines rather than kowtow to designers outside of the culture. Daymond John founded his FUBU label and got LL Cool J to wear one of his hats and shout the brand out during a Gap commercial in a legendary moment of marketing inception.

If one needed further proof that hip-hop wasn't just about the music but the lifestyle and attitude it represented, look no further than how NBA style has evolved. The basketball league's stars transitioned from Magic Johnson and Larry Bird to Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson. Jordan was a style icon in his own right. His Jordan Brand line of sneakers and apparel were a shorthand status symbol on the streets, infamously inspiring a Sports Illustrated article about people being killed for their kicks. Iverson, a tattooed, corn-rowed star player for the Philadelphia 76ers, drew the ire of then-league commissioner David Stern. Iverson often sat courtside or showed up to games in baggy, oversized sweat suits, jeans, T-shirts, and fitted baseball caps, as was par for the course in hip-hop trends. In 2005, Stern implemented a mandatory dress code for the NBA, requiring all players to dress in "business or conservative attire" when representing the NBA in any official capacity.

That jumpstarted a new era of athlete style, as NBA players struggled to fit in with the new dress code, but ultimately giving rise to the next generation of stylish athletes, who learned the rules well enough to know how to break them. Hip-hop's fashion iconoclasts began to rise up as well. André 3000 of Outkast favored slim, tailored garments that contrasted with the baggier styles of the time. Pharrell Williams favored skate brands, mesh trucker caps, and Japanese labels like A Bathing Ape. Kanye West broke the barriers between hip-hop and high fashion, proving hip-hop artists could do so much more for the fashion industry than simply attend the shows and buy the clothes.

It wasn't long before the likes of Pharrell, Kanye, A$AP Rocky, and Travis Scott were tapped for designer collaborations. Pharrell did collaborations with Timberland, Mark McNairy, Chanel, and G-Star RAW. West designed a capsule collection with A.P.C. Scott was tapped for a line with Helmut Lang. A$AP Rocky secured a campaign with Dior Homme and capsule collections for GUESS and cult Japanese sportswear line Needles. But things truly came full circle when Dapper Dan, whose atelier was once raided by police at the behest of litigious fashion labels, reopened his Harlem boutique in 2018 in an official collaboration with Gucci. In addition to designing a capsule collection for the Italian fashion house, Dapper Dan's restored atelier is back to making one-of-a-kind custom pieces using official Gucci fabrics. Twenty-six years after he was forced to close, the respect due to the inimitable Harlem tailor was repaid in full.
For more information on the people, brands, and trends that shook the worlds of fashion and street culture, order your copy of The Incomplete Highsnobiety Guide to Street Fashion and Culture.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Hip-Hop Left a Lasting Influence on Streetwear & Fashion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The following excerpt appears in Highsnobiety's new book with Gestalten: The Incomplete Highsnobiety Guide to Fashion and Street Culture. You can buy it here. Hip-hop culture has had the biggest influence on street culture, informing plenty of the style trends and clothing brands that rose to prominence.

# data[].attributes.headline
Influence of music in the fashion industry

# data[].attributes.subject
Influence of music in the fashion industry

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.szentek.uk/news/from-beats-to-racks-the-influence-of-music-in-the-fashion-industry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A few weeks ago, Jimmy Iovine, one of the music industry's most legendary scouts and Interscope Records' founder, announced his and his wife's newest investment: the fashion label TheVampire's Wife, owned by former model Susie Cave and made famous by its retro-glam dresses and direct-to-consumer marketing. Shortly after, when asked about his interest in the fashion industry in an interview for BOF (Business of Fashion), Iovine said: 'I know more about music and tech and different things like that than I know about dresses, but I do know a narrative and I know a story'. After understanding Iovine's motives through reading that interview, I couldn't help but return to a recurring thought of mine that ranged around how all types of art are integrated, and how creativity generates creativity.

When looking for a connection between the music and fashion industries, there are multiple that might come to mind: from musicians who founded their own brands (e.g. Rihanna and KanyeWest), to the fashion TikToker WisdomKaye getting inspiration from album covers and artists to create outfits, to the major connection between the punk rock band Sex Pistols and British designer Vivienne Westwood since their beginning. Together the band and the designer managed to establish the London punk scene and culture as it is known today. If there's one major element that brings these industries together, it is the feeling of belonging that both bring to their publics. The music industry brings together 'tribes' of people who listen to the same type of music, have similar ideas, live similar lifestyles. This translates into fashion - as dressing in a certain way has the ability of showing to the outside world what and who you identify yourself with. Therefore, a major part of the feeling of belonging that music brings is represented in fashion.

‍

When going back a little to the Punk Rock example, a subculture that was born from the desire of an anarchic, nihilist and revolutionary movement as a backlash against UK's poor economy and all-time high unemployment rates on the 1970s, it is clear that those same values were being portrayed by the BDSM fashion, bondage gear, safety pins, chains, the color black and outrageous make-up that punk artists and followers of the punk scene would dress in. These style choices surely weren't coincidental, but really had the intention to be more shocking to society; those who dressed in BDSM were choosing to be outsiders, creating a group separate from society. Moving on to the Glam Rock scene, artists like David Bowie and Alice Cooper, as well as their fans, can then be seen dressing in glitter, bright colors, platforms and flamboyant clothing to manifest the irrejection of the previous darker rock days, as well as traditional gender roles, with the acceptance of an androgynous look, marking the legalization of same sex activity in the UK in 1967. It may seem that the obvious influences the music scene had in fashion is something of the past, yet it is undeniable that many designers loved in today's industry still see the music scene as an unevaluable pot of inspiration gold.

Slade

‍

As a way to understand how music has also been a key element in recent fashion, the focus of this analysis will be on two major genres made famous in the last few decades and their ramifications, those being: hip-hop and electronic music.

Hip-hop was born in the 1970s inNew York, as a reaction to the prominent disco culture, and was brought together by Caribbean immigrants and black youth in marginalized neighborhoods, that would meet for gatherings featuring impromptu free-style rapping battles and mixing of funk and soul records in a way that encouraged dancing all nightlong. ' It was the start of a fringe subculture that would slowly evolve to the most dominant force in pop culture',describes 'The Incomplete Highsnobiety Guide to Fashion and StreetCulture'. As in other music genres, slowly the "tribe" of hip-hop formed, and with it their fashion statement, consisting primarily of Adidas tracksuits, Puma Suede sneakers (or Adidas Superstars) and bucket hats. This combination, though dated back to the 1980s, is not uncommon to spot within street style lovers walking down major cities in present days.Even though some might not realize the origins of the looks they're wearing, naturally, and maybe somewhat unconsciously, hip-hop style has become a synonym of street style as the years passed. What is key to notice when trying to understand how hip-hop went from a space for marginalized minorities to a huge fashion influence is that, according to Jian DeLeon:
"From the start, this is what separated hip-hop from its rock-and-roll predecessors. Movements like punk were founded on anti-fashion ideals and stood in contrast to consumption and capitalism.Hip-hop fully embraced it from the start, seeing dressing up as its own competition - and every rapper boasted he dressed better than the rest."
Dressing better than the rest would be synonymous with status, and there was no one better at providing that in the hip-hop scene than Harlem tailor Drapper Dan. Dan ran a boutique from1982 to 1992 in New York, operating 24/7 and serving some of the most affluent figures in the hip-hop world with his creations, made by repurposing fabrics from brands like Gucci, MCM, Louis Vuitton and Fendi to form tracksuits, bomber jackets and puffy-shouldered coats. In addition to that, brands like Tommy Hilfiger and Polo Ralph Lauren were soon to be seen among some groups in the hip-hop environment, showing that even though it took a while for hip-hop and streetfashion to influence luxury brands, as much as they do today, these brands were clearly already somewhat involved in that scene from its beginning.

Drapper Dan

‍

The 1990s and 2000s were marked by a number of streetwear brands that were born out of hip-hop culture, like Stüssy and X-LARGE. Sneaker culture grew closely with the hip-hop world with, for example, Air Jordans being immortalized by Spike Lee in his movies. In later years, hip-hop artists began to adapt original hip-hop trends to theirpersonal styles and make that type of streetwear more applicable to the general public: Tyler The Creator favors loose pants combined with dress shirts and caps, while A$AP Rocky wears slim, tailored garments with an androgynous feel, and Pharell Williams prefers skate brands and mesh trucker caps. Kanye Westbroke the final barrier between hip-hop and high fashion by creating his own brand and designing his own clothes, Yeezy proving it's worth in major fashion events and fashion weeks around the world. In 2018, Drapper Dan reopened his boutique in Harlem in an official collaboration with Gucci, this time using real Gucci fabrics to make his one-of-a-kind pieces, and making clear to everyone that hip-hop is one of the major influences of today's fashion industry.

While the hip-hop scene and its fashion developed in the streets of New York, the underground clubs and late-night encounters in some European capitals saw another type of subculture emerge. Gathering many genres within one, there are numerous so called "tribes" that can be spotted in the broad spectrum that is electronic music. There are those who long for the HaciendaClub days, those who turn to raves as their major moments of freedom, those who love dancing to EDM, the fans of the 1990s PLUR movement, the trance lovers, the faithful followers of New Wave, Techno, House and its ramifications... The list is almost endless, yet a unifying aspect of all of these tribes is the importance of being comfortable, making a statement, and expressing who they are and how they feel, all at the same time, through fashion. And that aspect most definitely caught the fashion industry's attention.

EDM influences in mainstream fashion can be identified in the Jeremy Scott SS15 collection in 2014, featuring neon shades and kandi bracelets, making direct references to electronic music festivals of recent years. However, some of today's biggest fashion trends can first be spotted when tracing back to EDM's non-mainstream era, the post-disco era where Electronic dance music began, where London's late80s and early 90s rave culture united with Berlin's underground and prominent club scene, where retro days would be referenced.

Jeremny Scott SS15

‍

The fashion season of 2017 made clear that both current and retro electronic music play a huge part in the fashion industry. Much like in the darker dance music days and nightclubs where attendees would go to free themselves during Reagan and Thatcher years, even if just for a night, fashion is looking for a way to find shelter from the current political climate. Trends such as neon colors and psychedelic patterns make direct reference to clubs' flyers that could be spotted in the streets during the 90s by their flashy colors and bold letterings. The incorporation of period pieces in outfits, such as sharp, tailored suits with wide-legged trousers, direct references to DuranDuran music videos, remind viewers of the 80s, where new wave, techno and house first emerged from the aftermath of disco music. Another trend that could be spotted in the SS17 London Fashion Week and that unites all eras of dance music is the use of wider silhouettes: baggy in some places, angular in others and with the sole and main purpose of giving the person who's wearing it the ability to move freely and to dance all night long.

Someone once told me that fashion is a sign of the times, yet it is becoming more and more clear that music is the true signifier. The fashion world is undeniably permeated by influences coming from the music industry; their connection is so strong that it becomes almost impossible not to associate rock music with leather jackets, grunge music with flannels and jeans, electronic music with bright colored windbreakers or hip-hop with tracksuits and sneakers. Both are responsible for the feeling of identity that music lovers construct over the years and both contribute to making said music lovers who they are, shape how they see the world and how they allow the world to see them. We're never going to truly understand how any type of art is conceived until we understand that all art and creative processes are interconnected, and that this is how they manage to truly impact us.

‍
Music never lets you down
Puts a smile on your face
Anytime, any place
Dancing helps relieve the pain
Soothes your mind, makes you happy again
Listen to those dancing feet
Close your eyes and let go
But it don't mean a thing
If it ain't got that swing
Bop-shoo-wa, bop-shoo-wa, bop-shoo-wa Chic - Everybody Dance from the album: Chic (1977)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
From Beats to Racks: The Influence of Music in the Fashion Industry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A few weeks ago, Jimmy Iovine, one of the music industry's most legendary scouts and Interscope Records' founder, announced his and his wife's newest investment: the fashion label TheVampire's Wife, owned by former model Susie Cave and made famous by its retro-glam dresses and direct-to-consumer marketing.

# data[].attributes.body
Monday - AM - House chores + Exercise
- Lunch - Lunch + Client work
- PM - Dissertation
- Eve - Relax/Social time
Tuesday - AM - Exercise
- Work
- PM - Dissertation
- Eve - Relax/Social time
Wednesday - AM - Exercise
- Work
- PM - Dissertation
- Eve - Relax/Social
Thursday - AM - Exercise
- Work
- PM - Dissertation
- Eve - Relax/Social time
Friday - AM - House chores + Exercise
- Lunch - Lunch + Client Work
- PM - Dissertation
- Eve - Relax/Social time
Weekend - Relax

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.michaelsolomon.com/fashion-psychology/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Fashion psychology is commonly as the study of the impact of clothing choices on the way in which we perceive and judge each other. However, the term fashion psychology is a bit misleading, as the actually looks well beyond clothing's impact on the individual. And, its focus transcends clothing to also consider the impact of many other products that express self-identity and are influenced by the same forces that drive change in the apparel industry, such as home furnishings, cosmetics, and even automobiles.

