Aspersions of Grandeur
Don't get me starter-packed!
I was very annoyed when, shortly after I became engaged, it dawned on me that the saccharine coquette trend bubble would burst within the year. From “I’m sick and tired of bows!” tweets directed at Sandy Liang’s SS24 collection to Dazed asking "has the coquette trend gone too far?", tastemakers of all stripes have given their two cents; framing hyper-feminine romantic aesthetics as regressive or anti-intellectual or simply played out. With my nuptials now 9 months out, bow-hatred is brewing and it appears likely that widespread negative opinions RE: lace ruffles, swan emojis, silk rosettes, and ornately decorated cakes will gestate before my big excuse to wear a white gown. Not to make this about me, but how unfair!
It’s not as if I worship at the altar of the in vogue, but I am easily embarrassed and somewhat weak willed. The cacophony of think pieces and social media analyses on the subject (of which I have contributed to) has been enough of a deterrent to propel me in a more minimalist direction when perusing wedding cakes on Pinterest. As I said, I am weak.
In this jaded landscape of cool today, passé tomorrow, material desire evokes a feeling in me that is best described as a “pre-embarrassment”. Buying into a micro-trend feels like falling for a practical joke. The new and shiny always glimmers like a too-clean penny on the sidewalk– surely superglued there to the pavement by some prankster waiting just out of sight with candid camera in hand.
What are cool-hunters to do but race to the bottom? Sometimes it feels as if every major cultural commentator is playing a game of chicken, all in competition to first accurately declare that a trend is over. One finger on the pulse, the other on the hair trigger impulse to deem something, anything, obsolete. The goal is no longer early-adoption in the trend cycle, but early-derision. It scratches the same itch as claiming “I always got a bad vibe off of them,” when allegations emerge about a celebrity or pretending that you never cared for a show when it loses the plot in later seasons.
Prognosticating the un-cool is a safer bet than trying to sniff out the up and coming. It allows the critic to flex status through knowledge of chic cosmopolitan consumption habits, yet maintains a distance from the act of consumption which allows the critic to position themselves as “above” influence.
TikTok comedian Pooja Tripathi describes her videos as "🌇 City satire 🌃". The subjects of her sketch comedy range from POV: Hinge Date in Murray Hill to POV: Bushwick Party. The line between casting aspersions and defining aspirations is often blurred. In one sketch lambasting the affectations of image obsessed cosmopolitans, Girlies getting ready to go out by NYC neighborhood, she wears a different outfit for each character: UES Girlie, Williamsburg Girlie, Bushwick Girlie, LES Girlie, etc. In the caption, Tripathi clarifies that all clothing is by a local designer, Constanza New York.
The Starter Packs of NYC page on Instagram, helmed by The Cut’s senior social editor Sasha Mutchnik, posts similar memes described by Interview Magazine as “sparse collages that define niche downtown archetypes”. The images amalgamate recognizable status symbols, like Aesop hand soap or Marlboro Gold Label cigarettes or Roujie ballet flats, into caricatures of Manhattanite over-spenders. Much more pronounced than in Tripathi’s content, it is difficult to discern where the derision ends and the native marketing begins.
In a recent post, Starter Packs of NYC opens with a collage poking fun of the ubiquitous bow trend before the carousel of images transitions into in-person coverage of Sandy Liang’s FW24 show. The official Instagram account of the beauty brand Clinique, tagged in due to the inclusion of Black Honey Almost Lipstick between a matcha latte and The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, commented “🖤🍯🎀”.
I was aware of this genre of hyper-local meme page before I moved to New York. As a rural midwestern teen, I followed pages like Nolita Dirtbag. Alex Hartman, the man behind Nolita Dirtbag, made a name for himself with memes about dudes who drench themselves in Santal 33 before wearing custom Bode to the natural wine bar. On some level, this brand of humble-braggy self-deprecation painted the same type of delusionally aspirational image of city life in my head as Sex and the City. How different is a meme poking fun at Salomons and Espresso Martinis from Manolos and Cosmos taking center stage in a dramedy? Both dispatches from the coastal elite couch lifestyle porn in a thin veneer of critical introspection.
