Theory of Style: On Trophies | Spike Art Magazine | Are.na

Let’s take an example. The luxury sector, fashion in particular, has increasingly become a key theater for umami. Throughout the history of human civilization, luxury was premised on being expensive, meaning it resulted from investing an unreasonable amount of work, material or other scarce resources into the making of a thing.

(In The Death of Trends, Vox's Terry) Nguyen is examining a more abstract consequence of this rapid acceleration, which is that it saps trends of their subcultural context, reducing them to status symbols that represent status itself, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading to more breadcrumbs. Her piece is focused on fashion trends, or aesthetic ... See more