Fashion psychology is very important to marketers who need to understand the factors that make it likely a product will be adopted by a group of consumers, and who need to predict how long that product will continue to stay in fashion. So, part of fashion psychology focuses on changes in acceptance over time. For example, a classic is a fashion with an extremely long acceptance cycle that is adopted by a fairly large group. In contrast, a fad is a short-lived fashion. Relatively few people adopt a fad product, but it can spread quickly. Adopters may all belong to a common subculture, and the fad "trickles across" members but rarely breaks out of that specific group.

Let's distinguish among some confusing terms in fashion psychology. Fashion is the process of social diffusion by which some group(s) of consumers adopts a new style. In contrast, (or style) is a particular combination of attributes (say, stovepipe jeans that women wear with a tunic top). To be means that some reference group positively evaluates this combination (i.e., endorses this look as "in" for this season). Thus, the term Danish Modern refers to particular characteristics of furniture design (i.e., a fashion in interior design); it does not necessarily imply that Danish Modern is a fashion that consumers currently desire.

Fashion is a complex process that operates on many levels. For this reason, there are many perspectives on the origin and diffusion of fashion.

Psychological Models of Fashion

Many psychological factors help explain what motivates us to be fashionable. These include conformity, desires for variety seeking, the need to express personal creativity, and sexual attraction. For example, many consumers seem to have a need for uniqueness : They want to be different (though not necessarily different!). As a result, people may conform to the basic outlines of a fashion, but still improvise to make a personal statement within these general guidelines.

One of the earliest theories of fashion psychology argued that "shifting erogenous zones" (sexually arousing areas of the body) accounted for fashion changes, and that different zones become the object of interest because they reflect societal trends. For example, it was common for Renaissance-era women to drape their abdomens in fabrics to give a swollen appearance; successful childbearing was a priority in the disease-ridden 14th and 15th centuries.

Numerous studies have looked at how variations in clothing influence observers' responses. For example, one study that men tended to leave higher tips for waitresses who wore red tops. The "dress for success" phenomenon illustrates the widespread belief that appearance directly impacts the way people are treated.

Other fashion psychology researchers focus on the role of clothing in mate selection; According to signaling theory , a male peacock will display his vibrant fan of feathers in a ritual to attract a female with whom to mate. Some researchers argue that clothing gives us a similar ability to distinguish ourselves from a crowd in an effort to find a mate.

A separate, albeit smaller, body of work in fashion psychology points to the important role that clothing and other expressive products play in shaping self-concept - "you are what you wear." In researchers asked respondents to wear a lab coat, which people associate with attentiveness and precise work. They found that subjects who wore the lab coat displayed enhanced performance on tasks that required them to pay close attention. But they also introduced a twist: When respondents were told the garment was in fact a painter's coat rather than a doctor's lab coat, the effects went away. In other words, the respondents interpreted the symbolic meaning of the clothing and then altered their behavior accordingly. The expression "clothes make the man" expresses this process.

Economic Models of Fashion

Economists approach fashion in terms of the model of supply and demand. Items in limited supply have high value, whereas our desire decreases for readily available products. Rare items command respect and prestige. However, other factors also influence the demand curve for fashion-related products. These include a prestige-exclusivity effect where high prices still create high demand, and a snob effect whereby lower prices actually reduce demand ("If it's that cheap, it can't be any good").

Sociological Models of Fashion

The fashion system includes all the people and organizations that create symbolic meanings and transfer those meanings to cultural goods. Although we often equate fashion with clothing, it's important to keep in mind that fashion processes affect types of cultural phenomena, including music, art, architecture, and even science (i.e., certain research topics and individual scientists are "hot" at any point in time). Even business practices are subject to the fashion process; they evolve and change depending on which management techniques are in vogue, such as total quality management (TQM), just-in-time inventory control (JIT), or managing by walking around (MBWA).

Trickle-down theory that two conflicting forces drive fashion change. First, subordinate groups adopt the status symbols of the groups above them as they attempt to climb up the ladder of social mobility. Dominant styles thus originate with the upper classes and trickle down to those below.

Now the second force kicks in: Those people in the superordinate groups keep a wary eye on the ladder below them to be sure followers don't imitate them. When lower-class consumers mimic their actions, they adopt new fashions to distance themselves from the mainstream. These two processes create a self-perpetuating cycle of change-the machine that drives fashion.

A Medical Model of Fashion

For many years, the lowly Hush Puppy was a shoe for nerds. Suddenly-almost overnight-the shoe became a chic fashion statement even though its manufacturer did nothing to promote this image. Why did this style diffuse through the population so quickly? Meme theory explains this process with a medical metaphor. A is an idea or product that enters the consciousness of people over time. Memes spread among consumers in a geometric progression just as a virus starts off small and steadily infects increasing numbers of people until it becomes an epidemic.

Fashion psychology also reveals important linkages between clothing styles and underlying social values as well as tribal divisions. Distinctive styles and colors denote gang membership, for example, and these markings extend to other domains like sports apparel. The ongoing controversy about the banning of clothing associated with Islamic terrorism, such as the on French beaches, illustrates how fashion psychology penetrates to crucial issues in society.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fashion Psychology - MIchael Solomon - Consumer Behavior & Marketing Expert

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fashion psychology is commonly as the study of the impact of clothing choices on the way in which we perceive and judge each other. However, the term fashion psychology is a bit misleading, as the actually looks well beyond clothing's impact on the individual.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022103112000200

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We introduce the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes. We offer a…

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.psychologistworld.com/body-language/psychology-of-clothing-dating-dress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You needn't be an avid fashionista, nor a London Fashion Week regular, to be aware of how important our dress sense is to our reputations in the 21st Century. The clothes we wear send powerful signals to our peers and strangers, projecting the self image of us that we want to display.

Yet, how many of us truly understand the psychology of how people in the street or office interpret our wardrobe choices, and how this impression might differ to the one that we believe we're conveying to them?

An array of psychological surveys have revealed the true impact of clothing choices on the way in which we perceive and judge each other, with experiments showing some surprising results. They even reveal how subtle varieties in dress sense can affect our ability to attract a partner whilst we are dating.

Defying stereotypes

Against the gender stereotype of females being more fashion-aware and conscious of others' clothes and makeup efforts than males, studies have also lifted the lid on men's insecurities with regards to clothes.

Contrary to commonly held beliefs, men have been shown to be often more self-conscious than females with regards to their personal dress sense and the way in which they are viewed in public ( Solomon and Schopler, 1982).

Therefore, we need to understand the significance of clothing choices regardless of our gender. Whether you are male or female, your fashion choices can affect both your self image, the impression that you convey to others and in turn, the way in which people behave towards you. They can influence everything from the outcome of a sports match ( Hill and Barton, 2005) to an interviewer's impression of your ability to perform effectively in a job position ( Forsythe, 2006).

In this article, we look at the effect that our fashion choices today can have on our lives, and how our unconscious clothing choices are interpreted by those around us.

Why clothes matter: what your wardrobe says about you

Clothes have not always been as influential a 'tell' of our personalities as they are today. Only as a result of technical advancements over centuries have fashion choices become significant.

Where in early civilizations, the key purpose of clothing was to keep us warm and relatively dry, today, central heating warms our homes, reducing our dependence on clothes alone to help us to survive. Clothes have developed from a practical asset to a social marker: they affect the way we see ourselves. They help us to be seen in the light that we wish to be, and also exude our personalities and social status.

In many societies, dress sense embodies personal wealth and taste. For example, Economist George Taylor demonstrated this most vividly with the Hemline Index (Taylor, 1926). Taylor noted that as a country enters recession and adopts austere spending habits, women often show a preference towards longer dresses, whilst during times of prosperity, the opposite result can be seen - hemlines often become shorter.

A second key influence on our dress sense is a result of millions of years of development as a species. As with many animals, the concept of mate selection in evolutionary psychology suggests that our behavior is determined by our efforts to find a mate and to reproduce.

Signalling in animals: 'honest signals' such as this male peacock displaying his colorful covert feathers to attract a female partner.

According to signalling theory, a male peacock will display his vibrant fan of covert feathers in a ritual to attract a female with whom to mate. Such rituals vary from species to species, but in humans, our ability to create and wear clothes gives us a equivalent advantage in being able to distinguish ourselves from a crowd and demonstrate our individuality in an effort to find a mate. Conversely, too, we might use clothing to merge into a crowd and hide our individuality by dressing in a uniform.

Dressing to Impress?

Aside from the adage of "dressing to impress" what do we know about the psychology of clothing choices in relation to dating?

Firstly, let's consider the idea of how we seek to 'impress' potential partners. A study by Joseph Benz at the University of Nebraska surveyed more than 90 men and women with regards to the way in which they deceive potential partners whilst on dates. The researchers found that both genders tend to use deception when dating but for different purposes.

Males were found to try to impress their dates by emphasizing the security that they could offer the partner - for example, by exaggerating their financial position or by trying to demonstrate a preparedness to commit. Women, however, were deceptive with regards to their body image, exaggerating physical features in an effort to appear more attractive to their date ( Benz et al, 2005).

In both cases, clothing may play a part in this dating ritual of deception.

Another factor in our clothing choices is the way in which males and females perceive and interpret different colors.

In one experiment, researchers photographed people in different colored clothes and then asked participants to rate the attractiveness of people in the resulting photos. They found that the color of clothing affects the way in which men rate both males' and females' attractiveness, and how women rate men's attractiveness. Interestingly however, clothing color did not influence women's judgement of other females ( Roberts et al, 2000).

This brings us to the question: which colors are viewed as attractive?

Roberts and his fellow researchers found that red clothes would tend to lead participants to rate subjects more favorably in terms of attractiveness compared to when they wore clothes of other colors.

This result might explain the findings of a study which found that, when waitresses wore different colored t-shirts whilst serving in a restaurant, men would tend to leave higher tips for those wearing red tops than those with t-shirts of other colors. However, shirt color had no effect on the tips left by female customers ( Guéguen and Jacob, 2010).
Learn more about the psychology of color here
Of course, the color of garments is far from the only factor used in judging a person based on clothing.

Timothy Brown and his fellow researchers of the Department of Psychology at Old Dominion University looked at the effect of clothing on college students' judgement of both people's attractiveness and masculinity or femininity.

Brown found that in both genders, posture and the way in which people moved influenced perceptions of their masculinity or femininity, which was intrinsically linked to their judgement of their attractiveness.

Specifically in males, tight-fitting clothes as opposed helped lead to perceptions of increased masculinity over those who wore baggy garments ( Brown et al, 1986).

Naturally, many of the findings from research into the psychology of fashion and clothing choices are subject to the cultural values of the society in which a person lives. Cultural differences in the interpretation of color, for example, mean that red may be perceived to have different qualities to those valued by participants in Guéguen and Jacob's waitress experiment, depending on the country a restaurant is situated in.

We should also note that the superficiality of clothing choices are rarely the sole determinant of how people are perceived: Brown's study into clothing and attractiveness demonstrated the influence of body language in addition to clothing choices. And for those of us with limited fashion sense, as the English writer William Hazlitt cautioned, "Those who make their dress a principal part of themselves, will, in general, become of no more value than their dress".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
fashion psychology: what clothes say about you

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fashion Psychology: How The Clothes You Wear Affect How People Perceive You

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You needn't be an avid fashionista, nor a London Fashion Week regular, to be aware of how important our dress sense is to our reputations in the 21st Century. The clothes we wear send powerful signals to our peers and strangers, projecting the self image of us that we want to display.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/fashion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Kaitlin Luna: Welcome to Speaking of Psychology , a bi-weekly podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna.

The clothes we put on every day tell a story about who we are to the world and can have a major impact on our emotions and mood. So where does psychology fit into all this, and how does it help us solve some of the biggest challenges facing the fashion industry now and in the future? Our guest for this episode is Dr. Carolyn Mair, a cognitive psychologist who created the Psychology of Fashion department at the London College of Fashion at the University of Arts London as well as an undergraduate program and two master's degree programs there. Dr. Mair is currently a consultant for fashion brands and recently published a book called the "Psychology of Fashion." Welcome Dr. Mair.

Carolyn Mair: Thank you very much Kaitlin it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Kaitlin Luna: We're happy to have you. How did you get into this field?

Carolyn Mair: I've always been interested in fashion, and my first job was a window dresser, visual merchandiser as it's known now. I did that for four years, absolutely loved it and then I did several other creative jobs. Making clothes for people, making clothes myself and so on and then when I got into my 30s and I had three children I decided it was time to get a degree. So, I did my undergraduate degree in applied psychology and computing. Then I did a master's in research methods and then I was very fortunate to be able to have a funded PhD studentship. So, after my PhD I really wanted to work in the applied field of psychology because my PhD was so theoretical, and I worked for seven years in an ordinary psychology department as a senior lecturer and then became a professor. And then I was at a conference and I met somebody from London College of Fashion and when I asked him if there were only psychologists there he said there weren't and that I should come into a paper there. And so I gave a paper at London College of Fashion on the importance of psychology for fashion and I was invited back to discuss how I could bring psychology to the college and that was back in 2011. I started working there in 2012 and developed the master's courses and set up the department before I left in 2017.