HBO’s Girls HBO’s was initially marketed as spiritual successor to Sex and the City. Lena Dunham’s lampooning of the young and resentful in 2010s Greenpoint anticipated the current dearth of stylish satirists trying to have it both ways– lambasting hipsters while simultaneously archiving their cultural moment in the sun. A 2012 review of the Girls pilot in the Guardian predicted that the show would leave a very different mark than Sex and the City, “Not only is Girls the exact opposite of the show HBO is promoting it to be, it could actually inspire a few New York residents to call it quits, pack their bags and start a new, less embarrassing, life elsewhere.”
More than a decade on, this reasonable prediction is proving false. The show’s legacy is invoked often in discussions of 2010s aesthetic resurgences from Indie Sleaze to the return of Twee. Brooklyn comedians Amelia Ritthaler and Evan Lazarus host an HBO Girls rewatch podcast with a rotation of Bushwick cool-kids guest mics. Ritthaler and Lazarus, who are both in their 20s and were teens when Girls was airing, credit the show with making them "the insufferable people they are today". I’ve caught myself feeling similarly: eating a falafel on a park bench in Manhattan with my legs akimbo and suddenly wondering if I look anything like the girls in the Girls print ad I saw in an InStyle magazine in middle school at my doctor’s office. I was previously unaware that that image was so deeply seared into my brain. I chastise my child-self: “You’re missing the point by idolizing her!”
Girls tackles Hannah's character flaws head on, but pulls back from ever fully casting any of the titular girls as entirely morally depraved. Films like American Psycho and Wolf of Wall Street, works often cited in accusations of misled character idolization, take a harsher approach. Where criticism of the hipster lifestyle in Girls is limited by the self referential nature of the work, only brushing at times on issues of hypocrisy or gentrification, media tackling the yuppie scum lifestyle can fully vilify the young urban professional.
Even in films where yuppies aren’t stabbing bums in a back alley when they should be returning video tapes à la Patrick Bateman, their moral failings are discussed in plain terms. In The Big Chill, adult friends from college gather for the funeral of their mutual friend who had killed himself. After dinner, the weary friends go around the table describing ways in which they have failed to live up to the idealistic plans they had in undergrad. One character left public defense for private practice, another is a failed writer and unhappy housewife. Another character spends a good chunk of the runtime trying to convince other friends to do insider stock training.
The aesthetic trappings and affectations of yuppieness are played for laughs in movies from Something Wild to Beetlejuice and Trading Places to National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. Memphis Milano home renovations and bottles of Evian act as sight gags in these toothless satires in the same way that a potted Fiddle leaf fig elicits a chuckle when you’re scrolling through Starter Packs of NYC. Neither necessarily good or bad, you recognize these as frivolous hallmarks of the leisure class.
But yuppie critical media often digs deeper than the aesthetic rebuke. In Fatal Attraction, Michael Douglas plays a yuppie lawyer whose extramarital philandering leads his family into danger. In Defending Your Life, Albert Brooks' yuppie character Daniel Miller is far from a villain. As the viewer, you root for Daniel as he romances Meryl Streep’s upstanding Julia. Even so, the relatable leading man is nearly denied entry into heaven due to his selfish fear and weakness of will.
Maybe this is where modern spoofs of the conspicuous consumer fails in my eyes. I doubt that satirists of Aesop hand washing class are taking aim at the ostentatiousness of bourgeois pretension. The urge to cast the first droll stone at a snobby trend is the same compulsion that drives cultural commentators to proclaim the death of a fad: an obsession with being ahead of the curve. Until Nolita Dirtbag implies that men who wear Aimé Leon Dore may literally be going to hell, I think he’s talking out of his ass.