Crowd Shortcuts – a quick chat about something that’s caught our attention. This week, Crowd’s Olivia Anderson on why shoulder pads and sartorial drama is back…
What’s all this then? Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of ‘quiet luxury’, a new aesthetic is lighting up the catwalks – one defined by opulence, excess and overt displays of luxury and wealth. This new/old aesthetic harks back to the late 80s, to the kind of ‘yuppies gone wild’ look made famous by movies like American Psycho (more on that later). There’s a new sheriff in town, and ‘Boom Boom’ is her name.
Boom Boom to you too. The name was coined by trend forecaster Sean Monahan of ‘normcore’ fame, who draws an analogy between the current cultural zeitgeist – economic difficulty, the persistent threat of war, geopolitical tensions – and that of the late 80s. Boom Boom is a counterbalance to the minimalism and restraint that defined the ‘stealth wealth’ trend that preceded it – the polar opposite to understated elegance and the humble-brag of minimalist designer Brunello Cucinelli.
Trouble on the horizon = dust off your shoulder pads. Pretty much. Like ‘the lipstick effect’ – an economic descriptor for when tough times spikes purchase of little luxuries – but supercharged. The sartorial powers-that-be are giving us a clear message: restore your Loro Piana loafers to the archives, it’s time to decommission champagne coloured chiffon and 50 shades of grey cashmere by The Row for dramatic silhouettes and brash jewel tones put forth by the likes of Saint Laurent and Gucci.
I’ve always said there’s something about the healing power of leopard print. And you’d be right.
Moet collaborates with Pharrell. Versace gets gilded. Gucci moves ‘from minimalism to ultra-maximal’
But wait. Is this just another passing trend? What’s next, despot-core? Protectionism-wave? The Trade War aesthetic?
It’s a fair question. The meaning of ‘trend’ has become so diluted of late that we’re confusing the timely manifestations of cultural shifts – the ‘-cores’ and aesthetics – with the essence of the shifts themselves, when they’re really just the flavour of the day. That’s why it’s important to look beneath the aesthetic to realise that Boom Boom is an articulation of something deeper.
The deeper meaning of Boom Boom?
Remember how ‘eat the rich’ rose up alongside ‘quiet luxury’?
And orcas were attacking the yachts of the superrich.
That they did. In an age where the West is under the thumb of the technocratic elite and one of the most powerful offices in the world is taken up by a man synonymous with extreme (gaudy?) wealth, it’s no surprise that fast culture is mirroring luxury tinged with sleaze. Technocrats rule and the economic divide is getting harsher, so we’re seeing that preoccupation with wealth spill over into other areas of culture – a new gilded age, tinged with something more urgent.
TL;DR. We’re fetishising greed and excess, and playing to masculine codes of power and dominion through androgynous styling and big shoulders when a world is in entropy, and political power resides with powerful men.