Kaitlin Luna: Wow so you've had a lifelong interest in fashion and that became academic and now here you are having have set up this program at the college, that's wonderful.

Carolyn Mair: Thank you.

Kaitlin Luna: And you wrote in your book that there are very few psychologists in this field, so from your perspective why is it important to have psychologists researching and working in the fashion industry?

Carolyn Mair: Well the fashion industry is about people. It employs millions worldwide and everyone wears clothes. Clothes are the closest thing to our bodies, they're our second skin. And psychologists can help with loss of the issues that are known to be caused by the fashion industry. So for example the fashion industry has a poor reputation in terms of social responsibility and now coming to a head, and it's been around for four decades actually, are the issues about sustainability. So the fashion industry is one of the worst industries for damaging the environment and psychologists can help with this. They can help the consumers change their habits through developing behavior change programs, they can also work with employers to help them create workplaces that provide better conditions for their staff, and they can also help in predicting demands so that there's far less waste when the items are made. So currently fashion forecasters tend to work on intuition, gut feeling, sometimes they look at the historical cycles, but psychologists are well trained in data analysis and they will be able to predict fashion trends much better using data.

And of course, there's the obvious way that psychologists can work in the fashion industry and that's in consumer behavior. And consumers are becoming more and more demanding. They are wanting more than just to be satisfied. Customers now have fantastic opportunities for competition, for searching online and in-store so the retail companies, fashion retail companies, have to give consumers a fantastic experience and who better to help design a fantastic experience than psychologists.

Kaitlin Luna: You just touched on some very interesting issues regarding overconsumption and regarding the environment. So you cited an alarming statistic in your book as well that in the US about an estimated 15 million people have a spending addiction, so we know that overconsumption is clearly an issue. How can people break the cycle and consume more responsibly?

Carolyn Mair: Well it's a very difficult one because the way we shop becomes a habit and lots of, lots of us go shopping as a social pleasure, as a leisure pursuit, and so shopping becomes part of what we do, part of our identity. And also you know, we like novelty, we like fashion we want to look nice and enhance ourselves. But people can also change their habits through structured behavior change programs so they can learn to identify what are the habits, what are the triggers that encourage them to go out buy more, more, more, more. And quite often they don't wear these items and how can their habits be changed so that it's a win-win situation for them so they have more money in their pockets to enjoy experiences rather than material objects. And they can also do good for the environment by consuming less and contributing less to the landfill problem.

Kaitlin Luna: Is this something you're working on when you in your consulting work?

Carolyn Mair: Yes, so I'm currently working across so many issues within the fashion industry and it's just such an amazing opportunity to make a really important difference globally. So yes changing people's habits, looking at the communication that we put out as a business, looking at how we communicate with our staff and with our customers. Yeah so this is something that I've been doing as a consultant since 2017. Understanding that, you know, that consumers are people, and they have behavior and psychologists understand behavior. So as a cognitive psychologist looking at all the cognitive processes you know the way we think, the way we perceive, the way we understand the world to make sense of it, all these things, processes, that we do as human beings this is what psychologists can help the fashion industry, and then to be honest all industry, learn more about.

Kaitlin Luna: And you wrote a lot about fast fashion which we've touched on as well. The environmental impacts of this and the human impacts of it, how its created environmental and human rights problems and there has been some movement in a positive direction, it's more awareness of this but people are still suffering in sweatshops and landfills are still getting filled up with unused or unwanted clothing. What is needed to change this trend?

Carolyn Mair: Okay first of all, I think it's quite important that that this notion of fast fashion equals bad needs to be changed. So, lots of items which are not considered fast fashion are made in exactly the same factories under exactly the same conditions. The problem is not with fast fashion per se, the problem with is with overproduction and overconsumption that ends up in the landfill sites. There are problems with the working conditions with abuse of the workers, with human rights as you say and these need to be addressed at the local level because they the factories are typically run by people in the local communities and there is a lot of pressure on them to change and hopefully they will. When the pressure turns into voting with our wallets, which is, I think we're beginning to see that, people are buying less and being more mindful with what they buy. Then then the behavior of the factory owners and the retail companies will change accordingly and the pressure is coming from consumers now.

Kaitlin Luna: So you are seeing changes in the opposite direction where people are being more mindful about what they purchase and how much of it.

Carolyn Mair: Some pockets of the population yes for sure, but there are still people who want to consume a lot simply because it's cheap and in reality they probably spend as much as they would on five or six very cheap items as they would if they bought one more one expensive item, a more expensive item that they would actually wear and it would potentially last longer and they would value it more.

Kaitlin Luna: Do you think a solution is for people to purchase perhaps higher quality items? Sometimes that can mean more expensive items as opposed to those, you know, buying five t-shirts for the price of one nice shirt. Is that one way to alleviate the problem?

Carolyn Mair: Yes I think I think that makes perfect sense. Because you know buying five very similar items and four of them are unlikely to be worn is purely wasteful and because they're cheap they're probably not going to be sold or swapped or nobody was really going to want them secondhand anyway. So yeah, I would definitely say buy less, buy mindfully, enjoy the experience, but don't buy multiple items that you're not going to wear. Think about it at the point-of-sale, when are you going to wear this item or these items, do you really want to buy it and is it just gonna hang in your wardrobe with the tags still on it until you decide you don't want it anymore and find out that nobody else does either which is, it's just so wasteful.

Kaitlin Luna: So there does come a point in a lifecycle of a piece of clothing item where you might want to give it away or to donate it or something of that nature. Is that a good solution to give away your clothes, give them to charity, give them to friends?

Carolyn Mair: Yeah definitely anything that stops them going into landfill is good, recycling if the product can be recycled then fantastic. Sometimes the recycling process does quite a lot of harm to the environment as well. Separating different fabrics, different textiles is difficult and not always possible. But anything is better than putting your unwanted items in the bin that would go to landfill. So swapping, renting clothes is becoming more and more popular. Selling on a market, individuals selling their own clothes is also becoming popular, and lots of fashion brands, fast fashion I'm well aware of, I'm not sure that the higher end of the fashion market does this, is accepting bags of recyclable clothes that you don't want, previously loved clothes let's say, for recycling and they might be used if they can be separated out for recycling. Some are useful for stuffing other fabrics for rags and then some are sent on to other countries so there's some organizations that go around and buy unwanted used clothing. But this can be problematic because the used clothes might end up actually frustrating the development of the fashion industry in developing markets.

Kaitlin Luna: I want to turn now to mental health, and as you mentioned clothing conveys a lot about a person. So what does, how does what we put on our bodies every day influence our mental health?

Carolyn Mair: Well it's stressful for us if we don't feel comfortable in what we're wearing. If we're really worrying that it's appropriate or it's suitable or we don't feel confident in what we're wearing. It stresses us and this means that we don't have the cognitive capacity to deal with the problem at hand. This is why lots of very successful people tend to wear a work uniform in inverted commas, not necessarily as suits but it may be t-shirt and jeans as we've seen with Mark Zuckerberg who wears the same items every day to allow this freeing up of cognitive capacity for more important issues. And then you know for you or me this might mean going to a meeting wearing something that we've worn before and knowing that it's suitable or it's appropriate and we don't have to worry about that at that time.

Kaitlin Luna: I know there have been positive steps in the right direction but it still seems like everywhere we go we're bombarded with images that encourage us to consume fashion and that there's no way to escape it. How does that impact people's mental health?

Carolyn Mair: People generally buy far more than they need and probably to be honest, none of us probably needs to buy any more clothes ever. Research suggests that 80% of clothes in our wardrobe are unworn and that's quite worrying actually, as some people can become addicted to shopping and this can result in debt, in shame, in guilt and there's a move now to buy mindfully which we've discussed, and I would definitely agree with that. Buying too much is something that we really should avoid. When you buy less it seems like a win-win situation. You've got more money in your pocket to enjoy the experiences that bring more and lasting satisfaction and you're also doing less harm to the environment.

Kaitlin Luna: So throughout this interview you've mentioned several times about the importance of people being mindful of their purchases, and this move toward mindfulness is certainly wonderful in many ways. But how does that work within the fashion industry because they certainly need to generate profits. I mean they want to respond to their customers in terms of wanting to be understanding and receptive to being more mindful about fashion, but at the same time they also need to make money. So what are you seeing in terms of that tension that exists?

Carolyn Mair: I think once the fashion industry is more in tune with what the customers want, actually want rather than what they think they want, when they're more able to predict more accurately, so production on demand rather than full supply, then you know this affects profits more so than the selling. So much money is wasted on overproduction, so if that comes out of the equation, the company can still be profitable.

Kaitlin Luna: You mentioned in your book the pressure to produce for consumers is so high that people in the fashion industry often suffer from mental health issues like substance abuse, anxiety, depression and eating disorders. So what needs to change in the industry and are you seeing any movement in that direction, in a better direction?

Carolyn Mair: Well I think we're still waiting for some change in that. I mean the cycles of fashion have become shorter and shorter so where they used to be two seasons and perhaps a cruise collection there are now six, seven, ten. Some high street brands have new stock every week, some every two weeks, and the designers are just on a treadmill. And the ones who we've seen are the very famous high-end designers where it makes news when they have mental health problems or worse. But there's a whole industry behind them of designer's assistants and interns who don't make that publicity when they have mental health problems. And it's not, there isn't time to speak out about how you feel, there isn't that possibility really. And it's not just the designers, its models as well who, when there's a fashion week or on shoots, they have to be available from the early morning to late at night looking fantastic the whole time often like no time to eat or very little time to eat, no food available for them, and there are reports of models saying that they've not been treated very well at all, that they just treated like a, like a clothes hanger I suppose, and that they're not called by their names. Not all, and we see the very famous ones, the ones who have fantastic lifestyles, but again there are thousands of models who don't enjoy that kind of celebrity status whose mental health may well suffer. And it may be that the fashion industry attracts people who are susceptible to mental health problems because it's so creative, so dynamic, so exciting and the pressures are on not just to work but to be on form 24/7.

Kaitlin Luna: And on the flip side for consumers who see images of these impossibly thin and beautiful models, what does that do to a person's self-image and their positive feelings about themselves?

Carolyn Mair: There's quite a lot of research now which shows that even a very brief look at fashion imagery of thin models or airbrush models can damage a person's body satisfaction, so they feel worse about their body than they did before after a very brief exposure. And given that we're exposed to images of a fashion thousands of times in a week you know this is affecting most of us, and social media has a lot to answer for to be honest with the images that are on Instagram for example. So anyone who likes fashion is going to be following the people, the designers they like, the models they like, the influencers they like, on Instagram and most of them have a particular image which, you know, individuals want to aspire to, they aspire to be, but quite often are unattainable.

Kaitlin Luna: And what do you think needs to change in this area?

Carolyn Mair: Well the same as it across the whole industry. More diversity, more representation and not just on the other side of the camera but in front of the camera so more diversity in the workforce of the fashion industry and in their peripheral workforce so model agents and so on. So far, more representation of the populations that the fashion industry serves, and this isn't just about skin tone, it's about body type, body shape, ages, ability and just the whole range you know. As I said right at the start everyone wears clothes and everyone should be represented by the fashion industry.

Kaitlin Luna: Where do you see psychologists fitting into all this in terms of helping promote more inclusivity and diversity?

Carolyn Mair: Psychologists can run studies that test hypotheses that say that improving representation is good for the industry and good for the consumer and show the evidence, bring the evidence to the fashion industry. Psychologists can also help with the communities who are marginalized. And when psychologists work in the industry they can actually really show the industry and how beneficial it is to have a diverse workforce. I mean there's plenty of evidence for that already.

Kaitlin Luna: Absolutely, and turning to a more casual topic what are your thoughts today about people dressing more casually? I mean a lot of people wear active wear as everyday clothing and offices are becoming more casual in a lot of instances.

Carolyn Mair: Yeah I'm fine with that. You know, in London you can wear absolutely anything you want and nobody looks at all. I think it's great that people can wear whatever they want, whether that's active wear, casual wear to work. I think it's a really positive move. For lots of people working in a formal suit it doesn't represent their true selves or their self-identity and so they might struggle to do the kind of job that they want to do if they were free to choose what clothes they can wear. But me for example, I really don't like wearing suits and I would typically wear jeans, I'm wearing jeans now. Or jeans and a jumper, or jeans and a shirt, so yeah I think people should be allowed to dress in the way they want because the way we dress is part of our identity, part of who we are.

Kaitlin Luna: Yeah so is what you're saying is a more casual environment overall does help people's mental health I imagine. Because if they are expressing their authentic self as opposed to wearing a suit or uniform every day, probably feeling better yea.

Carolyn Mair: Exactly, they have the freedom to choose. And autonomy, again plenty of evidence to support this, giving people autonomy at work or in their lives in whichever aspect is possible, is a really positive element of people's life.

Kaitlin Luna: So people say often "dress for success," does that hold water these days?

Carolyn Mair: It depends on the industry. Progressive industries success might be a pair of jeans and a cool t-shirt with a slogan of something. Still in finance it might be that you still have to wear a suit. When people ask me this question I would always say do some homework, find out what the next level in the hierarchy is wearing. What is the unwritten rule for that job, because you know if something is inappropriate or just considered not suitable by the person who might be hiring you, then however much you love it, it shows your identity, the person the hirer might believe that you're not really the right person for that job. In my opinion it shouldn't matter but it still does.

Kaitlin Luna: As a fashion psychologist, how do you approach your wardrobe?

Carolyn Mair: I like very plain casual clothes. I try to dress appropriately for a situation that I'm going to. Yeah I would say that I don't want clothes that shout, so I prefer clothes that don't say very much about them, so I'm not a logo wearer. Yeah typically quite plain clothes, often black or navy and in the summer maybe white, so I'm a quite plain dresser.

Kaitlin Luna: You know I've actually noticed that some of the biggest fashion designers you know will come out on the catwalk and they're wearing very simple, maybe black clothing. So is there any psychological reason why they might do that? Or are they trying to have an emphasis be on the clothes, of their other clothes that they're designing?

Carolyn Mair: Yes, it's almost an unwritten rule I think of the fashion industry, is black, almost like a modest dressing, quite loose fluid, gender fluid clothes. Yeah and that's been around for quite a while in the industry. It varies, I mean there are some fashion designers who dress quite, outrageously let's say, but yeah the majority I would say dress plainly. Perhaps yes as you say to not distract from the creations they've made on the catwalk.

Kaitlin Luna: It's always kind of struck me as interesting, someone who creates this like nearly dynamic outfit maybe it's colorful or something and then comes out and they're wearing maybe a black pants and a black shirt, sneakers or something like that, it's always a little jarring. I wanted to go back to, you mention about the workplace uniform and kind of a trend you might see like in the Silicon Valley or something where entrepreneurs wear casual clothes. Maybe they wear the same thing every day, that kind of thing. Is there anything behind that, you mentioned you people wanting to reserve cognitive resources, but is there any other, are there any psychological reasons why someone might want to wear a self-imposed uniform?

Carolyn Mair: It says something to the people who they are interacting with. For example it's not going to be any commentary around their clothes if they wear the same thing every day. So you know this issue with, oh wow, drawing attention to what they're wearing just won't happen if you wear the same thing every day. And perhaps that's why fashion designers and people who work in fashion wear a lot of black loose clothing because it doesn't say anything much about what they're wearing. But I think there's an important part about the cognitive resources, because if you're stressed about what you're wearing or if you're thinking about what you're wearing you don't have the capacity to think fully on the job at hand. You know worrying is it appropriate or have I dressed correctly for this meeting and then I'm going to another meeting. So I think a work uniform frees up time in the morning, you don't have to make decisions about what to wear for the day, but it's also very efficient at work because you won't get comments on what you're wearing. I would think it's rare that people would say oh you're wearing the same thing every day.

Kaitlin Luna: And do you think there's a lot of openings in the fashion industry for psychologists? You mentioned wanting to get more people in the field but do you think this is an area of study that you see growing in the future and opportunities for psychologists or people with a background in psychology or interest in psychology to find a way to use their knowledge in perhaps a different field than they expected?

Carolyn Mair: Absolutely, I think this year is a very interesting year for fashion retail. I think a lot of fashion retailers will struggle this year with the rising consumer demands and the rising competition and the rise of omni-channel shopping and so psychologists are suddenly being the people as well as tech people who are necessary in the fashion industry to understand all the processes that happen in the brain as well as all the social processes that happen between people. So consumers, fashion employees, and the peripheral people who work with fashion brands but are not actually part of the brands. And I think a huge opening will happen, and this takes time. So the course has only started recruiting in 2014. But I would say in a couple of years' time there's gonna be great demand for psychologists working in the fashion industry and I really feel it's important that people who work in the fashion industry as psychologists have psychology training and don't just feel that because they're human that they are psychologists. I think this is really really important because psychologists are also trained in ethics and understanding that, you know, people are vulnerable and sort of making claims about what happens because this all that can backfire with people who are not able to handle the outcomes of something for example. So I'm really conscious of some people wanting to work in the fashion industry as psychologists who have little or no understanding or training of psychology.

Kaitlin Luna: And going off what you just mentioned about ethics, there's been some scandals from recent brands like Gucci and Prada who've had issues with race and cultural sensitivity issues. So how can psychologists contribute to helping brands in this manner?

Carolyn Mair: Well, psychologists can help they because they need to help brands become more diverse in the areas of design, in their thinking, in their communications. Because this is an issue of lack of diversity as much as it's an ethical issue and a racist issue. So the lack of awareness by these brands is clearly shocking. And running diversity programs, implicit bias training to overcome the biases that people have, and also getting people on the ground actually working with the communities who these brands serve. It's beyond defensive and you know I think the brands have to hold their hands up when they've done something that is offensive. You know it all comes down to diversity, but the ethics is across the board and it needs to be implicit in everything that a brand does. So, you know, we're seeing with more data use the ethics of that has to be really seriously considered.

Kaitlin Luna: From your perspective what is the future of the fashion industry?

Carolyn Mair: Well I think the fashion industry is going to diversify not only in terms of its workforce or it's symmetry but in terms of its products, in terms of its services, because if we really are going to be buying less and it still needs to make a profit it needs to do that somehow. I think the fashion industry is also going to need to work with other disciplines, it's already working with AI and tech, it will be working far more with materials scientists, creating biodegradable textiles that can be woven easily and laundered and cared for but also can be recycled in a way that doesn't harm the environment. The fashion industry will of course be working with more psychologists and apologists. I think it's going to be an industry that in the past has been very much design based and business based that we will see the necessity, like neuroscience, for working with lots of different disciplines and actually appreciating the value of the diversity of disciplines within the industry, it's gonna make it far richer.

Kaitlin Luna: Thank you so much for joining us Dr. Mair, really appreciate your time.

Carolyn Mair: Thank you very much for having me.

Kaitlin Luna: To learn more about Dr. Mair's work visit The Psychology of Fashion. We want to know what you think about our show, you can email me your comments and ideas at KLuna@apa.org that's KLuna@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is part of the APA podcast network, which includes other great podcasts such as APA Journals Dialogue about new psychological research and Progress Notes about the practice of psychology. You can find all our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also visit SpeakingofPsychology.org to view more episodes and to find resources on the topics we discuss. I'm Kaitlin Luna at the American Psychological Association.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Speaking of Psychology: Psychology of fashion

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kaitlin Luna: Welcome to Speaking of Psychology , a bi-weekly podcast from the American Psychological Association. I'm your host Kaitlin Luna. The clothes we put on every day tell a story about who we are to the world and can have a major impact on our emotions and mood.

# data[].attributes.body
https://fashion-history.lovetoknow.com/fashion-clothing-industry/trickle-down

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The "trickle-down" theory offers a straightforward way of predicting fashion diffusion: a hierarchical process whereby individuals with high status establish fashion trends, only to be imitated by lower-status individuals wearing cheaper versions of the styles. Subsequently, high-status individuals become motivated to differentiate themselves by moving on to a new trend. Initially based upon an explanation of social-class dynamics within western modernity, the theory has since been applied to gender and age relations.

Origin

The origin of the theory is generally attributed to sociologist Georg Simmel, although he was actually only one of several writers (e.g., Spencer, Grosse, Veblen) who sought to explain fashion through class structure and social mobility in the late nineteenth century. Through a contemporary lens, Simmel (like others of his day) placed an inordinate emphasis on social class in his explanation of fashion (see Blumer; Davis; Crane). However, in many ways Simmel's analysis was especially nuanced in its blend of psychology and philosophy; it can be read as elaborating a fundamental blend of imitation and differentiation that surpasses social class alone (Lehmann; Carter).

Related Articles

Carter (2003) suggests that a modern scientific goal of assigning order to a seemingly disorderly phenomenon (fashion) led to the restricted (economic-based) naming and life of the trickle-down theory. The historical evidence of such an orderly trickling-down fashion is not very convincing (see Breward; Crane). By the late 1960s, the theory had come under attack, as class-based explanations could not explain the number of styles that bubbled or percolated up from working-class youth or diverse ethnicities (Blumer; King). Furthermore, the speed with which fashion could be "knocked off" in cheaper versions had accelerated to the point that any trickling that occurred was blurry. Indeed, in the twenty-first century's global economy, counterfeit versions of high-fashion handbags appear almost simultaneously with "original" handbags, on the sidewalks outside designer stores in major cities around the world.

Rehabilitation

McCracken (1985) attempted to rehabilitate the trickle-down theory by relating it to gender. He noted a process whereby women imitate men's fashions in order to obtain more status, only to be usurped by further changes in men's attire. Although McCracken has been critiqued for not demonstrating the differentiation function (on the part of men) adequately, if one goes back to Simmel's analysis, it is possible to establish how the dialectical process of fashion simultaneously articulates twin opposites in a single "masculine" or "feminine" look.

Modern Reinterpretation

More recently, Huun and Kaiser (2000) demonstrated how the basic elements of imitation and differentiation can explain changing infants' and young children's fashions-in terms of age, as well as gender. And, Cook and Kaiser (2004) reinterpreted the trickle-down theory to explain the recent "downsizing" of teen and adult fashion into children's and "tweens'" styles. Although the hierarchical (class-based) flow of the trickle-down theory may be challenged in many ways, the basic dynamic underlying Simmel's analysis of imitation and differentiation remains a critical part of fashion theory.

See also Thorstein Veblen.

Bibliography

Blumer, Herbert. "Fashion: From Class Differentiation to Collective Selection. " Sociological Quarterly 10 (Summer 1969): 275-291.

Breward, Christopher. The Culture of Fashion. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Carter, Michael. Fashion Classics: From Carlyle to Barthes. Oxford, U.K., and New York: Berg Press, 2003.

Cook, Daniel, and Susan B. Kaiser. "Be Twixt and Be Tween: Age Ambiguity and the Sexualization of the Female Consuming Subject." Journal of Consumer Culture 4, no. 2 (2004): 203-227.

Crane, Diana. Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class Gender, and Identity in Clothing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Davis, Fred. Fashion, Culture, and Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Huun, Kathleen, and Susan B. Kaiser. "The Emergence of Modern Infantwear, 1896-1962: Traditional White Dresses Succumb to Fashion's Gender Obsession." Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 19, no. 3 (2001): 103-119.

King, Charles W. "Fashion Adoption: A Rebuttal to the 'Trickle-Down' Theory." In Toward Scientific Marketing. Edited by S. A. Greyser. Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1963, pp. 108-125.

Lehmann, Ulrich. Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

McCracken, Grant. "The Trickle-Down Theory Rehabilitated." In The Psychology of Fashion. Edited by Michael R. Solomon. Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1985.

Georg Simmel. "Fashion." American Journal of Sociology 62 (May 1957): 541-558.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The "trickle-down" theory offers a straightforward way of predicting fashion diffusion: a hierarchical process whereby individuals with high status establish fashion trends, only to be imitated by lower-status individuals wearing cheaper versions of the styles. Subsequently, high-status individuals become motivated to differentiate themselves by moving on to a new trend.

# data[].attributes.body
https://unherd.com/2018/06/victimhood-culture-will-tear-us-apart/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Culture wars rule the debate as the wealth gap widens

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A recent scholarly paper on "microaggressions" uses them to chart the ascendance of a new moral code in American life.

David McNew / Reuters

Last fall at Oberlin College, a talk held as part of Latino Heritage Month was scheduled on the same evening that intramural soccer games were held. As a result, soccer players communicated by email about their respective plans. "Hey, that talk looks pretty great," a white student wrote to a Hispanic student, "but on the off chance you aren't going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!"

Unbeknownst to the white student, the Hispanic student was offended by the email. And her response signals the rise of a new moral culture America.

When conflicts occur, sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning observe in an insightful new scholarly paper, aggrieved parties can respond in any number of ways. In honor cultures like the Old West or the street gangs of West Side Story, they might engage in a duel or physical fight. In dignity cultures, like the ones that prevailed in Western countries during the 19th and 20th Centuries, "insults might provoke offense, but they no longer have the same importance as a way of establishing or destroying a reputation for bravery," they write. "When intolerable conflicts do arise, dignity cultures prescribe direct but non-violent actions."

We've all engaged in these actions.

The aggrieved might "exercise covert avoidance, quietly cutting off relations with the offender without any confrontation" or "conceptualize the problem as a disruption to their relationship and seek only to restore harmony without passing judgment." In the most serious cases, they might call police rather than initiating violence themselves. "For offenses like theft, assault, or breach of contract, people in a dignity culture will use law without shame," the authors observe. "But in keeping with their ethic of restraint and toleration, it is not necessarily their first resort, and they might condemn many uses of the authorities as frivolous. People might even be expected to tolerate serious but accidental personal injuries."

* * *

The Oberlin student took a different approach: After initially emailing the student who offended her, she decided to publicly air the encounter that provoked her and their subsequent exchange in the community at large, hoping to provoke sympathy and antagonism toward the emailer by advertising her status as an aggrieved party.

She did so in a post to the web site Oberlin Microaggressions, a blog "primarily for students who have been marginalized at Oberlin." The aggrieved student quoted the aforementioned email: "Hey, that talk looks pretty great, but on the off chance you aren't going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!"

Then she explained her grievance:

Ok. 1. Thanks for you thinking that the talk is "pretty great". I appreaciate your white male validation. I see that it isn't interesting enough for you to actually take your ass to the talk. 2. Who said it was ok for you to say futbol? It's Latino Heritage Month, your telling people not to come to the talk, but want to use our language? Trick NO! White students appropriating the Spanish language, dropping it in when convenient, never ok. Keep my heritage language out your mouth! If I'm not allowed to speak it, if my dad's not allowed to speak it, then bitch you definitely are not supposed to be speaking it. Especially in this context.

She also published the email that he sent to the white student:

Your not latino, call it soccer. You don't play futbol. Futbol is played with people (LATINO) who know how to engage in community soccer, as somebody who grew up on the cancha (soccer field) I know what playing futbol is, and the way you take up space, steal the ball, don't pass, is far from how my culture plays ball.

I'm not playing intramural once again this semester because you and your cis-dude, non passing the ball, stealing the ball from beginners, spanish-mocking, white cohort has ruined it (for the second time). Unless I find another team you won't be seeing me.

I don't care if this email is over the top or mean. So complain to whatever white friends you want about it. You're never going to know what its like to not be able to your own heritage sport comfortably because of your gender/race/ethnicity.

And she quoted the white student's reply, which emphasizes the white student's own sense of grievance:

...I'm sorry that I detracted from your event. Do you really think people who were going to go to the talk changed their mind because of my email? I don't think so, and that was not my aim at all - I wanted to give those people who had been looking forward to playing soccer on Thursday a chance to do that.

You do not get to define who I am. Fuck off. Clearly you only see me at face value and yes I'm white and male, what do you want me to do about that? I have a second family that I have spent a good portion of my life with. My brothers Paco Rafa and Diego my mom Julie my grandmother Margo and my father Arnoldo. Technically their my god-family but for all intensive purposes they are my family, call me their 4th son, and I am extremely close with them. My father came from Costa Rica as a fourteen year old boy, living, working and studying through an education program jointly coordinated by the catholic church and UC Berkeley. My 2nd family is Costa Rican, and I am a part of that family no matter what you say. I'm not claiming to be latino and I don't think I've ever claimed that, but I do have a latino family and you trying to separate me from them, to create distance that doesn't exist based purely on how you incorrectly perceive me, is terribly offensive.

The white student goes on to assert that white, male privilege is a huge problem in America, and briefly chronicles his attempts to wrestle with it and live a just, moral life.

The Hispanic student replied, in part:

(WOWWWWWWWW SO YOUR NOT RACIST BECAUSE YOU HAVE A "SECOND" LATINO FAMILY, SECOND! We need to talk about tokenizing brown friends/family and taking them in to identify with POC's (or avoiding accountability for being racist)... I'm glad you've recognized you're not latino, how hard was that? Did you ever think that you shouldn't speak or advertise your Spanish because you're white. How hard is it to understand when a member of the latino community comes out and says, DO NOT APPROPRIATE AND FETISHIZE OUR LANGUAGE. GET OFF MY CANCHA!

So what exactly does this exchange tell us?

​* * *

The sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, cited the Oberlin incident as one of many examples of a new, increasingly common approach to handling conflict.

It isn't honor culture.

"Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response," they write. "But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one's own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor."

But neither is it dignity culture:

"Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether."

The culture on display on many college and university campuses, by way of contrast, is "characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization."

It is, they say, "a victimhood culture."

Victimhood cultures emerge in settings, like today's college campuses, "that increasingly lack the intimacy and cultural homogeneity that once characterized towns and suburbs, but in which organized authority and public opinion remain as powerful sanctions," they argue. "Under such conditions complaint to third parties has supplanted both toleration and negotiation. People increasingly demand help from others, and advertise their oppression as evidence that they deserve respect and assistance. Thus we might call this moral culture a culture of victimhood ... the moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights."

To return to Oberlin, it is instructive to imagine how an exchange-student from Spain might react to the Hispanic student's post on the Oberlin Microaggressions blog. Were he operating in an honor culture, he might find the student and slap her in the face. In a dignity culture, he might ignore the post, or write the student a private note that says, "Hey, just to let you know, in my native country, there are millions of people who are both white and native Spanish speakers. And we all say fútbol."

Whereas in a victimhood culture, the Spaniard might write his own post at Oberlin Microaggressions, constructed to heighten the perceived insult. "Hey you American supremacist," he might tell the Hispanic student, "your HEGEMONIC ignorance of MY PEOPLE effectively ERASES US. Before you engage in RHETORICAL GENOCIDE against me in the future, consider that by calling it YOUR LANGUAGE you've EXCLUDED millions of people in a country smaller and poorer than yours." Then someone else could take offense and call the Spaniard a white-male colonialist. There is no end to conflict in a victimhood culture.

​* * *

Per their discipline, the sociologists offer structural explanations for why college students are addressing conflicts within the framework of "microaggressions." Victimhood culture "arose because of the rise of social conditions conducive to it," they argue, "and if it prevails it will be because those conditions have prevailed."

Those social conditions include the following:

Self-help in the form of dueling or fighting is not an option.

"The availability of social superiors-especially hierarchical superiors such as legal or private administrators-is conducive to reliance on third parties."

Campaigns aimed at winning over the support of third parties are likeliest to occur in atomized environments, like college campuses, where one cannot rely on members of a family, tribe or clan to automatically take one's side in a dispute.

Since third-parties are likeliest to intervene in disputes that they regard as relatively serious, and disputes where one group is perceived as dominating another are considered serious by virtue of their aggregate relevance to millions of people, victimhood culture is likeliest to arise in settings where there is some diversity and inequality, but whose members are almost equal, since "a morality that privileges equality and condemns oppression is most likely to arise precisely in settings that already have relatively high degrees of equality."

This interesting theory offers a lot of fodder for reflection--indeed, it is broader in scope and more nuanced in its particulars than I've been able to convey in this article, and interested readers should read Jonathan Haidt's treatment for more details.

As I ponder microaggressions as "a form of social control in which the aggrieved collect and publicize accounts of intercollective offenses, making the case that relatively minor slights are part of a larger pattern of injustice and that those who suffer them are socially marginalized and deserving of sympathy," I certainly see their emergence on college campuses, but I wonder about other possible iterations.

For example, the emergence of "the blogosphere" in the early aughts--something I participated in to some extent-- was rife with examples of conservative, progressive, and libertarian bloggers calling attention to minor slights against their respective ideological groups by mainstream media outlets. In "Fisking" the MSM, the aggrieved seized on these slights, often exaggerating them in the process; tried to garner the support of third parties (an ombudsman, the public at large); cast themselves as victims of unfair treatment; and demonized adversaries.

They did so in hopes of making the case that the small slight that they'd seized upon was actually evidence of a larger, significant injustice to a whole class of people.

In the mid-aughts, when I covered immigration politics and policy, many restrictionists that I interviewed-many of them working class whites in the Inland Empire-would say that they resented "having to dial one for English" on automated phone lines, or having to hear Spanish spoken while in line at the grocery store. They, too, were emphasizing small slights in hopes of casting themselves as victims while appealing to third parties, like politicians they were lobbying.

A little bit farther afield is a Hispanic homeowner I once encountered who lived across the street from a high school. Sometimes she would call the police on black or Hispanic students who were standing on a nearby corner after school, arguing that they were loitering and that their loud conversation and laughter bothered her. If "dignity culture" is characterized by a reticence to involve third parties in minor disputes, an argument could be made that many black and brown people are denied its benefits. In a city like New York during the stop-and-frisk era, minorities were stopped by police because other people in their community, aggrieved by minor quality-of-life issues like loitering or sitting on stoops or squeegee men, successfully appealed to third-parties to intervene by arguing that what may seem like small annoyances were actually burdensome and victimizing when aggregated.

To what extent are non-collegians engaged in policing microaggressions by another name? How are their actions the same as and distinct from Oberlin Microaggressions and its analogs at other campuses? It seems clear that college students are coming into conflict as adherents of dignity and victim cultures collide; but to what extent are the same clashes happening in other realms, some of them on the political right? These are the questions I'm pondering after reading that paper.

As yet, I have no firm conclusions.

And I encourage your emails, whether they're abstract responses to those questions or observations from campus or elsewhere about "dignity" and "victimhood." Are those the right frames? Do you think that dignity culture is better, in the abstract, than victimhood culture? Write conor@theatlantic.com with your views.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Conor Friedersdorf is a California-based staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Microaggressions and the Rise of Victimhood Culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A recent scholarly paper on "microaggressions" uses them to chart the ascendance of a new moral code in American life. Last fall at Oberlin College, a talk held as part of Latino Heritage Month was scheduled on the same evening that intramural soccer games were held.

# data[].attributes.body
https://quillette.com/2018/05/17/understanding-victimhood-culture-interview-bradley-campbell-jason-manning/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Bradley Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, and Jason Manning, Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University, have been described as "prophets of the academic world" by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and their new collaborative work The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, "a book of revelations," by the sociologist Donald Black. The two sociologists have aimed to supply us with an empirical sociological analysis of the recent moral conflicts that have erupted on U.S. college campuses-and the extent to which these conflicts are spreading outwards into mainstream society.

After reading the book, I reached out to the American sociologists to interview them about some of the key themes of their book, and also to gain insight into some recent cultural trends that were not covered. What follows is a transcript of our interview conducted via email.
I. Three Moral Cultures Claire Lehmann: Just briefly for our readers who have not read your book, can you explain the main differences between the dignity, honor and victimhood cultures which you outline in your thesis?
Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning: The three moral cultures are different clusters of traits having to do with what people find offensive and how they handle their grievances.

In dignity cultures, there is a low sensitivity to slight. People are more tolerant of insult and disagreement. Children might be taught some variant of "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me." It's good to have "thick skin," and people might be criticized for being too touchy and overreacting to slights. If the issue in the conflict is something more than a slight or insult - say, a violent assault - you're to handle the matter through appeal to authorities such as the legal system. Taking the law into your own hands with violent vengeance is itself a serious crime and generally looked down upon.

In honor cultures, there's a much greater sensitivity to slight. Insults demand a serious response, and even accidental slights might provoke severe conflict. Having a low tolerance for offense is more likely to be seen as a virtue than a vice. Letting yourself be slighted without seeking justice is shameful. And seeking justice is more likely to take the form of violent vengeance. Appealing to authorities is more stigmatized than taking matters into your own hands.

These two kinds of cultures emphasize different sources of moral status or worth. Honor is one's status in the eyes of other people. It depends on reputation. And while a lot of things might go into making this reputation, the core of classical honor is physical bravery. Tolerating slights is shameful because you let someone put you down without defending your reputation by force. It suggests cowardice. Appealing to the authorities is shameful for the same reason. Virtue means being bold and forceful, aggressively defending your reputation against any challenges, and being vigilant for signs that someone else is probing you for weakness.

Dignity is a kind of inherent and inalienable moral worth. It doesn't depend on your standing in the eyes of other people. A dignity culture emphasizes that all people have this sort of worth, which can't be taken away. It's why an insult can't devalue you. If anything, overreacting to an offense is unseemly because it suggests you're not confident in your worth and need to take other people's opinions so seriously. Virtue isn't being bold, touchy, and aggressive, but restrained, prudent, and quietly self-assured.

What we call victimhood culture combines some aspects of honor and dignity. People in a victimhood culture are like the honorable in having a high sensitivity to slight. They're quite touchy, and always vigilant for offenses. Insults are serious business, and even unintentional slights might provoke a severe conflict. But, as in a dignity culture, people generally eschew violent vengeance in favor of relying on some authority figure or other third party. They complain to the law, to the human resources department at their corporation, to the administration at their university, or - possibly as a strategy of getting attention from one of the former - to the public at large.

The combination of high sensitivity with dependence on others encourages people to emphasize or exaggerate the severity of offenses. There's a corresponding tendency to emphasize one's degree of victimization, one's vulnerability to harm, and one's need for assistance and protection. People who air grievances are likely to appeal to such concepts as disadvantage, marginality, or trauma, while casting the conflict as a matter of oppression.

The result is that this culture also emphasizes a particular source of moral worth: victimhood. Victim identities are deserving of special care and deference. Contrariwise, the privileged are morally suspect if not deserving of outright contempt. Privilege is to victimhood as cowardice is to honor.

We can see examples of honor cultures around the world and throughout history. They tend to have relatively high rates of violence, including such distinctive forms as dueling and feuding. Much of the premodern West can be understood as an honor culture. European elites used to preserve their honor by fighting duels to the death; in the US South, fatal duels continued up until the American Civil War.

By the 20 th century, though, dignity culture had largely supplanted honor culture in the West. Writing in 1970, sociologist Peter Berger called the concept of honor obsolete, saying it had little resonance with modern people. People no longer lived in mortal fear of having their honor damaged. Questioning someone's honor would result in a quizzical look rather than outrage. And duels to the death were a strange curiosity of the past.
II. Moral Hierarchy
We argue that victimhood culture, at least in its more extreme forms, is new. We see it in its purest form on contemporary college and university campuses. Manifestations of victimhood culture include complaining about and punishing microaggressions, demanding and creating safe spaces, requesting and requiring trigger warnings, and banning or disinviting speakers who might offend designated victim groups.

CL: In The Rise of Victimhood Culture, you mention that this new morality imposes a moral hierarchy, with white people being at the bottom and oppressed or marginalised people (victims) being at the top. Can you elaborate on what you mean by a 'moral hierarchy'?

BC & JM: Making moral judgments elevates the reputation of some people and lowers the reputation of others, so morality is always a source of a kind of social status that we can think of broadly as respectability. Other kinds of status have other sources, so in any complex society not only are some people more respectable than others, but some are also wealthier, more socially integrated, or more culturally conventional. Your position on these and other social hierarchies affects how people treat you. If you testify in court, for example, people are more likely to believe you if you are wealthy, respectable, and so on. And if you're the victim of a crime, it's more likely the offender will be brought to justice.

So respectability - moral status - acts like other kinds of status. And since moral judgments give rise to it, it takes different forms depending on the moral culture. Whether it's important to have a reputation for kindness, chastity, obedience, courage, wisdom, generosity, self-control, or anything else depends on what people value. One culture might see obedience and self-control as key virtues, while another might see them as vices if they mean less individuality and authenticity. Even when different cultures agree on what's virtuous they might emphasize some virtues over others. This is what happens in an honor culture. Courage, and one aspect of it in particular - physical bravery - is elevated over other virtues. It's not that people in other cultures don't value bravery, or that people in honor cultures don't value anything else, but the emphasis on bravery and toughness in honor cultures leads to a morality that outsiders often find bewildering and immoral.

It also leads to a moral hierarchy with brave, strong, and violent men at the top and the cowardly and the weak at the bottom. Honor is one type of moral status, one revolving around a particular virtue. It arises under particular social conditions such as the absence of a government monopoly on violence, so we certainly understand why honor cultures exist and the logic of their moral system. But we agree with the critics of honor cultures throughout history who have objected to the conflict and violence those cultures produce. We also object to the moral hierarchy of those cultures. Emphasizing one virtue over many others leads to perversities: Cruel men and hotheads can end up being esteemed while peacemakers are denigrated.

The moral hierarchy of victimhood culture has some of the same problems, and it introduces others. Like honor cultures, victimhood cultures emphasize one set of vices and virtues over others. They are concerned with eradicating oppression and privilege, and this single-minded moral obsession can lead to the similar kinds of perversities that come from neglecting other virtues in honor cultures. But even in an honor culture your moral status usually has to do with your own behavior rather than someone else's. In a victimhood culture it's instead your identity as a victim that gives you status. It's not your own virtue at all, but someone else's treatment of you, that makes you virtuous.

One problem with this is that you end up with a system of morality that doesn't offer much incentive for good behavior. Honor cultures incentivize bravery while neglecting other virtues. But if you want esteem in a victimhood culture, what can you do? It's not like you can become a victim. Or actually, you can - you can portray yourself as weak and in need of help, you can portray others' behavior toward you as harmful and oppressive, and you can even lie about being the victim of violence and other offenses. Victimhood culture incentivizes bad behavior.

The extreme form of victimhood culture we see among activists on college campuses leads to another problem in that one's status as a victim comes not just from individual experiences of victimhood but also from one's identity as part of a victim group. The idea is that all members of certain groups are victims, but that no one else is. Activists even argue that whites cannot be the victims of racism, or men the victims of sexism. Likewise, whether people can be victims of new offenses like cultural appropriation or microaggression, depends on their identity. A white person wearing a hairstyle associated with African Americans would be cultural appropriation, for instance, but an African American wearing a hairstyle associated with whites would not be. Likewise, those who have pioneered the concept of microaggression have made it clear that not all slights count. A white male elementary school teacher may experience stereotypes and put-downs, for example, but to call those microaggressions would be a " misapplication of the concept."

So the moral hierarchy of victimhood culture places entire groups of people at the top or bottom based on the whole group's victimhood status. And while it's not always clear which groups qualify, Jonathan Haidt identifies seven groups that are currently treated as sacred: people of colour, women, LGBTs, Latinos, Native Americans, people with disabilities, and Muslims. Under this schema even many minority groups, such as Evangelical Christians, fail to qualify, and any discrimination against them is ignored or celebrated.
III. #MeToo Movement CL: You wrote your book before the explosion of the #MeToo movement. From your perspective, and your knowledge about the spread of moral cultures, do you believe that the #MeToo movement represents a significant shift in victimhood culture into the mainstream?
We have two problems with this. The first is a fundamental moral objection. We believe in the ideals of dignity culture - that all human beings have an inherent worth and should be treated accordingly - and we object to the new hierarchy of victimhood just as we would any racial and ethnic hierarchy. The second problem is the reactions it may produce. Whites, men, and others who do not have victimhood status are unlikely to accept a new morality and a new moral hierarchy in which they're at the bottom. And they may end up embracing one in which they're at the top. We find the recent prominence of alt-right white nationalists alarming, and we worry there will be more of it in reaction to the spread of victimhood culture. It's a dangerous thing to undermine dignity culture and its ideals of equality.

When we look at the full-blown victimhood culture among campus activists, the moral logic at work is starkly different than what we see in other contexts. But the lines between different moral cultures aren't always so clear. The degree to which victimhood is a kind of status is variable, so even where dignity culture is still dominant, we might see some tendencies toward victimhood culture.

In the book we talk about the movement against campus rape, and we point out that the movement has support from journalists, members of Congress, and others who are not part of the campus victimhood culture. And rape isn't a new offense like microaggression or cultural appropriation. It's also not a minor offense. So the movement as such isn't a pure manifestation of victimhood culture. But what we do see is that an effort to honor victims leads to credulity even in cases like the rape hoaxes at Duke and at the University of Virginia where it should have been clear that the accusers were lying. It also leads to efforts to weaken the due process rights of the accused. And alongside the more mainstream elements of the movement are the campus activists and others enmeshed in victimhood culture who make more radical arguments - that accusers should always be believed, for example. But so far such ideas haven't been widely adopted.

The #MeToo movement may be similar. To some extent it may have facilitated the mainstreaming of victimhood culture, but it's also a mainstream enough movement that efforts to radicalize it and to use the moral language and logic of campus activists seem mostly to have failed. The movement as a whole appears not to have relied on accusations of new victimhood offenses and has focused instead on things like rape, groping, and other kinds of sexual assault and sexual harassment. The accusations against Harvey Weinstein and against most of the other prominent targets of the #MeToo movement haven't been about microaggressions and haven't relied on creative ideological expansions of the concepts of assault and harassment. The accusations against Weinstein, for example, include 19 coerced sexual acts and many more instances of unwanted touching and sexual exhibitionism.

Much of the #MeToo movement might be seen as an expression of dignity culture - an appeal to ideals already widely held in the culture but commonly violated in practice. Women demanding that they not be bullied, groped, fondled, demeaned, assaulted, or harassed by men the workplace, and that the men abusing their power in this way face consequences, aren't relying on radical feminism or its notions of endemic patriarchal oppression - not usually, anyway. They seem to be trying to bring to light behavior that was already considered wrong but that many people weren't aware was going on.

But the #MeToo movement is large and has less mainstream elements as well, so some of the accusations have indeed drawn from victimhood culture in various ways. We might think of the most prominent accusations existing on a continuum from Harvey Weinstein to comedian Aziz Ansari. In January 2018 the online magazine Babe published an article by Katie Way about an anonymous woman's date with Ansari. The article, " I Went on a Date with Aziz Ansari. It Turned into the Worst Night of My Life," recounts in detail a date between "Grace" and Ansari. Ansari doesn't come off as particularly gentlemanly in the account, but it's clear that the story is not about rape, it's not about sexual assault, and it's not even about sexual harassment. After going to dinner, the two went to Ansari's apartment, engaged in sexual acts with one another, and according to Grace, Ansari then kept wanting to engage in intercourse, she didn't, and she eventually went home. Later in a text message she told Ansari that he had ignored "clear non-verbal cues" and said that he had to have noticed she was uncomfortable.

The accusations against Weinstein, which deal with clear-cut cases of violence, coercion, and harassment, are understandable in terms of mainstream morality, while the accusation against Ansari is understandable only in terms of victimhood culture.

The same perspective that leads to the labeling of uncomfortable conversations as a kind of aggression, or conservative political speech as violence, leads here to the labeling of boorish behavior on a date as sexual assault. To the extent that the #MeToo movement accords a special status to victims, to the extent that it establishes victimhood solely based on whether someone is a woman or man, and to the extent that it blurs the distinction between serious offenses like what Weinstein has been accused of and the kind of noncoercive sexual advances on a date that Ansari is accused of, it will indeed lead to the spread of victimhood culture.
IV. Cultural Appropriation CL: Do you see the many complaints made today about 'cultural appropriation' as being a part of victimhood culture? Cultural appropriation seems to be one aspect of the new morality that most people find baffling. But can it be understood as a culture imbuing certain cultural objects or practices with moral status, that cannot (or should not) be accessed by people who are lower down in the moral hierarchy? Is cultural appropriation in some way similar to a form of moral pollution?
Another thing the Ansari case illustrates is something we have thought of as moral emaciation. Victimhood culture's focus on oppression narrows the range of moral discourse, and activists seem to be losing the capacity to make moral judgments based on anything other than victimhood terms. It seems that anything activists find bad they define as harmful and oppressive, whether it's an ugly statue on campus or a bad date. As Mona Charen points out, isn't what Grace wanted - affection, kindness, attention - what many people want when they go on a date? "What does it say about dating in our time," she asks, "that those are unrealistic expectations?"

The problem is that Grace has no moral language to communicate this. She can't describe Ansari's behavior as caddish, lascivious, or any of the other old-fashioned terms that would more accurately capture her moral reaction. Instead, it has to be oppression, assault. This is probably not good for the #MeToo movement, and it may shift attention away from the kinds of offenses the movement was supposed to call attention to. It also doesn't help anyone to think better about how people should behave on dates. Moral emaciation leads to moral confusion.

BC & JM: Complaints of cultural appropriation illustrate victimhood culture quite well. As with microaggression complaints, it's a grievance about a nonviolent, probably unintentional slight that many observers wouldn't even see as offensive. As with microaggressions, the offense is framed as a matter of collective oppression, of one social group harming another. And in practice, it's usually an offense defined by identity, something only people in designated privileged groups can be guilty of.

Victimhood culture's high sensitivity to slight means it continually coins new types of offense. And this is certainly one of the most baffling of the new offenses. As we've discussed elsewhere, one particularly confusing aspect is that many of the things that get called cultural appropriation were, until very recently, virtues - signs that one was cosmopolitan and open-minded. If anything, we might expect social and cultural conservatives to be the ones most upset about Westerners practicing yoga or mindfulness meditation, or white kids adopting black fashions and hairstyles. In many cases they are, but these days so-called progressives are often vocal and visible critics.

People are accusing the Eurovision winner of cultural appropriation https://t.co/2muHX6pAT7

- BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) May 13, 2018

Conservatives and Victimhood Culture CL: It was really interesting to read about how conservatives (particularly those who are very flamboyant or attention seeking) have learned to use victimhood culture, or exploit victimhood culture for their own selfish benefit. You argued that this might, in fact, lead to an increased uptake of victimhood culture morality in the mainstream culture. Would you be able to elaborate on this point for our readers?
Your suggestion about moral hierarchy is on point. Though the complaint is framed as a matter of someone dominating or exploiting the vulnerable - in a victimhood culture, virtually all complaints are - it might be more helpful to understand it as a matter of the offenders aping their betters. As sociologist Donald Black discusses in his book Moral Time, various societies throughout history have had rules - sumptuary laws - preventing people from adopting the styles, entertainments, and recreations of their social betters. The Han and Ming dynasties forbade commoners from wearing certain colors of clothing. Premodern Japan had laws forbidding peasants from wearing clothing distinctive of townspeople. In medieval England a law stated that no one under the rank of knight should wear any fur clothing (later amended to allow them to wear distinctive kinds of fur). And no one below the rank of lord was allowed to wear the period's fashionable pointy shoes. The unwritten norms regarding cultural appropriation seem analogous to these sorts of restrictions.

As you suggest, thinking of it as a kind of moral pollution also might help us put it into a larger sociological context. As sociologist Murray Milner argued in his work on the Indian caste system, sacredness is but a special form of status. It corresponds to what we call moral status in our book, though like honor it might be a particular style of moral status. The sacred is that which is treated as special and worthy of reverence. It must be set apart from the profane, protected by rituals associated with cleanliness and purity. One might immediately think of Mosaic Law, but if we understand it abstractly we can see these sorts of purity rules everywhere, including regarding secular things like national flags and anthems. What is going on when a white Westerner practices yoga or paints in an indigenous style or quotes a lyric from a Beyoncé song? Perhaps it's like having the unclean enter the temple and put on the vestments. The culture of vibrant, good, brave, people is being polluted by those who carry the moral stain of privilege.

It also seems like there's also a theme of moral pollution in some of the discourse surrounding "whiteness." Sometimes the manner in which it's discussed makes it seem like a curse, or something that spreads and infects places and things as well as people. Hence we see pieces where people complain about the prevalence of whiteness in LGBT spaces, or Taylor Swift exuding whiteness, or, to give a case we mention in our book, people accusing others of asking white questions and employing white research methods.

BC & JM: Victimhood culture is mainly a leftwing phenomenon, but it has a way of spreading. Conservatives and others who find themselves opposed to campus activists might uphold the values of the dignity culture the activists reject, but sometimes they end up departing from it themselves. One way they might do this is by embracing whatever victimhood culture opposes. This can mean being deliberately provocative and offensive in order to get a rise out of the activists, or at the extreme, it can mean embracing alt-right ideologies that reject equality and diversity. But another way conservatives might depart from dignity culture is by embracing the assumptions of victimhood culture and pointing to their own victimhood.

In our first article on victimhood culture in 2014, we pointed to the case of Tal Fortgang, a Princeton student who wrote an article about checking his privilege, as campus activists had been urging that he and others do. The idea was that when he checked his privilege he found in his background a long history of hardship and persecution, including family members who had been persecuted and murdered in the Holocaust.

Now in one sense, that's perfectly reasonable. It points to the absurdities of the victimhood framework. The grandson of Holocaust survivors might legitimately wonder why he should have the burden of being labeled privileged while others at his elite university gain sympathy and status by labeling themselves victims. We ourselves sometimes wonder why in an academic environment where people constantly talk about disadvantage, inclusivity, diversity, and the like, our working class, small town, Southern backgrounds gain us no victimhood points. So the idea might be, if you're going to denigrate the privileged and valorize the victimized, at least be more accurate - don't base it all on skin color, sex, and a few other such traits.

But this easily leads to competitive victimhood, where moral disputes become contests over who can claim the most disadvantage. Conservatives at colleges and universities might be especially prone to embracing victimhood since they can actually make very plausible claims of being one of the most victimized groups on campus. Conservatives are vastly underrepresented among the faculty, especially in the social sciences. Far more sociologists identify as Marxists than as conservatives, for example, and a survey of sociology professors found that nearly 30% of them acknowledged they would be less likely to support a job candidate who was a Republican. Conservatives on campus are also subject to what the activists would call microaggressions or worse if directed toward recognized victim groups. Many of them remain closeted.

The claims of victimhood are understandable, then, but if conservatives end up adopting their adversaries' assumptions about what constitutes victimhood and what the response to victimhood should be, they'll become just another force undermining dignity culture. And we're seeing some of that. For example, National Review published an article by Frederick Hess with the title "When College Presidents Mistake Lib-splaining for Conservative Outreach." Lib-splaining is presumably like mansplaining, whitesplaining, and other new victimhood culture offenses, and here it refers to a college president encouraging a group of campus conservatives to read more serious conservative works and meeting with them to discuss one of them. As with the other "splaining" offenses, the notion seems to be that any attempt to discuss or explain something coming from an outsider can be offensive.
Preserving Dignity Culture CL: And finally, what are some simple ways (for those who don't want to live in a victimhood culture) to preserve dignity culture? I really liked the way you offered insight and not just condemnation of victimhood culture. How do you remain so detached from your subject without becoming judgemental?
We also see claims of victimhood becoming a key part of the campus conservative message. Conservatives should definitely complain about the suppression of free speech on campus. But sometimes this takes the form of engaging in intentionally offensive speech in order to get a reaction from the left that then becomes the basis of further complaints. This actually combines both of the dignity-rejecting strategies - the embrace of offensiveness and the embrace of victimhood. Conservative groups that have brought in the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, for example, seem more interested in stirring up controversy and angering the left than in advancing conservative ideas.

They should have the right to do so, of course, and even when groups have brought in conservative intellectuals campus activists have sometimes reacted in the same way. Still, bringing in someone like Yiannopoulos hardly advances the ideals of dignity. As conservative UCLA professor Gabriel Rossman wrote to the Bruin Republicans recently after they scheduled a talk by Yiannopoulos on "10 Things I Hate about Mexico," "if your mission is to spread conservative ideas, you should recognize that hosting Yiannopoulos will only render your organization and our ideas toxic." In that case the group ended up canceling the talk, but the temptation to court controversy through popular, attention-grabbing speakers can be powerful.

Another way that conservatives and other opponents of victimhood culture may end up adopting its assumptions, perhaps unwittingly, is by valorizing the victims of victimhood culture. Consider the recent case of Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student and teaching assistant at Wilfred Laurier University who was certainly treated badly by the faculty and administration there. In a communications class, Shepherd showed a short clip of a debate on the use of gender pronouns and was called to a meeting with two professors and an administrator, who berated her and told her that showing the debate was transphobic and possibly a violation of Canada's anti-bias laws. When Shepherd released a recording of the meeting, there was an outpouring of support for her from those concerned about free speech and academic freedom, and the university ended up apologizing.

In the aftermath of all of that, though, Shepherd has become a kind of celebrity among opponents of victimhood culture, with regular speaking engagements and honors, including the Outstanding Student Award from Heterodox Academy and a prominent speaking spot at their upcoming meeting. While Shepherd behaved well in the initial conflict with her superiors, her prominence seems to come almost entirely from her status as a victim-of-victimhood culture rather than from any insights of her own. Her views have been consistently supportive of free speech but otherwise mostly inchoate and rapidly shifting. Initially describing herself as on the left, for example, she released a video recently announcing that she no longer identified this way, citing the left's blurring of the distinction between white nationalists and white supremacists as one of the main reasons for the change. As Genevieve Weynerowski commented, "This granular sidebar made her centrist bona fides a little hard to swallow." Shepherd also cited the reaction to her campus group hosting a talk on campus by Faith Goldy, an alt-right activist who once gleefully recited a white nationalist slogan and was fired by the right-wing Rebel Media after appearing on a neo-Nazi podcast. Shepherd is both an opponent and victim of campus victimhood culture, but she isn't necessarily an advocate of dignity culture and seems increasingly to be employing the strategies of deliberate offense and an embrace of victimhood herself. For many opponents of victimhood culture, though, her status as a victim gives her a kind of moral authority and perhaps even immunity from criticism.

We both have somewhat analytical thinking styles. And from our early training, we've both approached sociology out of scientific interest in patterns of behavior. We each got into studying conflict and social control because that seemed where the action was, scientifically speaking. We were drawn to Donald Black's theoretical work, which used simple principles to describe and explain social behavior.

In our book we talk about the politicization of sociology. The field has long tended to attract people with axes to grind - mostly liberal or progressive ones, occasionally conservative ones. Even if they take scientific methodology seriously - and many still do - their topics and questions are driven by what they feel passionate about for practical or political reasons. Hence the common pattern of people studying their own gender, race, ethnicity, or else writing about the topic they were doing activism on before deciding to go to graduate school.

That's not been our bag. Our previous research topics - genocide and suicide - weren't chosen because we were particularly involved with them outside of sociology. They just seemed like strange phenomena, and topics we could tackle given using the approach we'd learned from Black.

Victimhood culture does hit closer to home for us. Its epicenter is the university, and it has a lot of traction in the social sciences. As academic sociologists, we definitely have practical worries about what the future holds. Even with this topic, though, our initial forays into it were more of a "Hey, this is weird" than " Man the barricades! "

Throughout the process of writing the book we were simply more interested in describing and analyzing than merely complaining. Complaint is boring. Analysis is interesting, especially if one is making cross-cultural comparisons and searching for the general principles behind it all. There's a reason so many of our chapters start with examples from the days of dueling aristocrats. In comparative context, all human behavior is bizarre and fascinating.

We are social scientists, but of course, we are not only social scientists. We have political views and strong moral commitments. Our book considers several consequences of victimhood culture that we, and probably most of our readers, think are bad. Outside of the book, including in The Chronicle of Higher Education, we've stated our support for free speech and academic freedom and our belief that victimhood culture isn't conducive to these things.

How, then, would people who agree with us go about preserving dignity culture?
Bradley Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, and Jason Manning, Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, is on sale now via Amazon. Claire Lehmann is the founder and editor-in-chief of Quillette.
Jordan Peterson's rule #6 isn't bad practical advice: "Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world." So we might start with ourselves. Can we make ourselves less sensitive to slight? Studying ancient wisdom, learning the lessons of cognitive behavioral therapy, or even absorbing some folk knowledge might be helpful. So might searching for sources of involvement and meaning that don't revolve around a moral hierarchy of identity groups. Can we find better ways of handling our grievances other than venting online or complaining to a bureaucracy? Talking things out is hard. It requires confrontations that many of us would rather avoid. But like anything, if you can force yourself to start doing it, it might get easier with practice.

We might also focus on the epicenter of victimhood culture - our colleges and universities. Do we know how much of state universities' funds go to administration as opposed to instruction? Do we know how much of that is for the policing of offensive speech and propagating microaggression theory and implicit bias training? Do our legislators know? Maybe we should call and ask - or better yet, get together a group of a half-dozen friends to call and ask. If it were possible to shrink the university bureaucracy - particularly the bureaucracy charged with handling offensive words and images - it would reduce the moral dependency of victimhood culture. It would reduce the incentives to jockey for victim status and increase the incentives for alternative ways of dealing with problems. It might even make people more prone to talk to talk to one another and speak their minds without fear of reprimand.

Along those lines, another strategy would be to try to reduce the ideological homogeneity of the academy, where a mainstream conservative is a rarer thing than a radical leftist. There's no guarantee this would increase dignity culture as such - as we've seen, conservatives can join in the victim game too. But since victimhood culture is currently most concentrated on the radical left, some of its most severe manifestations involve demonizing those on the right. According to Black's theory, tolerance of diversity is greater in exactly those places that have more diversity to start with, while concern with cultural purity is greatest where culture is relatively homogeneous. Theoretically, increasing ideological diversity should reduce the degree of ideological intolerance on campus, and so undermine some of the more severe eruptions. It would also provide some more tolerance for those wishing to criticize victimhood culture as such.

For many college students, socialization into extreme sensitivity and dependency began before they arrived. There are signs that children and youth - at least from the middle and upper classes - are more sheltered, supervised, and regulated than in decades past, and that they have correspondingly less practice in coping with difficulties and handling conflicts on their own. Supporters of so-called free-range parenting campaign against this, encouraging parents to allow their children unsupervised play and school districts to provide recess grounds with such dangerous equipment as jungle gyms and monkey bars. One might find ways to encourage these kinds of initiatives locally or nationally, such as by raising money for the legal defense of people charged with neglect and abuse for what many of us would consider a reasonable bit of autonomy or schools held responsible for accidental injuries.

And finally, it's important to combat victimhood culture and to deal with the problems it creates in the universities and elsewhere, but it's also important to create alternatives to the universities and the mainstream media where serious ideas can be discussed and debated.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Understanding Victimhood Culture: An Interview with Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Bradley Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, and Jason Manning, Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University, have been described as "prophets of the academic world" by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and their new collaborative work The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and

# data[].attributes.body
https://theeverydaymagazine.co.uk/opinion/youll-never-live-like-common-people-the-fetishisation-of-being-working-class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
“You’ll Never Live Like Common People” – The Fetishisation of Being Working Class — The Everyday

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What struck me more than the dress, the cheap baccy, the husky voices, was the attitude that ‘looking’ and ‘acting’ working class was a novelty, something to be picked up and dropped by comparison to their own backgrounds. Which by implication meant dressing like they had no money, drinking to obliv

# data[].attributes.body
https://zoejourno.wordpress.com/2020/04/02/stop-fetishising-the-poor-class-appropriation-at-university/

# data[].attributes.headline
How working class culture has become monetised 

# data[].attributes.subject
How working class culture has become monetised 

# data[].attributes.body
https://medium.com/@isabelle.s.drury/how-the-working-class-aesthetic-has-become-monetised-121ab7c8c900

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Photo by Mike Von on Unsplash

Take a look at the youth fashion of today and you'll see a mix of tracksuits, trainers, and sports labels. Whether you look at the kids on the corner of the street or celebrities like the Kardashian/Jenners, you won't struggle to see athletic or "athleisure" wear.

The 20/21 runway is filled with brands such as MSGM, TommyNow, and Reese Cooper showing off their new designs which could...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Working Class Culture Has Become Monetised

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Take a look at the youth fashion of today and you'll see a mix of tracksuits, trainers, and sports labels. Whether you look at the kids on the corner of the street or celebrities like the Kardashian/Jenners, you won't struggle to see athletic or "athleisure" wear.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.huckmag.com/perspectives/opinion-perspectives/hetty-douglas-working-class-dawn-foster/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In scenes similar to the earlier days of Twitter, users yesterday found a new bête noire in the form of Hetty Douglas, an artist living in Peckham, who shared a photo of four men in construction gear with the caption: "These guys look like they got one GCSE."

The snobbery, and similar poor taste slogans in some of her artwork such as "you're peng but your English is shit", led to intense mockery. Douglas began trending on Twitter and deleted her Instagram after people shared photos of her posing with her Jobcentre work plan, and complaining about the lack of water coolers in the building when she went to sign on.

Douglas's background is only presumed, but most people read her as "a spoiled little rich girl gentrifying south London" because her behaviour is symptomatic of a trend in London and beyond: of embracing working class cultural signifiers while struggling to conceal your visceral hatred of actual working class people.

People behave stupidly in their youth, but there's a difference between vomiting outside a bar, and feeling you have a right to publicly mock perfect strangers and make assumptions about their intelligence based on their workwear. Previously, Douglas had joked about the horror of finding a homeless person attractive - imagine discovering someone sleeping rough could be anything less than a figure of contempt for you! But the McDonalds Instagram post was a perfect metaphor for this tendency: entering spaces you deem working class to show how real and down to earth you are, but retaining a sense of disgust at the people who are in the same space for reasons other than irony.

It's a phenomenon I first encountered at university. At a drinks reception on the first day of term, students were asked to meet their lecturers and each other over wine and crisps. I was ushered over to some lecturers with the handful of fellow scholarship kids to meet some senior members of faculty. One asked me a few questions about my background, then said "A word of advice - lose the accent, it'll only hold you back."

Minutes later, other students were introducing themselves to me: all from London, they claimed to be from Brixton, Peckham and Hackney. Later I learned that was code for, respectively, Herne Hill, East Dulwich and Stoke Newington.

While I was being told to shake off any vestige of my background, my classmates were confidently asserting they were far less middle class than the actuality, as if faking working class identity was a progressive form of dressing up.

This continued through university: endless bores bent my ear about their "working class roots" (usually their grandfather had seen a coal miner on a train once) and I quickly learnt the most middle class conversation of all is over whether you are "truly" middle class, and oh - isn't it just so complex? People who went to schools that cost far more than my large family lived on in a year earnestly argued that they couldn't truly be middle class because their mother was a teacher not a magistrate, or other minor quibbles. For these people, reading Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier showed how open minded they were.

Orwell's approach, adopting the dress and lifestyle of the working classes to report on them is still endemic today. The poverty safari approach - where a middle class person goes "undercover" as a member of the underclass to expose the realities of low paid life - is still regarded as the height of investigative work on social issues. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed has spawned dozens of copycat books, each less valuable than the original. The idea that you could simply ask, or commission, people in these jobs what their life is like and listen to them seems ludicrous to many journalists, failing as it does to provide them with any kudos for fleetingly enduring hardship and sacrifice themselves.

There are thousands of privileged young people in Britain though who spend their days eulogising about going to Greggs and Wetherspoons as if it shows how grounded and open-minded they are. No working class person I know does the same, because for most people going to McDonalds isn't a notable event in which they're deviating in what is acceptable for their class. They're buying food or ordering a pint, not going on a class-crossing field trip to an alien territory in which they feel comfortable because being middle class affords you the confidence to feel entitled to enter any space you wish.

Instagramming photos from your Wetherspoons crawl seems exciting and exotic when you have the privilege to adopt any class signifier you like. But being working class hasn't ever meant people treat me or friends with any wide-eyed respect. Instead I'm spoken to as if I'm stupid, have scorn poured on the fact I decided against going to Oxford, have people make openly scornful jokes about the areas we come from especially post-Brexit, or slag off "benefit scroungers" even after pointing out you grew up on benefits.

Playing class dress up is so irritating because it doesn't erode discrimination and snobbery based on class. Common People by Pulp was a criticism, not an instruction manual. Tweeting and effusing about working class signifiers grates because middle class people have the cultural privilege to do so without reprisals, while working class people are still discriminated against openly day in and day out.

If you went to boarding school and are bankrolled by your parents, own it, and be honest about your privilege: don't think donning an Adidas tracksuit and tweeting about going to Greggs for lunch is anything other than offensive and embarrassing.

Dawn Foster is a journalist based in London. Follow her on Twitter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Privileged kids need to stop fetishising working class culture

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sure, these guys embrace working class culture when it's en vogue, but while retaining their contempt for working class people, explains Dawn Foster.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/18/why-professional-middle-class-brits-insist-working-class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Coronavirus has brutally reinforced that it pays to be privileged. Yet despite the advantages enjoyed by those from middle-class backgrounds, it is precisely these individuals who believe most strongly that meritocracy is working; that "hard work" is the key to success.

One explanation for this is that many simply do not see themselves as privileged. Britain certainly has an unusual attachment to working-class identities. While in most western countries people tend to identify as middle class, Britain has long been an intriguing outlier. According to the British Social Attitudes Survey, 47% of Britons in middle-class professional and managerial jobs identify as working class. Even more curiously, a quarter of people in such jobs who come from middle-class backgrounds- in the sense that their parents did professional work - also identify as working class.

How do we make sense of this? Our research published today addresses this question, drawing on 175 interviews with actors, architects, accountants and television professionals, 36 of whom were from middle-class backgrounds but identified as working class.

Our findings indicate that such misidentifications are built on particular origin stories that people reach for when asked about their backgrounds. These accounts tend to downplay people's own, fairly privileged upbringings and instead reach back into working-class extended family histories that incorporate grandparents and even great-grandparents. Here people find stories of the past - of working-class struggle, of upward social mobility, of meritocratic striving - that provide powerful frames for understanding their own experiences and identity.

But should we think of these as misidentifications? After all, these people correctly identify the socio-economic conditions of their working-class ancestors and simply argue it is the legacy of that history that scaffolds their identity. In some ways, they're right. Research shows that the class position of our grandparents does, on average, have an effect on our own destinations.

Yet we shouldn't overstate this. The "grandparent effect" on life outcomes is small in comparison with that of our parents. It is also telling that it was only those from privileged backgrounds who reached back in this way, and there was often a certain awkwardness, even defensiveness, when they did.

Take Ella, an actor who was conscious that her claim to a working-class identity might be undermined by her middle-class accent ("I consider my background to be a working-class one even though I don't sound like that"). She also tried to play down her private schooling ("one of the small ones, quite cheap"). Or Mike, a partner in an accountancy firm who gave a long family history when asked about his background, focusing less on his father's career as an architect ("he was a technician made good, really") and more on his grandmother, who had worked in a mill as a child.

In our report, we argue that these intergenerational understandings of class origin should be read as having a performative dimension; they deflect attention away from the structural privileges these individuals enjoy, both in their own eyes but also among those they communicate their origin stories to in everyday life. At the same time, by framing their lives as an upward struggle against the odds, these interviewees misrepresent their subsequent life outcomes as more worthy, more deserving and more meritorious.

It is also striking that such misidentification was higher among the actors and television professionals we spoke to. This is not coincidental; there is arguably a particular market for downplaying privilege in these professions. Not only are these arenas disproportionately dominated by the privileged, with class an increasingly fiercely debated topic, but the precarious nature of the work itself - often freelance, short-term, poorly paid, and reliant on informal networks - tilts decisively in favour of those insulated by the bank of mum and dad. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that people feel a particular pressure to tell a humble origin story.

But this research also tells us something broader. It shows us another worrying byproduct of our fetishisation of meritocracy. Michael Sandel has recently written about the meritocratic hubris of the successful, who increasingly feel they deserve the disproportionate rewards they receive.

What is less understood, though, is how this meritocratic hubris also impacts how the successful narrate their origins. Here, the privileged face competing pressures: they must on one hand ward off suspicions that their achievements have been accelerated by inherited advantage, and on the other answer to a policy agenda that presents the upwardly mobile as meritocracy's winners. Their answer, it seems, is to reach for extended family histories that allow them to tell an upwardly mobile story.

Whether this is intentional or not is hard to adjudicate;. This may be how people really make sense of their origins; equally, it might simply be how they choose to narrate it in public. Either way, it surely indicates that the "meritocratic ideal" not only acts as the yardstick by which we evaluate life outcomes, but also shapes how we appraise our own and others' starting points.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why do so many professional, middle-class Brits insist they're working class? | Sam Friedman

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
LSE's new study shows how our fetishisation of meritocracy makes privileged people frame their lives as an uphill struggle, explains academic Sam Friedman

# data[].attributes.body
Image + final title

# data[].attributes.body
Today I managed to complete my title page, my list of illustrations, writing my conclusion and reviewing the final draft with the help of other reading through my dissertation. This took longer than expected and so i didnt have time in the end to complete anything further. I will complete the rest tomorrow.

# data[].attributes.body
find definition of gentrification reference

# data[].attributes.body
The topic is interesting and is clearly of personal interest, but the lead question and the focus need to be clarified. Ideas of fetishization of the working class, appropriation and authenticity are all worth investigating, but they need to be organised into a coherent argument.

Research: The bibliography is very limited, but includes some academic sources. More research is needed, particularly academic texts, in order to ground the discussion in theory.

Analysis: There are elements of analysis and dynamic engagement with the topic, but more in-depth reflection is needed in relation to concepts such as fetishization, appropriation and authenticity. Some pages seem to be missing, which made following the discussion more difficult.

Communication: Ideas need to be organised more rigorously to construct a clearer and more coherent argument. I suggest looking again at the presentations on how to write analytically (in the materials for week 3 on the AULA page) in order to construct coherent paragraphs that explore one idea each. Proofreading is advised, paying attention to sentence structure.

Skills: All the elements of the Formative assignment are included, although some pages were missing. The Progress Map shows engagement with the topic. It would be good to see images used to support the discussion.

Action plan:

-        Do more research (academic sources)

-        Use the research to ground the discussion in theory

-        Clarify the argument

-        Organise the ideas more rigorously

-        Use images to support the discussion

# data[].attributes.body
Diss prep FEEDBACK:
“This is a very interesting proposal for a Dissertation on the subject of gentrification, and how the aesthetic of street culture (or the working classes) contributes to it, and in turn effects those who created it.
Research This Proposal shows an awareness for quality research; the Bibliography is short, but all sources are academically sound; this is good! Remember to think broadly about research, and explore other avenues which may not be directly linked to the topic. For example, you may look at some consumer theories (why do we buy this stuff?) or questions of identity (the idea of identifying with a particular place). You mention authenticity in your Review; this is a word often spoken with regards to Subcultures; I know that Ross Haenfler talks about it in his book Subcultures; The Basics. It’s a very interesting word to unpick, and so appropriate here. Analysis More research will generate more analysis; but there is clearly an awareness of the various points of view and areas of debate here. Examples are well chosen and appropriate. It’s a shame you can’t do a series of photographs but actually I think there’s enough to write about here, and a photo series may just complicate what it is you want to say.
Communication This is a well written proposal and it’s great that it’s so personally motivated. I would suggest re-wording the lead question slightly; it comes across as quite complex and not easy to understand! This may be best left to near the end of the research, however, when you know exactly what it is you are writing about. Organisation & Planning The Progress Map is good in terms of a collection of reseach and reflection. It would be good to see more planning in here; how will you fit this in around other commitments?
ACTION PLAN - Consider re-wording the question so that it is concise and easy to understand - Broaden your research so that you’re looking at other things, as suggested above. There’s an artist/photographer who talks a lot about these themes also; Lewis Bush – it may be worth looking at some of his work and writings. - Continue the level of research here, and use the library search engine while libraries are closed; it’s new and very, very good: https://ravensbourne.deepwebaccess.

com/ravensbourne/desktop/en/search.html" (for my reference)